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Trump administration’s new rule on gas mileage standards

The Trump administration is set to finalize a rule that will weaken the federal government’s gas mileage standards for cars put in place during the Obama Administration. With the new rule, the cost of vehicles will be lowered and fuel prices will rise over the long term. It will also release over 1.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles over just five years.

The Administration claims that the new rule will decrease the number of car accidents and accident related deaths connected to older, less safe cars. By decreasing the price of cars, more people will be able to purchase new, more safe car models. It is predicted, however, that with the rule change more people will die from the increase in air pollution than from car accidents. Read More.

The following article is reprinted on our webpage from the Washington Post written by Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis.

Trump promised his mileage standards would make cars cheaper and safer. New documents raise doubts about that.

By: Juliet Eilperin and Brady Dennis
March 30, 2020 at 8:03 p.m. EDT
The Trump administration is set as soon as Tuesday to undercut President Barack Obama’s most significant effort to combat climate change, finalizing a rule that would weaken the federal government’s gas mileage standards for the nation’s cars and pickup trucks, according to two federal officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the rule was not yet public.
The rule will require U.S. cars, pickup trucks and SUVs to improve average fuel efficiency by 1.5 percent per year between model years 2021 and 2026, compared to a nearly 5 percent annual increase put in place under the Obama administration.
“They’re doing a rule to damage public health,” said Chester France, a former senior career official at the Environmental Protection Agency who helped oversee the Obama-era mileage standards and now works as a consultant for the Environmental Defense Fund. “In this crisis that we’re having, it’s unconscionable.”
Asked about the change, known as the Safer Affordable Fuel-Efficient (SAFE) Vehicles rule, EPA spokeswoman Corry Schiermeyer said in an email that she could not comment on specifics because it is still under review.
“This rule when finalized will benefit all Americans by improving the U.S. fleet’s fuel economy, reducing air pollution, making new vehicles more affordable for all Americans and save lives,” she said.
The revised mileage standards will affect drivers across the country, partly by lowering the sticker price of new vehicles but also by causing fuel costs to rise over the long term. It also would release an additional 1.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions into the air over five years, according to an analysis by the Environmental Defense Fund — equivalent to the pollution released by 68 coal plants operating during that time.
The Trump administration has argued that forcing automakers to increase the fuel economy of their fleets to Obama-era standards would make new vehicles more expensive and encourage people to drive older, less safe cars and trucks. By contrast, the new rule — part of a joint effort between the Transportation Department and the EPA — estimates there will be fewer accident-related deaths over the lifetime of vehicles sold between 2021 and 2029 as more people trade older cars for newer, safer ones.
However, the government’s own estimates say more Americans will die as a result of increased air pollution during that same period than if the existing standards remained in place, according to two people briefed on the rule who spoke on the condition of anonymity because it was not yet public.
This week’s finalization of the federal fuel-efficiency standards began nearly two years ago, when the Trump administration first proposed weakening the 2009 requirements. The Obama administration argued that higher fuel-efficiency standards would improve public health, combat climate change and save consumers money without compromising safety.
The Trump administration’s move follows its attempt to revoke California’s long-standing ability to set its own, more stringent tailpipe standards — and have other states follow its lead. California, joined by nearly two dozen states, is suing the administration for the right to set its own fuel efficiency standards.
The new rule has also caused a rift within the auto industry, as a handful of companies have forged a deal with California to abide by tougher mileage standards, while other automakers have sided with the White House in the ongoing legal tug-of-war.
“The auto industry has consistently called for year-over-year fuel economy and [fusion_builder_container hundred_percent=”yes” overflow=”visible”][fusion_builder_row][fusion_builder_column type=”1_1″ background_position=”left top” background_color=”” border_size=”” border_color=”” border_style=”solid” spacing=”yes” background_image=”” background_repeat=”no-repeat” padding=”” margin_top=”0px” margin_bottom=”0px” class=”” id=”” animation_type=”” animation_speed=”0.3″ animation_direction=”left” hide_on_mobile=”no” center_content=”no” min_height=”none”][greenhouse gas] improvements,” said John Bozzella, president of the Alliance of Automotive Innovation, an industry group.
Still, he said, the standards developed a decade ago under the Obama administration made assumptions that “aren’t supported by the data today.” Fuel prices have remained low, and buyers have gravitated to SUVs and pickup trucks in far larger numbers than smaller, more efficient cars.
“The standards that were originally developed are no longer appropriate in light of shifting market conditions and consumer preferences,” Bozzella said.
The new mileage rule is just one in a suite of efforts officials are undertaking to ease environmental protections in the last months of President Trump’s first term, even amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Power companies don’t want the EPA to change this mercury pollution rule. It’s doing it anyway.
On Friday, for example, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management finalized an environmental analysis that marks a key step in building a private mining road through the wilds of Alaska.
The administration is pursuing other rollbacks, including increasing offshore drilling and altering a regulation that limited mercury and other pollutants from power plants. The White House has yet to finalize an overhaul of how it conducts environmental reviews of major federal decisions, as well as another effort to relax an Obama-era regulation on methane emissions.
Agencies within the Interior Department are moving ahead with plans to expand development on public land. While environmental groups have called on the government to cancel federal oil and gas auctions altogether — or at least extend comment periods for them — the Bureau of Land Management recently raised about $3.5 million by selling off the right to drill on a total of about 87,000 acres in Colorado, Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming.
Administration officials have changed at least one policy on how the public can comment on rule changes during the pandemic.
BLM’s New Mexico office said last week it would allow those who oppose an oil and gas lease sale scheduled for May to submit formal complaints online, instead of by mail or in person.
On Thursday, the EPA issued a memo instructing petrochemical plants, power companies and other major industries that they could monitor their own pollution levels during the virus outbreak.
Cynthia Giles, who headed EPA’s enforcement division during Obama’s second term, said in an interview that the new memo failed to emphasize that facilities need to keep complying with existing pollution rules.
EPA spokeswoman Andrea Woods, however, said the new policy only states that companies will not be held liable “for routine compliance monitoring and reporting. It is not a nationwide waiver of environmental rules.”
“During this extraordinary time, EPA believes that it is more important for facilities to ensure that their pollution control equipment remains up and running and the facilities are operating safely, than to carry out routine sampling and reporting,” she added. The agency added that the policy is “temporary and will be lifted as soon as normal operations can resume.”
The expected rollback this week of federal fuel-efficiency standards brought a wave of criticism from environmental advocates and vows of legal action on Monday, even before it was made official.
“In the middle of a national crisis, the Trump administration is moving forward with a legally flawed, environmentally damaging rollback that will unleash regulatory uncertainty and mire the automotive industry in more economic disarray,” Sen. Thomas R. Carper (D-Del.), the top Democrat on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a statement.
Even if the rule gives many automakers a measure of regulatory certainty for the moment, Bozzella said the industry is now awash in a moment of massive uncertainty due to the coronavirus.
“We’re facing a demand shock. People are not buying cars, understandably,” he said. “Frankly, the biggest uncertainty we’re facing right now is what will the industry look like? How long will this market uncertainty be with us?”
Dino Grandoni and Josh Dawsey contributed to this report.
Juliet Eilperin
Juliet Eilperin is The Washington Post’s senior national affairs correspondent, covering the transformation of federal environmental policy. She’s authored two books, “Demon Fish: Travels Through The Hidden World of Sharks” and “Fight Club Politics: How Partisanship is Poisoning the House of Representatives.” She has worked for The Post since 1998. Follow
Brady Dennis
Brady Dennis is a national reporter for The Washington Post, focusing on the environment and public health issues. He previously spent years covering the nation’s economy. Dennis was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for a series of explanatory stories about the global financial crisis. Follow
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EPA suspends enforcement of environmental laws amid coronavirus

This is essentially a nationwide waiver of environmental rules. Communities around these chemical plants and refineries now have one more threat to their health and well-being. If no one is watching and there is no financial or legal consequences for dumping toxic chemicals into the air, water and land this country has another crisis lurking in the near future.
Houston, Texas has at least six major chemical fires since last March, incidents that killed three workers, injured dozens, exposed thousands to pollutants and, in the case of the Watson Grinding blast, may cost dozens of residents their homes. That was when the industries were monitored and had to abide by the laws.   Read more.

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A Decrease in Pollution Levels Across the U.S.

As the United States continues to respond to the coronavirus outbreak, cities across the country are seeing a general decrease in air pollution. While people are being asked to stay home to avoid exposure to the virus, cities including Los Angeles, Seattle and New York City are seeing fewer cars on the road. The decrease in traffic has led to a decrease in nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide from car emissions and an increase in rush hour speeds. Read More. 

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Shelter In Place Can Be Very Different Depending on Where You Live

The Center for Health, Environment & Justice team and I send our compassion, support and affection to those whose health and livelihoods may be affected by COVID-19. This is a worldwide crisis on a scale we have not seen in our lifetimes. We are thinking of you, your family, friends and neighbors.
As you know our team has always been about families, communities and people and at all times working on issues from the grassroots to the White House not the other way around. For the first time, the entire country now has a better understanding of the horrors of “sheltering in place.”  Hundreds of our member’s communities, maybe you live in one, have been told to shelter in place because of an explosion from a pipeline, refinery, chemical plant and other releases.
I feel safe in my home, even though I’m in the high risk age range. I am also grateful that I have a place to stay with food, water and clean air, until the public health crisis is over. I can work from home, hold virtual meetings, talk with my friends through the phone, Facebook or e-mail. As terrifying as this virus is I still feel safe, maybe I shouldn’t.
Unfortunately, safe is not how so many of communities CHEJ works with feel, when asked to shelter in place because of an environmental release or explosion. There are a number of reason for their fears.
–No one told them something was going to happen and they should seek safe shelter, stock up on food, water and toilet paper.
–There wasn’t days of news castors telling folks what scientists think the real dangers are, what health symptoms people should look out for or the speed of the poison touching communities as it moves across the world.
–No federal or state health agency was working around the clock to ensure everyone exposed would receive critical health care if needed, regardless of whether they’re insured.
I invite you to read or reread the article we reprinted on our web from the New York Times authored by Ana Parras a local activist in TX.
 
In Texas and across the country, the E.P.A.’s gutting of the Chemical Disaster Rule is a matter of life or death.
While families across the country celebrated Thanksgiving with their loved ones, more than 50,000 people in Port Neches, Tex., were forced to evacuate from their homes and spend the holiday in makeshift shelters. The reason? Two explosions at the Texas Petroleum Chemical plant sent flames into the sky, injured eight people, and released plumes of butadiene, a carcinogen, into the air.
The disaster erupted six days after the Trump administration gutted Obama-era regulations meant to improve safety at 12,000 chemical plants around the country.
It’s too soon to say whether these now abandoned rules would have made a difference in Port Neches. But there is no question that the communities that surround these thousands of plants are less safe now.
This regulatory rollback gives chemical plants across the country a free pass, in pursuit of greater profits, to operate in a way that endangers families and workers.
There are over 2,500 chemical facilities in the Houston area. Manchester, the neighborhood where Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services works, is among those most affected by this negligence. There are 30 chemical plants and waste sites in the Manchester area that report to the Environmental Protection Agency. When an explosion happens, nearby neighborhoods, mostly Latinx and people of color, are exposed to this toxicity.
And these toxic blasts are not infrequent. The last chemical explosion in Houston to garner national attention was in March at the Intercontinental Terminals Co., a few miles east of Manchester. This explosion led to high benzene levels in the air, school closures and community shelter-in-place orders for days: stay where you are, turn off air conditioning. Some advisories told people to put a plastic tarp over their windows, sealed with duct tape, to prevent air from coming in.
Federal regulations were supposed to protect us. For years, organizations like United Steelworkers, Greenpeace and dozens of other community and environmental organizations pressured the E.P.A. to make chemical disaster prevention a priority.
The turning point happened in 2013 when an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Tex., 200 miles northwest of Houston, killed 15 people and injured over 260.
Later that year, President Barack Obama signed an executive order calling on federal agencies to create a task force. What emerged was the Chemical Disaster Rule, a proposal to improve plant safety and protect surrounding communities, which the former E.P.A. administrator Gina McCarthy approved one month before President Trump took office.
Two months later, the Trump administration blocked the regulations from taking effect, and now the E.P.A. has released a final rule that eviscerates the Obama-era requirements. The agency rescinded major accident prevention provisions, including requirements to consider safer technology, audits of accidents by outside parties and “root cause” analyses of accidents.
While Texas has the largest number of chemical facilities in the country, Illinois, California, Iowa and Louisiana are riddled with them, too. As The Houston Chronicle has documented, no state is spared from having at least one facility that could have toxic or flammable chemical accidents with consequences that extend beyond the site.
The E.P.A. calls these communities — areas that could be affected by a release from a chemical accident — “vulnerable zones.” One in three children in America attends a school in a vulnerable zone. This means that over 19 million children are at risk of exposure to the harmful chemicals that these plants use, store and can emit when they produce plastics, pesticides, adhesives and other products.
Our neighborhoods in Houston are a case in point. The oil and gas facilities and chemical plants along the 52-mile Houston Ship Channel have turned the air in Harris County into a public health hazard, significantly increasing the likelihood of residents’ developing cancer and respiratory problems — and shortening the lives of children. Children living near the Houston Ship Channel are 56 percent more likely to develop leukemia than those who live more than 10 miles away.
To me this issue is personal. Yes, explosions from chemical facilities can be deadly. But the long-term impact of exposure to toxic chemicals also kills. In 2016, I was found to have hypersensitivity pneumonitis, a rare autoimmune system disorder that arises from breathing in dust or toxins repeatedly. The doctors blamed indoor air, but I am convinced that exposure to chemicals in Houston led to my condition. In this town, there’s little distinction between the air indoors and what’s outside.
When traveling — I am now at the U.N. Climate talks in Madrid — I bring a portable oxygen machine in case I need it. I am unable to walk long distances, and I move slowly because of my shortness of breath. Public speaking is difficult, as is any exertion. My life expectancy is not long (10 years, one doctor told me). I hope it is more.
In my family, lung diseases are the norm. My diagnosis came the same year that my father, Gregorio V. García, died of lung cancer at 79. He worked in the Asarco Refinery in Corpus Christi, Tex., and was a member of United Steelworkers for 30 years. Workers in these refineries are the first exposed to toxic substances. Many, like him, have died of cancer.
Plants like the nearby Valero facility emit a slew of poisonous chemicals like benzene and hydrogen cyanide into our neighborhoods. Far too often, they fail to meet Clean Air Act requirements.
During Hurricane Harvey in August 2017, I felt what it was like to breathe in a concentrated amount of toxic air. On the day of the worst flooding, my husband and I drove his pickup truck into Manchester to document what was happening at the Valero refinery. We saw water running from Valero into Hartman Park, where children gather to play baseball and soccer, and down the streets we knew well. As we drove, we had to cover our nose and mouth with our hands. My lips turned numb. The odor was so strong that it made me nauseated.
Three days later we found out that we had driven into one of the largest benzene spills. Benzene is clear, colorless and flammable. To date, this spill has not been adequately addressed by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality.
In Houston, we struggle to get chemical facilities to follow the law. We ask our state to protect us from chemicals that no one should breathe. Now the federal government is ending safeguards that the E.P.A. only a few years ago said the industry needed to protect the lives of workers, emergency medical workers and communities like mine.
My life should not be a pawn for leveraging industry profits. Nor should those of my neighbors and their children. Families and workers in these neighborhoods deserve to be safe.
As disasters continue to happen, we — those most affected, those who breathe and live and play in toxicity — condemn the E.P.A.’s decision to repeal the Chemical Disaster Rule. We are denied basic health protections simply because the industry does not want to invest in our safety.
Families and workers across the country should not have to pay the ultimate cost of this administration’s refusal to do its job: our lives.
Ana Parras is a co-executive director of Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services (@tejasbarrios).
 

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50th Anniversary of the Clean Air Act

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Clean Air Act, passed by the United States Congress in 1970. After 50 years of amendments, advances in research and technology, and administration changes, the UN Environment Programme takes a look at how the country’s air holds up today. Read More.

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Environmental Journalism: 30 Years of Reporting

Peter Dykstra, journalist for the Environmental Health News, pays tribute to the 30 years of reporting from the Society of Environmental Journalists. Founded in 1990, the SEJ is comprised of over a thousand reporters from various news media across the United States and a number of countries across the world. Every year, the group hosts an annual conference to bring together some of the greatest minds in environmental journalism, research and activism, including CHEJ’s own Lois Gibbs. Even through the ups and downs of reporting, journalists continue to report on the pressing issues concerning the environment today. Read More. 

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The Coronavirus Outbreak

This blog was recently published by Hesperian Health Guides.

Coronavirus is all over the news and people are looking for how-to, actionable information on surviving the pandemic. But limiting advice and actions to improving individual or community hygiene is only washing our hands of the problem. To successfully defeat the looming epidemic, we have to change a health system that places profit over health. We have to recognize and address the political, social and economic factors –the social determinants of health — that govern how health or illness moves through our communities. 

Most of what to do immediately about Coronavirus (or COVID-19) is already known: Wash your hands; don’t touch your face so often; stay home if you are sick. Clean surfaces often that are touched by multiple people. Since the virus is mostly transmitted by respiration, cough or sneeze into your elbow, wear a mask if you are sick or around sick people, or stay about 6 feet away from people you speak with if you think the virus is active in your area. (See our COVID-19 Fact Sheet for more details.)

While individual action is important, it will not stop an epidemic, only collective action will. We have to start acting like the connections among us are not routes to transmit disease, but the channels through which we can defeat it. There are many actions and policies we can demand to lower the possibility that COVID-19 becomes epidemic in the United States:

1) Guaranteed income for people affected by the virus.

Most of us live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford to stay home from work without pay. Quarantines are difficult enough for people without making them worse by causing financial disaster.

The federal government has refused to require employers to pay sick leave, and even states that do — California requires only 3 days a year – would not cover the time necessary for your quarantine, much less if your quarantine is because someone else in your household is sick. And how would people with the lowest wages survive, those in service or production jobs who cannot telecommute (as our health advisors so blithely suggest), if their employers shut down?  If schools are closed to prevent disease from spreading, how will adults stay home with children and not lose their jobs or income?

In places like the Bay Area, where housing costs take the lion’s share of monthly expenses, it may also be necessary to declare mortgage holidays and a moratorium on evictions. 

2) Free access to testing and treatment.

The cost of health care already stops people from getting timely testing and treatment for health problems. With coronavirus, our health system is a prescription for an epidemic. 

The CDC bungled producing testing kits for COVID-19, and hospitals still have a shortage. People who have been tested are being charged thousands of dollars. When asked about treatment costs, HHS Secretary Azar refused to say treatment would be affordable: “We can’t control that price because we need the private sector to invest.”

If the US continues on the health-care–for-profit path, it insures the epidemic will be more widespread and more severe. Free access to testing and treatment for coronavirus is essential, as it is for other health conditions. Demand access to care now and in November don’t vote for anyone who doesn’t support Medicare for All – they’re basically telling you that saving your life is too expensive. 

3) Prioritize reaching the most vulnerable communities

People of color and low-income communities have more exposure to disease and less access to health care facilities. We can’t perpetuate this injustice in our coronavirus response.

People already sick, especially those with breathing problems, have a higher chance of getting severely ill and dying from COVID-19. Environmental racism places factories and freeways disproportionately in poor communities of color, leading, for example, to 20% more asthma among African Americans. By prioritizing reaching communities marginalized by the medical system with necessary supplies, testing and treatment, we can slow the epidemic and begin to undo the deadly relationship of ill health, inequity and injustice. 

These are all achievable demands. To win them, we have to organize pressure on our local, state and national governments from our neighborhood organizations, unions, churches, professional groups, and within the political parties that are contending for our votes this election year. 

We can also organize locally to care for each other:

–Reorient your Neighborhood Watch or Earthquake Preparedness group to check up on your neighbors. Find out who is sick and who needs help.

–Expand the reach of Meals on Wheels and other such programs to feed those in quarantine.

–Volunteer and train others to be community health outreach workers to help answer questions and prepare your neighborhood for the coronavirus.

–Compensate “gig workers” who are the human backbone of food and supplies order and delivery apps for the time and disinfection supplies  they need to safely support people stuck at home in quarantine.

What really stands out in the face of an epidemic like coronavirus is our leaders’ antagonism to the concept of “the public good” — unless it’s profitable, it just shouldn’t exist. Our public health systems have been weakened by millions of dollars of budget cuts, an opposition to regulation of both pollution and greed, and the refusal to build or maintain common infrastructure. If we are going to survive coronavirus with a minimum of deaths, we need to replace our health-for-profit system with one that recognizes that health is a human right.

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An Air Pollution Pandemic

While the world is increasing its concern for the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) pandemic, scientists have stated that another pandemic has been plaguing the world for years. The European Society of Cardiology has released a report claiming that air pollution is the cause of an underlying pandemic that causes cardiovascular and respiratory diseases and on average 5.5 million premature deaths a year. Read More.

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Environmental Racism & Injustice

Blog by Joy Barua
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Credit: GERALD HERBERT / AP
The color of our skin or where we live shouldn’t determine the outcome of our health. Unfortunately, that is not the case for a large portion of the population both domestically and internationally. Environmental racism and justice are critical issues of modern society, one that often gets overlooked and gets buried by the government.
Various studies in the past have linked exposure to pollution that is often linked with racial segregation. Those living in segregated areas are more like to be exposed to pollutants. A study conducted in 2012 Environmental Inequality in Exposures to Airborne Particulate Matter Components in the United States https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3546368/
found that exposure to particulate matter (PM) is higher amongst those of color than whites. The study looked at exposure to various components in which both Hispanic and Blacks had a higher amount of exposure compared to whites. The study also looked at exposure based on Socioeconomic Status (SES) and the result finds that persons with lower SES were significantly more exposed to higher levels of PM than those with higher SES.
There are many other studies similar to the one mentioned that found both Blacks and Hispanics have a higher amount of exposure compared to whites. However, African Americans have a higher chance of being exposed to pollution from the emissions of factories due to the placement of these facilities in minority neighborhoods.
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Credit: Jon Hrusa/EPA
Environmental health is not only about being exposed to toxic components but also about the surroundings of a person’s living and working conditions. Black people are some of the most vulnerable population when it comes to neighborhood and community disparity. This is prominent in South Africa where the living and social conditions for blacks are far more challenging compared to whites as stated by Robert Bullard in his book The Quest for Environmental Justice. In South Africa, whites make more money while paying less tax while black people are making less money while paying higher taxes.
The corrupted political system in South Africa also favors whites more than blacks. As a result, black peoples are almost being pushed out and being forced to live under cruel circumstances such as living near power and sewage plants. As a result, they are exposed to more hazardous substances. Blacks in South Africa also face neighborhood disparity as there are more parks and recreation created for those living in the white neighborhood compared to blacks. Black people in South Africa are also exposed to workplace disparity as they work in some of the most unsafe work conditions under the reconstruction and development program (RDP).
TheScoreWorkingFileV3Page2WEB_img                                       Credit: Tracy Loeffelholz Dunn / The Nation. Shutterstock images
Similar situations are also prevalent here in the states where some African Americans are living without modern sanitation and access to clean water. Flint’s water is a perfect example of that where a town with a majority black population does not still have access to clean water after the city switched its water source to the Flint River. As I mentioned earlier that people of color are more likely to be living near hazardous-waste facilities, but another report states that people of color are exposed to a level of nitrogen dioxide—which emanates from cars and industrial sources as stated in the article Race Best Predicts Whether You Live Near Pollution https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/race-best-predicts-whether-you-live-near-pollution/
While the EPA had acknowledged and made progress on the issue of environmental racism and injustice, the current administration has dismantled much of the work that had been completed. It started with President Trump placing Scott Pruitt as the new EPA administrator leading to the dismantling of previous federal-environmental justice work. Further changes are taking place as those scientists that have been working on and has extensive knowledge of environmental justice are now either being fired or replaced by the current administration as reported by The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/02/the-trump-administration-finds-that-environmental-racism-is-real/554315/
Thus, burying the issue of Environmental racism and injustice in our country!
 

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Mercury Regulation Rollbacks and Industry Opposition

The Trump Administration has worked to rollback almost all industry regulations enacted during the Obama Administration to demonstrate how government should not have role in determining how and what a facility can emit. As the EPA organizes to debunk the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS) that sets a limit the release of mercury, the industry sector has spoken up in opposition. Industry officials have stated that there is no need to rollback a regulation that industries have already worked to comply with and that could deregulation could lead to more harm than good. Read More.