The 1,656-page assessment report lays out the devastating effects of a changing climate on the economy, health and environment, including record wildfires in California, crop failures in the Midwest and crumbling infrastructure in the South. Going forward, American exports and supply chains could be disrupted, agricultural yields could fall to 1980s levels by midcentury and fire season could spread to the Southeast, the report finds. Read more.
Tag: Environmental Justice
The USEPA Region 4 Administrator, a 2017 Trump appointee, has been indicted by a Jefferson County, Alabama, grand jury for ethics violations, along with his former business partner, former Alabama Environmental Management Commissioner Scott Phillips. <Read more…>
Flames shot to the surface from the burning fire below from the Bridgeton Superfund site landfill. It was 5:30 in the evening, when people were sitting down to dinner and sirens could be heard throughout the community. Just Moms STL have been fighting to get this site cleaned up and local families relocated for years. The flames shooting into the air was terrifying to local families. What’s in the smoke? Whats in the odors? Recently the Missouri Depart. Of Health released a study that clearly demonstrated that families in the community were exposed to unhealthy levels of chemicals due to the releases from the underground fire. A meeting is planned to discuss their findings on Nov. 15th. Now this.
“We’ve been fighting this issue, now, for six years. We have people who live just a half-mile from this site, right over the hill,” said Nickel. “I don’t want to take any chances. When we got here, the wind was blowing in different directions and we didn’t smell anything,” Nickel said. ” Now it seems the wind is kind of moving around a little bit and we’re getting strong odors.”
“After hitting it, with a lot of water and foam, we were not able to extinguish it. It appears at the time, from my belief, it was a gas-fed fire from the gases generated from the landfill underneath,” Fire departments assistant Chief LaVancy. It took almost over two hours to put the fire out. Black toxic smoke went throughout the community during that time.
The community is still pushing EPA to relocate them. The event alarmed nearby residents, who have been concerned about the underground smoldering fire at the Bridgeton Landfill for several years. The landfill is also adjacent to the West Lake Landfill, a Superfund site that contains World War II-era radioactive waste. To view video from community leaders monitoring the fire click here.
Baltimore, Maryland voters made history today by voting in favor of passing ballot question E, a city charter amendment that bans privatization of the city’s water and sewer systems. The Baltimore City Council voted unanimously to ban water privatization earlier this year. As of 11:15 p.m., Baltimore voters voted 77% in favor of this amendment with 91 percent of precincts reporting. This confirms Baltimore is now the first major city in the country to amend its charter to prohibit the sale and lease of the city’s water and sewer system.
“With water corporations circling around Baltimore over the past several years, ramped up privatization ploys last Spring, and a federal administration hellbent on propping up corporate power over peoples’ rights, it is momentous that the city has voted to keep its water public,” said Rianna Eckel, Maryland Organizer, Food & Water Watch.
“This vote makes it clear that grassroots organizing and people power have taken precedence over deep-pocketed corporate fat cats in Baltimore. Voters have chosen to resist pressure to sell and outsource one of the most vital and precious resources we have and have vowed to keep control, accountability, and transparency of our water.
Now that privatization is out of the picture, Baltimoreans can work with our elected officials to improve the accountability and affordability of our water system and ensure every person in our city has access to safe water at a price they can afford to pay. Food & Water Watch looks forward to working with other cities to protect their water systems from corporate control and using Baltimore as a model for water justice for the nation.”
Hurricanes Michael, Florence, Harvey, Sandy, Katrina. Once in 500-year superstorms that are hitting land once every 3 years including twice this year. Deadly wildfires that have devastated parts of California. Torrential rains that have caused massive flooding in parts of Asia. A punishing heat wave that killed dozens in Japan, South Korea and parts of Europe. Melting glaciers in both the north and south poles.
Are these events related to climate change? While there’s growing evidence that they are, some climate deniers continue to ignore it all and point to what scientists have been saying for years – that no one weather event can definitely be blamed on climate change. However, it’s getting tougher to say this with so many crazy weather events occurring.
Last week the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading scientific panel on climate change, released a report that supported the link between these and similar weather events and climate change. One of the co-chairs of the research group that released this report put it this way, “One of the key messages that comes out very strongly from this report is that we are already seeing the consequences of 1°C of global warming through more extreme weather, rising sea levels and diminishing Arctic sea ice, among other changes.”
The report goes on to talk about the need to make “…unprecedented changes…” and for “rapid and far-reaching transitions in land, energy, industry, buildings, transport and cities.” It provides “policymakers and practitioners the information they need to make decisions that tackle climate change…” Debra Roberts, co-chair of the IPCC working group, called the next few years “probably the most important in our history.”
The media did cover the release of this powerful report, as it covered the impact of the superstorm hurricanes Michael and Florence and other incredible weather events that have struck the world in recent years. But for how long? These events are quickly pushed off the front pages and soon forgotten except for a brief follow-up as the media moves on to the next big story, whether it’s the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice, the killing of a Washington Post reporter in Turkey or the latest crazy tweet by our president. Of course these other news stories need to be covered, but the impact of climate change is becoming the most important news story of our time.
Instead, there’s so much going on every day, at times at every moment it seems, that it’s hard to sustain interest in the intense weather events that just won’t stop. As the planet goes through drastic changes, Trump continues to tweet about nonsense. Something has to change. If we believe the scientists like the IPCC work group who continue to provide evidence that man-made carbon emissions are causing an increase in world-wide warming, then the media needs to help the public understand the importance of this situation. The media needs to tell the story of climate change in a way that will help bring about the changes we need to survive. Who else has the reach? How else do we get to unprecedented changes?
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.
Charlie Powell in Birmingham, Alabama has waited since 2005 for action from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Instead he gets the run around. Why? Because like so many other communities that we work with they are poor and African American. They have the wrong complexion for real protection.
Instead of stopping the air emissions of an industrial coke plant or properly cleaning up the contaminated soils throughout the community EPA and health authorities gave each family a piece of paper. It included a list of things they should do, not the polluter, to avoid exposures to chemicals in their air and backyard soils.
“Undress the children at the doorway so any chemical that gets onto their clothes and shoes will not be tracked into the home.” Really. Every teenager wants to strip down to their underclothing at the front door in front of their brother, sister and entire family.
If you are a vulnerable person like a pregnant woman or asthmatic child, the recommendation was, “don’t inevitably breathe the air or come in contact with the soil.” I guess that means hold your breath while outdoors.
EPA’s also concluded that, “past and current exposure to arsenic found in surface soil of some residential yards could harm people’s health. Children are especially at risk.”
Now if this was a white, middle- or high-income neighborhood do you think that the actions or lack of them with such strong health risk conclusions would be treated the same? I don’t.
The site consists of an area of lead, arsenic, and benzo(a)pyrene (BaP)-contaminated soil from multiple possible sources, including nearby facility smoke stack emissions and coke oven battery emissions, as well as from possible flooding along Five Mile Creek. The 35th Avenue site and surrounding area include two coke oven plants, asphalt batch plants, pipe manufacturing facilities, steel producing facilities, quarries, coal gas holder and purification system facility, and the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport.
Clearly, the North Birmingham community has the wrong complexion for protection.
But they are not alone. In Uniontown, AL a very similar story is playing out.
Uniontown is 30 miles west of Selma, and is home to families that are 84% African American, almost half of whom live under the poverty level. Despite its proximity to a town famous for its civil rights marches, families still feel very much tied to its past. Many residents know which plantations enslaved their great-grandparents, and people as young as 50 remember growing up with sharecropper parents and no running water or toilets. Uniontown’s polluters include a massive landfill next to the historic black cemetery that started accepting coal ash after a spill of the waste in Tennessee. There’s the pungent odor from a cheese plant that has released its waste into a local creek and then there’s the waste water from the catfish processing plant, which contributes to an overwhelmed sewage system that spills fecal matter into local waterways.
People are afraid to drink their water.
A local farmer, Alex Jones, takes people on a tour pointing out the runoff from the cheese factory. “See that, that looks like a lake, it’s runoff.” It’s not only ugly but stinks. A leader of a Riverkeeper group described it as, “one of the worst smells ever. The smell is so putrid you immediately start dry heaving. It makes your body involuntarily try to throw up.”
Again, this would not be the situation in a middle class, higher income area as they have the complexion and income for government’s protection.
When asked why the families don’t move away from Uniontown, Phyllis from the local community group Black Belt Citizens said, “We don’t give up because the end result is to run us off the land and make the entire community a landfill. So what are your choices?”
The American Public Health Journal study published in April found that black people are more burdened by air pollution than any other group, even when taking poverty into account. And the agency has taken years or even decades to respond to all complaints.
EPA has faced criticism on civil rights issues around a number of contaminated sites in the state. Earlier this year, the agency denied Uniontown’s environmental racism complaint.
Today with the hurricanes and associated record rains, innocent families across the south will be in more danger than ever before from widespread contamination from coal ash, industrial run off, pig manure, and yes, even putrid smelling cheese factory waste. Such communities need protection that is equal to that of white and higher income families.
Water doesn’t stay still. Air doesn’t stay still. Nor are the families in contaminated communities willing to stay still. They are fighters as they have everything to lose – their land, their health and the future for their families. I’m proud and honored to stand with them and continue to fight for justice and invite you to join us.
The Civil Rights Movement was about more than voting and lunch counters. It was also about the right of all Americans to live and work in a healthy, safe place. (Voting rights aren’t much good if you can’t walk to the polls because your asthma is bad that day.) That was why Dr. King had moved on to the Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his murder.
There is in Alabama a poisoned place called Uniontown. Its residents are primarily African-American. In no particular order, they have seen dumped on or near their places of abode coal ash, cheese waste, wastewater from a nearby catfish processing plant. All of that overtaxes the place’s antiquated sewage system until it starts giving up its proper contents all over the ground and into the rivers and groundwater. The people who live there know why this is the case, as this study from the Pew Charitable Trusts discovered. Read more.
When Christopher Columbus landed on Turtle Island, which we now call North America, he brought with him a goal of making profit—of taking from the land and people to create commerce. Today, approximately 526 years later, that same pillaging continues to drive our planet further into the climate crisis and lead us into ecological collapse. Instead of honoring the violent colonization Columbus represents, we should use this day to call for truth and reconciliation—and honor the Indigenous communities at the forefront of efforts to heal the long-lasting environmental harm Columbus and his ilk have wrought. Read more.
As communities along the Gulf Coast await Hurricane Michael, it’s easy to forget the devastation that Hurricane Florence wrought on North and South Carolina. As described in the news story by Ring of Fire, “It is easy to forget about the plight of the Carolinas with all of the insanity taking place in Washington, D.C., but for the people who were impacted by Hurricane Florence, that’s all that matters right now. And while we weren’t paying attention, the EPA was testing flood waters and found that many areas are being impacted by potentially deadly corporate toxins that have leached into the flood waters, threatening the health of everyone in their way.” Read more …