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millerco

Why Has the E.P.A. Shifted on Toxic Chemicals? An Industry Insider Helps Call the Shots... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...epa-chemicals-regulations.html

Us politics history Trump chemicals EPA

shared by millerco on 22 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • A scientist who worked for the chemical industry nowshapes policy on hazardous chemicals.
  • Within theE.P.A., there is fear that public health is at risk.
  • For years, the Environmental Protection Agency has struggled to prevent an ingredient once used in stain-resistant carpets and nonstick pans from contaminating drinking water.
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  • The chemical, perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, has been linked to kidney cancer, birth defects, immune system disorders and other serious health problems.
  • scientists and administrators in the E.P.A.’s Office of Water were alarmed in late May when a top Trump administration appointee insisted upon the rewriting of a rule to make it harder to track the health consequences of the chemical, and therefore regulate it.
  • The revision was among more than a dozen demanded by the appointee, Nancy B. Beck, after she joined the E.P.A.’s toxic chemical unit in May as a top deputy. For the previous five years, she had been an executive at the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry’s main trade association.
  • The E.P.A.’s abrupt new direction on legacy chemicals is part of a broad initiative by the Trump administration to change the way the federal government evaluates health and environmental risks associated with hazardous chemicals, making it more aligned with the industry’s wishes.
anonymous

The EPA Refuses to Reduce Pollutants Linked to Coronavirus Deaths - ProPublica - 0 views

www.propublica.org/...s-linked-to-coronavirus-deaths

pandemic epa climatechange pollution

shared by anonymous on 21 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • In April, as coronavirus cases multiplied across the country, the head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rejected sc
  • ientists’ advice to tighten air pollution standards for particulate matter, or soot.
  • Particulate matter kills people. “It is responsible for more deaths and sickness than any other air pollutant in the world,” said Gretchen Goldman, a research director at the Union of Concerned Scientists.
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  • Firing the advisory panel and opting not to pursue a more stringent particulate standard were in keeping with the administration of President Donald Trump’s dim view of environmental regulation. By one tally compiled by The New York Times, 72 regulations on air, water and soil pollution, climate change and ecosystems have been canceled or weakened, with an additional 27 in progress. EPA leadership has sidelined or ignored research by agency scientists, and career staff are censoring their reports to avoid terms like “climate change” out of fear of repercussions from political staff. Many of the changes involve narrowing the scope of science, and scientists, that contribute to policy, experts said.
  • The pollution comes from cars, power plants, wildfires and anything that burns fossil fuels. When people take a breath, the particles can lodge deep into their lungs and even enter the bloodstream. The pollutant causes health complications that can lead people to die earlier than they would have, and it is linked to conditions such as COPD, asthma and diabetes.
  • Three weeks ago, the agency finalized another rule allowing certain polluters to follow weaker air emissions standards. Wheeler has said the environmental rollbacks will continue if Trump is reelected.
Javier E

There's No Such Thing As 'Sound Science' | FiveThirtyEight - 0 views

fivethirtyeight.com/...d-science-demand-sound-science

science method research trade-off values fact objectivity

shared by Javier E on 16 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • cience is being turned against itself. For decades, its twin ideals of transparency and rigor have been weaponized by those who disagree with results produced by the scientific method. Under the Trump administration, that fight has ramped up again.
  • The same entreaties crop up again and again: We need to root out conflicts. We need more precise evidence. What makes these arguments so powerful is that they sound quite similar to the points raised by proponents of a very different call for change that’s coming from within science.
  • Despite having dissimilar goals, the two forces espouse principles that look surprisingly alike: Science needs to be transparent. Results and methods should be openly shared so that outside researchers can independently reproduce and validate them. The methods used to collect and analyze data should be rigorous and clear, and conclusions must be supported by evidence.
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  • they’re also used as talking points by politicians who are working to make it more difficult for the EPA and other federal agencies to use science in their regulatory decision-making, under the guise of basing policy on “sound science.” Science’s virtues are being wielded against it.
  • The sound science tactic exploits a fundamental feature of the scientific process: Science does not produce absolute certainty. Contrary to how it’s sometimes represented to the public, science is not a magic wand that turns everything it touches to truth. Instead, it’s a process of uncertainty reduction, much like a game of 20 Questions.
  • “Our criticisms are founded in a confidence in science,” said Steven Goodman, co-director of the Meta-Research Innovation Center at Stanford and a proponent of open science. “That’s a fundamental difference — we’re critiquing science to make it better. Others are critiquing it to devalue the approach itself.”
  • alls to base public policy on “sound science” seem unassailable if you don’t know the term’s history. The phrase was adopted by the tobacco industry in the 1990s to counteract mounting evidence linking secondhand smoke to cancer.
  • What distinguishes the two calls for transparency is intent: Whereas the “open science” movement aims to make science more reliable, reproducible and robust, proponents of “sound science” have historically worked to amplify uncertainty, create doubt and undermine scientific discoveries that threaten their interests.
  • Delay is a time-tested strategy. “Gridlock is the greatest friend a global warming skeptic has,” said Marc Morano, a prominent critic of global warming research
  • While insisting that they merely wanted to ensure that public policy was based on sound science, tobacco companies defined the term in a way that ensured that no science could ever be sound enough. The only sound science was certain science, which is an impossible standard to achieve.
  • “Doubt is our product,” wrote one employee of the Brown & Williamson tobacco company in a 1969 internal memo. The note went on to say that doubt “is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’” and “establishing a controversy.” These strategies for undermining inconvenient science were so effective that they’ve served as a sort of playbook for industry interests ever since
  • Doubt merchants aren’t pushing for knowledge, they’re practicing what Proctor has dubbed “agnogenesis” — the intentional manufacture of ignorance. This ignorance isn’t simply the absence of knowing something; it’s a lack of comprehension deliberately created by agents who don’t want you to know,
  • In the hands of doubt-makers, transparency becomes a rhetorical move. “It’s really difficult as a scientist or policy maker to make a stand against transparency and openness, because well, who would be against it?
  • But at the same time, “you can couch everything in the language of transparency and it becomes a powerful weapon.” For instance, when the EPA was preparing to set new limits on particulate pollution in the 1990s, industry groups pushed back against the research and demanded access to primary data (including records that researchers had promised participants would remain confidential) and a reanalysis of the evidence. Their calls succeeded and a new analysis was performed. The reanalysis essentially confirmed the original conclusions, but the process of conducting it delayed the implementation of regulations and cost researchers time and money.
  • Any given study can rarely answer more than one question at a time, and each study usually raises a bunch of new questions in the process of answering old ones. “Science is a process rather than an answer,” said psychologist Alison Ledgerwood of the University of California, Davis. Every answer is provisional and subject to change in the face of new evidence. It’s not entirely correct to say that “this study proves this fact,” Ledgerwood said. “We should be talking instead about how science increases or decreases our confidence in something.”
  • which has received funding from the oil and gas industry. “We’re the negative force. We’re just trying to stop stuff.”
  • these ploys are getting a fresh boost from Congress. The Data Quality Act (also known as the Information Quality Act) was reportedly written by an industry lobbyist and quietly passed as part of an appropriations bill in 2000. The rule mandates that federal agencies ensure the “quality, objectivity, utility, and integrity of information” that they disseminate, though it does little to define what these terms mean. The law also provides a mechanism for citizens and groups to challenge information that they deem inaccurate, including science that they disagree with. “It was passed in this very quiet way with no explicit debate about it — that should tell you a lot about the real goals,” Levy said.
  • in the 20 months following its implementation, the act was repeatedly used by industry groups to push back against proposed regulations and bog down the decision-making process. Instead of deploying transparency as a fundamental principle that applies to all science, these interests have used transparency as a weapon to attack very particular findings that they would like to eradicate.
  • Now Congress is considering another way to legislate how science is used. The Honest Act, a bill sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith of Texas,3The bill has been passed by the House but still awaits a vote in the Senate. is another example of what Levy calls a “Trojan horse” law that uses the language of transparency as a cover to achieve other political goals. Smith’s legislation would severely limit the kind of evidence the EPA could use for decision-making. Only studies whose raw data and computer codes were publicly available would be allowed for consideration.
  • It might seem like an easy task to sort good science from bad, but in reality it’s not so simple. “There’s a misplaced idea that we can definitively distinguish the good from the not-good science, but it’s all a matter of degree,” said Brian Nosek, executive director of the Center for Open Science. “There is no perfect study.” Requiring regulators to wait until they have (nonexistent) perfect evidence is essentially “a way of saying, ‘We don’t want to use evidence for our decision-making,’
  • ost scientific controversies aren’t about science at all, and once the sides are drawn, more data is unlikely to bring opponents into agreement.
  • objective knowledge is not enough to resolve environmental controversies. “While these controversies may appear on the surface to rest on disputed questions of fact, beneath often reside differing positions of value; values that can give shape to differing understandings of what ‘the facts’ are.” What’s needed in these cases isn’t more or better science, but mechanisms to bring those hidden values to the forefront of the discussion so that they can be debated transparently. “As long as we continue down this unabashedly naive road about what science is, and what it is capable of doing, we will continue to fail to reach any sort of meaningful consensus on these matters,”
  • The dispute over tobacco was never about the science of cigarettes’ link to cancer. It was about whether companies have the right to sell dangerous products and, if so, what obligations they have to the consumers who purchased them.
  • Similarly, the debate over climate change isn’t about whether our planet is heating, but about how much responsibility each country and person bears for stopping it
  • While researching her book “Merchants of Doubt,” science historian Naomi Oreskes found that some of the same people who were defending the tobacco industry as scientific experts were also receiving industry money to deny the role of human activity in global warming. What these issues had in common, she realized, was that they all involved the need for government action. “None of this is about the science. All of this is a political debate about the role of government,”
  • These controversies are really about values, not scientific facts, and acknowledging that would allow us to have more truthful and productive debates. What would that look like in practice? Instead of cherry-picking evidence to support a particular view (and insisting that the science points to a desired action), the various sides could lay out the values they are using to assess the evidence.
  • For instance, in Europe, many decisions are guided by the precautionary principle — a system that values caution in the face of uncertainty and says that when the risks are unclear, it should be up to industries to show that their products and processes are not harmful, rather than requiring the government to prove that they are harmful before they can be regulated. By contrast, U.S. agencies tend to wait for strong evidence of harm before issuing regulations
  • the difference between them comes down to priorities: Is it better to exercise caution at the risk of burdening companies and perhaps the economy, or is it more important to avoid potential economic downsides even if it means that sometimes a harmful product or industrial process goes unregulated?
  • But science can’t tell us how risky is too risky to allow products like cigarettes or potentially harmful pesticides to be sold — those are value judgements that only humans can make.
hannahcarter11

U.S. Senate votes to confirm Biden EPA pick Michael Regan | Reuters - 0 views

www.reuters.com/...ck-michael-regan-idUSKBN2B22TF

senate epa biden

shared by hannahcarter11 on 11 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • The bipartisan tally in the Democratic-led Senate was 66-34 to confirm Regan, who will be the first Black man to lead the EPA.
  • Regan will take the helm of the agency as it rebuilds after the Trump era, which had been focused on undoing Obama era regulations on industry, slashing the agency’s budget and staff and upending independent scientific panels.
  • He will need to quickly ramp up the work of EPA staff as the new administration races to carry out President Joe Biden’s executive orders, which set goals to zero out emissions from power plants by 2035, revamp vehicle efficiency standards, accelerate the deployment of electric cars and crack down on methane emissions from oil and gas operations.
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  • At his confirmation hearing, he was introduced by North Carolina’s two Republican senators and stressed that he will work with every state to ensure that their concerns about the transition to cleaner energy are heard.
  • Republicans have said they are worried a rapid shift away from fossil fuels would kill jobs and stunt economic growth in the world’s top producer of oil and gas and have already criticized some of Biden’s early moves like canceling the permit for the Keystone XL oil pipeline from Canada, and pausing new leases for oil drilling on federal land.
leilamulveny

Senate Confirms Biden's Pick to Lead E.P.A. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...s-bidens-pick-to-lead-epa.html

senate biden new york times Politics Culture policy

shared by leilamulveny on 10 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Michael S. Regan, the former top environmental regulator for North Carolina, to lead the Environmental Protection Agency and drive some of the Biden administration’s biggest climate and regulatory policies.
  • Political appointees under Donald J. Trump spent the past four years unwinding dozens of clean air and water protections, while rolling back all of the Obama administration’s major climate rules.
  • Several proposed regulations are already being prepared, administration officials have said.
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  • Those potentially overlapping authorities have already provoked criticism from Republicans, some of whom voted against Mr. Regan’s confirmation because they said they did not know who is truly in charge of the administration’s climate and environment policy.
  • But most of the opposition centered on Democratic policy. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, called Mr. Biden’s agenda a “left-wing war on American energy.”
  • Mr. Regan has a reputation as a consensus-builder who works well with lawmakers from both parties. North Carolina’s two Republican senators, Thom Tillis and Richard Burr voted to support his nomination. Even Senate Republicans who voted against him had kind words.
  • “I really liked meeting and getting to know Michael Regan,” Senator Capito said. “He is a dedicated public servant and an honest man.”
  • The Obama administration tried to curb carbon pollution from the electricity sector with a regulation called the Clean Power Plan, which would have pushed utilities to move away from coal and toward cleaner-burning fuels or renewable energy. The Trump administration repealed that and replaced it with a far weaker rule that only required utilities to make efficiency upgrades at individual power plants.
  • Ms. McCarthy has already been in talks with automakers around new vehicle emissions standards, but the proposed new rule itself will also come from E.P.A.
hannahcarter11

A Regulatory Rush by Federal Agencies to Secure Trump's Legacy - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...sh-federal-agencies-trump.html

shared by hannahcarter11 on 16 Oct 20 - No Cached
  • almost
  • almost
  • Facing the prospect that President Trump could lose his re-election bid, his cabinet is scrambling to enact regulatory changes affecting millions of Americans in a blitz so rushed it may leave some changes vulnerable to court challenges.
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  • In the bid to lock in new rules before Jan. 20, Mr. Trump’s team is limiting or sidestepping requirements for public comment on some of the changes and swatting aside critics who say the administration has failed to carry out sufficiently rigorous analysis.
  • Every administration pushes to complete as much of its agenda as possible when a president’s term is coming to an end, seeking not just to secure its own legacy but also to tie the hands of any successor who tries to undo its work.
  • If Democrats take control of Congress, they will have the power to reconsider some of these last-minute regulations, through a law last used at the start of Mr. Trump’s tenure by Republicans to repeal certain rules enacted at the end of the Obama administration.
  • Two main hallmarks of a good regulation is sound analysis to support the alternatives chosen and extensive public comment to get broader opinion
  • Administration officials said they were simply completing work on issues they have targeted since Mr. Trump took office in 2017 promising to curtail the reach of federal regulation.
    • hannahcarter11
      hannahcarter11 on 16 Oct 20
       
      He really took that opportunity to throw shade at Obama and Biden and did just that.
  • Editors’ Picks
  • But the Trump administration is also working to fill key vacancies on scientific advisory boards with members who will hold their seats far into the next presidential term, committees that play an important role in shaping federal rule making
  • almost
  • Workers across the country deserve a chance to fully examine and properly respond to these potentially radical changes,
  • The Departments of Labor and Homeland Security are using a tactic known as an interim final rule, more typically reserved for emergencies, to skip the public comment period entirely and to immediately enact two regulations that put much tougher restrictions on work visas for immigrants with special skills. The rule change is part of the administration’s longstanding goal of limiting immigration.
  • The Homeland Security Department is also moving, again with an unusually short 30-day comment period, to adopt a rule that will allow it to collect much more extensive biometric data from individuals applying for citizenship, including voice, iris and facial recognition scans, instead of just the traditional fingerprint scan.
  • A third proposed new Homeland Security rule would require sponsors of immigrants to do more to prove they have the financial means to support the individual they are backing, including three years’ worth of credit reports, credit scores, income tax returns and bank records.
  • Unlike most of the efforts the administration has pushed, the rules intended to tighten immigration standards would expand federal regulations, instead of narrowing them
  • The Environmental Protection Agency, which since the start of the Trump administration has been moving at a high speed to rewrite federal regulations, is expected to complete work in the weeks that remain in Mr. Trump’s term on two of the nation’s most important air pollution rules: standards that regulate particulates and ozone emitted by factories, power plants, car exhaust and other sources.
  • But it is nonetheless pushing to have the rule finished before the end of Mr. Trump’s first term, limiting the period of public comment to 30 days, half the amount of time that agencies are supposed to offer.
  • Mr. Trump signed an executive order last year directing the Transportation Department to enact the rule within 13 months — even before it had been formally proposed.
  • The change was backed by the railroad and natural gas industry, which has donated millions of dollars to Mr. Trump, after construction of pipelines had been blocked or slowed after protests by environmentalists.
  • the proposal provoked an intense backlash from a diverse array of prominent public safety officials.
katyshannon

E.P.A. Broke Law With Social Media Push for Water Rule, Auditor Finds - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-water-rule-auditor-finds.html

water social media push law rule lobbying auditor new york times epa clean obama politics US

shared by katyshannon on 15 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • WASHINGTON — The Environmental Protection Agency engaged in “covert propaganda” and violated federal law when it blitzed social media to urge the public to back an Obama administration rule intended to better protect the nation’s streams and surface waters, congressional auditors have concluded. From Our Advertisers .story-link { position: relative; display: block; text-decoration: none; padding: 6px 0; min-height: 65px; min-width: 300px; } .story-link:hover { background-color: #eeeeec; } .story-kicker, .story-heading, .summary { margin: 0; padding: 0; } .thumb { position: absolute; left: 0; top: 6px; } .thumb-hover, .story-link:hover .thumb-main { display: none } .thumb-main, .story-link:hover .thumb-hover { display: block } .story-body { padding-left: 75px; font-family: 'Source Sans Pro', sans-serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 400; color: #000; } .story-body .story-kicker { font-family: 'nyt-franklin', arial, helvetica, sans-serif; text-transform: uppercase; font-size: 11px; line-height: 11px; font-weight: 400; color: #5caaf3; } .story-heading { font-size: 13px; line-height: 16px; font-weight: 700; padding: 5px 0 0; } Bill &amp; Melinda Gates Foundation Changing Charity Younger donors are finding new ways to give. <noscript class=&quot;MOAT-nytdfp348531439194?moatClientLevel1=31074278&amp;amp;moatClientLevel2=343740158&amp;amp;moatClientLevel3=58584518&amp;amp;moatClientLevel4=94015704638&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer1=28390358&amp;amp;moatClientSlicer2=30706478&amp;amp;zMoatPR=n
  • The ruling by the Government Accountability Office, which opened its investigation after a report on the agency’s practices in The New York Times, drew a bright line for federal agencies experimenting with social media about the perils of going too far to push a cause. Federal laws prohibit agencies from engaging in lobbying and propaganda.
  • An E.P.A. official on Tuesday disputed the finding. “We use social media tools just like all organizations to stay connected and inform people across the country about our activities,” Liz Purchia, an agency spokeswoman, said in a statement. “At no point did the E.P.A. encourage the public to contact Congress or any state legislature.”
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  • But the legal opinion emerged just as Republican leaders moved to block the so-called Waters of the United States clean-water rule through an amendment to the enormous spending bill expected to pass in Congress this week. While the G.A.O.’s findings are unlikely to lead to civil or criminal penalties, they do offer Republicans a cudgel for this week’s showdown.
  • The E.P.A. rolled out a social media campaign on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and even on more innovative tools such as Thunderclap, to counter opposition to its water rule, which effectively restricts how land near certain surface waters can be used. The agency said the rule would prevent pollution in drinking water sources. Farmers, business groups and Republicans have called the rule a flagrant case of government overreach.
  • The publicity campaign was part of a broader effort by the Obama administration to counter critics of its policies through social media tools, communicating directly with Americans and bypassing traditional news organizations.
  • At the White House, top aides to President Obama have formed the Office of Digital Strategy, which promotes his agenda on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and other social sites. Shailagh Murray, a senior adviser to the president, is charged in part with expanding Mr. Obama’s presence in that online world.
  • White House officials declined to say if they think Mr. Reynolds or other agency officials did anything wrong.
  • Federal agencies are allowed to promote their own policies, but are not allowed to engage in propaganda, defined as covert activity intended to influence the American public. They also are not allowed to use federal resources to conduct so-called grass-roots lobbying — urging the American public to contact Congress to take a certain kind of action on pending legislation.
  • As it promoted the Waters of the United States rule, also known as the Clean Water Rule, the E.P.A. violated both of those prohibitions, a 26-page legal opinion signed by Susan A. Poling, the general counsel to the G.A.O., concluded in an investigation requested by the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
jayhandwerk

Trump EPA plan will roll back Obama standards on power plant emissions | Environment | ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...tandards-power-plant-emissions

environment trump politics US

shared by jayhandwerk on 25 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration is moving to roll back the centerpiece of President Barack Obama’s attempt to slow global warming, seeking to ease restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions from coal-fired power plants.
  • The new EPA proposal would make good on Trump’s campaign pledge to unravel Obama’s efforts to curb global warming and follows the president’s promise to pull the US out of the landmark Paris climate agreemen
  • Repealing the Clean Power Plan without a timeline or a commitment to propose a rule to reduce carbon pollution “isn’t a step forward, it’s a wholesale retreat from EPA’s legal, scientific and moral obligation to address the threats of climate change”, said former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy.
anonymous

Trump's EPA chief Scott Pruitt calls for an 'exit' to the Paris climate agreement - The... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...to-the-paris-climate-agreement

trump epa chief paris agreement

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • Trump’s EPA chief Scott Pruitt calls for an ‘exit’ to the Paris climate agreement
  • Trump’s top environment official called for an “exit” from the historic Paris agreement Thursday in what appeared to be&nbsp;the first time such a high-ranking official has so explicitly disavowed the agreement endorsed by nearly 200 countries to fight climate change.
  • “You might’ve read in the media that there was much discussion about U.S. energy policy and the fact that we’re undergoing a review of many of those policies,” Energy Secretary Rick Perry said in Texas on Thursday, according to prepared remarks. “It’s true, we are and it’s the right thing to do.”
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  • The Obama administration had promised the world that the United States would reduce its emissions by 26 to 28 percent below its 2005 levels by the year 2025. The Trump administration could simply revise that pledge and make it less ambitious, and easier to attain.
davisem

Pruitt: Scientists receiving federal grants will be cut from EPA advising roles - CNNPo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by davisem on 18 Oct 17 - No Cached
  • Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt says scientists who sit on EPA advisory boards and committees who have also received federal grants for studies could be cut from their roles as soon as next week, citing a lack of objectivity in their research.
  • Pruitt said having individuals on EPA advisory boards who have received grants from the agency raises red flags.
  • Jennifer Sass, the Natural Resources Defense Council's health program senior scientist, said Pruitt's goal was to "get rid of scientists who tell us the facts about threats to our environment and health."
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  • During his speech at the Heritage Foundation, Pruitt also confirmed that he's looking at a red team-blue team approach into questions about climate change.
  • Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Bruce also opposed Pruitt's announcement.
  • "Of course Scott Pruitt doesn't want to support science, because science makes clear that Pruitt's policies are disastrous for the health of our kids and our communities," Bruce said. "For Pruitt, anything that helps corporate polluters make money is good and science and facts are just roadblocks he wants to tear down."
andrespardo

US lets corporations delay paying environmental fines amid pandemic | Environment | The... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...n-environmental-fines-decision

environment pandemic

shared by andrespardo on 27 May 20 - No Cached
  • US lets corporations delay paying environmental fines amid pandemic
  • Ten corporations that agreed to a total of $56m in civil penalties for allegedly breaking environmental laws are not being required to make payments under a pause granted by the US government during the Covid-19 pandemic.
  • They signed settlements with the government agreeing to pay fines without admitting liability but the justice department last month advised most of the companies of extensions in letters which were obtained by the government watchdog group Accountable.US via public records requests.
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  • Denver-based oil and gas company K P Kauffman allegedly violated air pollution laws, emitting volatile organic compounds that form smog in the Denver-Julesburg Basin, an area that wasn’t meeting smog standards. The company settled and agreed to pay $1m in eight installments over four years, but it has not been required to pay its second installment because of the freeze. The company did not respond to requests for comment.
  • Chris Saeger, director of strategic initiatives at Accountable.US, said: “This is exactly the time to make sure support is flowing to the federal, state and local governments that need a hand with responding to the coronavirus crisis and with the environmental problems that these special interests have caused.”
  • The companies will not be required to pay penalties before 1 June, although they have the option to do so and at least two companies told the Guardian they made payments despite the extension. The EPA would not respond to inquiries about its policy and or say which companies paid penalties.
  • One company, Virginia power provider Dominion Energy, settled and agreed to pay $1.4m for allegedly releasing 27.5m gallons of water from a coal ash impoundment that seeped into groundwater along the shore of the James River. Coal ash contains dangerous pollutants, including mercury, cadmium and arsenic, which can cause widespread environmental damage. The company said it plans to pay the settlement penalty once it is finalized.
  • Another alleged violator, one of the world’s largest steel companies, ArcelorMittal, decided to pay the $5m penalty it agreed to for air quality issues at steel plants in East Chicago, Indiana; Burns Harbor, Indiana; and Cleveland, Ohio, according to a spokesman.
  • BP was accused of emitting too much particle pollution, which is linked to asthma and heart attacks. The justice department’s assistant attorney general Brian Benczkowski represented BP in the past. BP employees have given $85,000 to Trump campaign groups.
daltonramsey12

In Scott Pruitt hearing, Flint water crisis emerges as GOP wedge against Obama EPA - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...as-gop-wedge-against-obama-epa

shared by daltonramsey12 on 18 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • daltonramsey12 on 18 Jan 17
     
    The water crisis in Flint, which still affects thousands of that Michigan city's residents, emerged in surprising ways at the hearing for EPA nominee and Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt. In his remarks opening the hearing, Senate Environment and Public Works chairman John Barrasso (R-Wyo.)
nataliedepaulo1

Scott Pruitt confirmed to EPA - CNNPolitics.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by nataliedepaulo1 on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • Scott Pruitt confirmed to EPA
  • The Senate confirmed Scott Pruitt to head the Environmental Protection Agency, an agency Republicans desperately want to rein in after what they charge was eight years of dangerous activism under the Obama administration that hurt businesses, jobs and the economy.
  • Next up will be Commerce nominee Wilbur Ross, Interior nominee Ryan ZInke, Housing and Urban Development nominee Dr. Ben Carson, and Energy nominee Rick Perry.
brickol

Trump's Environmental Rollbacks Find Opposition Within: Staff Scientists - The New York... - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ollbacks-staff-scientists.html

us trump environment obama politics

shared by brickol on 27 Mar 20 - No Cached
  • President Trump has made rolling back environmental regulations a centerpiece of his administration, moving to erase Obama-era efforts ranging from landmark fuel efficiency standards and coal industry controls to more routine rules on paint solvents and industrial soot.
  • But all along, scientists and lawyers inside the federal government have embedded statistics and data in regulatory documents that make the rules vulnerable to legal challenges. These facts, often in the technical supporting documents, may hand ammunition to environmental lawyers working to block the president’s policies.
  • Trump administration loyalists see in the scientists’ efforts evidence that a cabal of bureaucrats and holdovers from previous administrations is intentionally undermining the president and his policies. And there can be little doubt that some career scientists are at odds with the president’s political appointees.But current and former federal employees who work on environmental science and policy say their efforts to include these facts are a civic and professional duty, done to ensure that science informs policy outcomes and protects the public. Some are trying to preserve regulations they spent years of their lives writing.
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  • The current rules, written during the Obama administration, are now up for review, and Trump administration appointees do not want to further tighten controls on the industrial pollutant, which contributes to lung disease. But in a draft analysis of the soot regulations, scientists included data showing that by tightening the existing standard by 25 percent, as many as 12,150 lives could be saved a year. That data may be a powerful weapon for promised legal challenges to the stay-the-course soot rule.
  • And this winter, as Trump administration officials worked on a rollback of Obama-era fuel economy standards, political appointees found themselves at odds with their career staff, combing through thousands of pages of analysis to find what Thomas J. Pyle, a Trump campaign adviser in 2016, called “trip wires that E.P.A. staffers were setting” in their work. There is no accusation, however, that any data was false or that E.P.A. employees were engaged in scientific misconduct.
  • Civil servants who have served in the federal government for decades said that the efforts by the Trump Administration to roll back environmental regulations were sharply different from those of previous administrations.“In previous administrations, we did not always agree with the policies, but when we did new rules, we spent years reviewing the data, the science, the economics, as the law says to do,” said Elizabeth Southerland, who joined the E.P.A. during the first George Bush administration and resigned in 2017 from her position as a senior official in the agency’s clean water program. “But what these guys have done is come in and repeal and replace, without relying on data and science and facts.”
  • But E.P.A. scientists who reviewed the health data concluded the current rule was still killing people and wanted their warnings made public.So on Page 181 of a draft 457-page scientific risk assessment, they placed critical data points. The scientists estimated that the current standard, which allows for 12 micrograms of fine soot per cubic meter of air, is “associated with 45,000 deaths” annually. In a separate paragraph, the scientists wrote that if the rule were tightened to nine micrograms per cubic meter, annual deaths would fall by about 27 percent — or 12,150 people a year.
  • A final version of the report, published in January to preview the still-unpublished rule, does say the rule as it stands contributes to 45,000 deaths annually, but it also says only that tightening it would reduce “health risks,” not deaths.
  • Such advice guided dozens of scientists, lawyers and engineers who wrote President Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan to cut planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and give a boost to renewable energy. When the same civil servants were directed to undo it and create a more coal-friendly version, some of those who remained at the E.P.A. made sure the documents accompanying the proposed replacement included the fact that increased coal pollution would cause 1,400 new premature deaths a year.
  • The scientists have some legal protection. On climate change, the Global Change Research Act of 1990 legally mandates that 13 federal agencies work together to produce a comprehensive report every four years on the impact of planetary warming on the United States. After the 2018 assessment concluded that climate change could knock as much as 10 percent off U.S. economic production by the century’s end, White House officials decided the law mandating the report made suppressing or altering it too legally risky.
andrespardo

We can't let Trump roll back 50 years of environmental progress | Elizabeth Southerland... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...-anniversary-environment-trump

enviro change global warming crisis economics trump US

shared by andrespardo on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Within 10 years, Congress had passed many of the major environmental laws that protect us to this day. The EPA and other agencies worked to improve the quality of our air and water; clean up contaminated land; curb toxic chemicals; and reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change.
  • The Trump EPA has repealed or weakened almost 100 environmental regulations, even when affected industries have not objected to the rules. The number and speed of these repeals puts us in uncharted territory. Critical public health and worker protections are being rolled back solely to maximize corporate profits.
  • We cannot allow 50 years of hard-won environmental progress to be reversed in just four years.
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  • The rollback of water quality rules has endangered drinking water, fisheries and recreational waters that support the health and economies of communities throughout the country. The failure to adequately fund cleanups at Superfund sites has left communities with contaminated land, fenced off from any beneficial use for years as remediation is delayed.
  • By August 2017, it was clear that EPA leadership had little regard for the expertise and historical knowledge of its career employees. That’s when I made the decision to publicly protest against the Trump administration when resigning from the agency after 33 years of service.
  • Replace the Obama Clean Power Plan, which limited harmful emissions from power plants, with a rule that is projected to significantly increase exposure to fine particles and ozone in the air. More people, especially those living in frontline communities, will have heart attacks; suffer from asthma, bronchitis and other respiratory diseases; and miss days of work and school because of illness.
  • oll back successful clean car regulations and fuel economy standards, which reduced greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, improved air quality and increased fuel economy. The rollback is projected to increase GHG emissions by 1.5bn metric tons through 2040, contributing to the destructive impacts of climate change, and resulting in 18,500 more premature deaths by 2050.
  • ctions by the Trump administration over the past four years have set us back. But we will not let this administration obliterate 50 years of environmental and public health progress. We owe that to the generation that will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Earth Day in 2070.
knudsenlu

A civil rights 'emergency': justice, clean air and water in the age of Trump | US news ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...al-justice-in-the-age-of-trump

civil rights justice trump news Crisis

shared by knudsenlu on 21 Nov 17 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration’s dismantling of environmental regulations has intensified a growing civil rights battle over the deadly burden of pollution on minorities and low-income people.
  • Black, Latino and disadvantaged people have long been disproportionately afflicted by toxins from industrial plants, cars, hazardous housing conditions and other sources.
  • Senator Cory Booker, a Democrat from New Jersey, recently said: “Civil rights have to include, fundamentally, the right to breathe your air, plant tomatoes in your soil. Civil rights is the right to drink your wate
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  • “I left the EPA because of the proposals to roll back legislation that will have direct impacts on local communities,” he said. “Ten months in, they have yet to move forward any action to help communities be healthier. People in Puerto Rico are drinking toxic water. Unfortunately, so far, I’ve been proved right in my decision to leave. I wanted them to prove me wrong.”
  • The Trump administration has targeted dozens of regulations it says have stymied economic growth. It has moved to axe an Obama-era plan to reduce emissions from coal-fired power plants, delayed new standards to cut toxic fumes from vehicles and dropped a proposed ban on a pesticide linked to developmental delays in children.
  • But Ali said there was little evidence the agency is focused on vulnerable communities, claiming it is a “particular slap in the face” that the EPA wants to cut funding for anti-lead programs given that the largely black city of Flint, Michigan, continues to suffer from lead-tainted water, three years after the scandal was exposed.
  • “I became an environmentalist, I have to be candid with you, not because of the effects of global warming some time in the future,” said Booker, a former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, at a time when the city was experiencing its own problems with lead contamination of drinking water. “I became an environmentalist because I saw horrific examples of environmental injustice and how it was hurting my community in every single way.”
  • One in three Latinos live in areas that violate federal standards for ozone, a pollutant that causes smog and is linked to an array of health problems. The thousands of abandoned mines that dot the western US have left a legacy of soil and water contamination that blights native American tribes, such as the Navajo nation.
  • Nearly seven in 10 African Americans live within 30 miles of a coal-fired power plant, compared with 56% of whites. Once the coal is burned, its ash, which can damage the nervous system and cause cancers if ingested or inhaled, is dumped in about 1,400 sites around the US – 70% of which are situated in low-income communities.
Javier E

Gina McCarthy's Return to Politics After Obama Tenure - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...610144

environmental organization activism

shared by Javier E on 24 May 20 - No Cached
  • The Trump administration’s actions on the mercury rule especially infuriated McCarthy. Mercury is a powerful neurotoxin that can lead to impaired vision, muscle weakness, and changes in mental function. Children and unborn infants are the most vulnerable. As Obama’s last EPA head and a top air-pollution official at the agency before that, McCarthy was intimately involved in drafting the rule, which she said was broadly accepted by all parties.
  • “I had been working on mercury standards for 12 years,” she told me. “Who doesn’t know that mercury is bad for you? It’s the origin of the phrase mad as a hatter.”
  • The EPA finalized changes to the mercury rule on April 16, declaring it not “appropriate and necessary.” Industry groups and environmentalists alike had opposed alterations. There’s “no basis to repeal these important and long-overdue” protections, Exelon, a major utility company, wrote to regulators in a 2019 public comment.
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  • Although the Trump administration did not reverse the mercury rule entirely, the modifications were intended to make clear that Trump officials disagree with the Obama administration’s basis for drafting it in the first place, and that the new rule is “correcting flaws” in the logic. They say that the costs of complying with the mercury rule would exceed the environmental benefit. Environmentalists worry that the changes could limit regulators’ ability to control toxins in the future.
  • The Trump administration’s squabbling over the rule drove McCarthy “absolutely nuts,” she said. “That’s when I realized what they were doing made no sense from a standard-setting process. It was just to destroy everything that had been done before. It had no explanation otherwise.”
Javier E

Opinion | The Complicated Truth About Recycling - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ng-plastic-paper-aluminum.html

recycling analysis

shared by Javier E on 30 Nov 23 - No Cached
  • Recycling has been called a myth and beyond fixing as we’ve learned that recyclables are being shipped overseas and dumped (true), are leaching toxic chemicals and microplastics (true) and are being used by Big Oil to mislead consumers about the problems with plastics.
  • Recycling is real. I’ve seen it. For the past four years, I’ve traveled the world writing a book about the waste industry, visiting paper mills and e-waste shredders and bottle plants. I’ve visited all kinds of plastics recycling facilities, from gleaming new factories in Britain to smoky, flake-filled shredding operations in India
  • While I’ve seen how recycling has become inseparable from corporate greenwashing, we shouldn’t be so quick to cast it aside. In the short term, at least, it might be the best option we have against our growing waste crisis.
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  • One of the most fundamental problems with recycling is that we don’t really know how much of it actually happens because of an opaque global system that too often relies on measuring the material that arrives at the front door of the facility rather than what comes out
  • What we do know is that with plastics, at least, the amount being recycled is much less than most of us assumed.
  • According to the Environmental Protection Agency, two of the most commonly used plastics in America — PET (used in soda bottles) and HDPE (used in milk jugs, among other things) — are “widely recycled,” but the rate is really only about 30 percent
  • Other plastics, like soft wraps and films, sometimes called No. 4 plastics, are not widely accepted in curbside collections.
  • The E.P.A. estimates that just 2.7 percent of polypropylene — the hard plastic known as No. 5, used to make furniture and cleaning bottles — was reprocessed in 2018
  • Crunch the sums, and only around 10 percent of plastics in the United States is recycle
  • the landfill-happy United States is far worse at recycling than other major economies. According to the E.P.A., America’s national recycling rate, just 32 percent, is lower than Britain’s 44 percent, Germany’s 48 percent and South Korea’s 58 percent.
  • the scientific research over decades has repeatedly found that in almost all cases, recycling our waste materials has significant environmental benefits
  • We need clearer labeling of what is and is not actually recyclable and transparency around true recycling rates
  • Recycling steel, for example, saves 72 percent of the energy of producing new steel; it also cuts water use by 40 percent
  • Recycling a ton of aluminum requires only about 5 percent of the energy and saves almost nine tons of bauxite from being hauled from mines
  • Even anti-plastics campaigners agree that recycling plastics, like PET, is better for the climate than burning them — a likely outcome if recycling efforts were to be abandoned.
  • The economic perks are significant, too. Recycling creates as many as 50 jobs for every one created by sending waste to landfills; the E.P.A. estimates that recycling and reuse accounted for 681,000 jobs in the United States alone.
  • That’s even more true in the developing world, where waste pickers rely on recycling for income.
  • before we abandon recycling, we should first try to fix it
  • Companies should be phasing out products that can’t be recycled and designing more products that are easier to recycle and reuse rather than leaving sustainability to their marketing departments.
  • Lawmakers can help by passing new laws, as cities like Seattle and San Francisco have done, to help increase recycling rates and drive investment into the sector.
  • Governments can also ban or restrict many problematic plastics to reduce the amount of needless plastics in our everyday lives, for instance in food packaging
  • According to a 2015 analysis by scientists at the University of Southampton in England, recycling a majority of commonly tossed-out waste materials resulted in a net reduction in greenhouse gas emissions
  • Greater safety regulations are needed to reduce toxic chemical contents and microplastic pollution caused by the recycling process.
  • consumers can do their bit by buying recycled products (and buying less and reusing more).
  • Yes, recycling is broken, but abandon it too soon, and we risk going back to the system of decades past, in which we dumped and burned our garbage without care, in our relentless quest for more. Do that, and like the recycling symbol itself, we really will be going in circles.
ecfruchtman

Fiat Chrysler cheated on diesel emissions EPA says - 0 views

money.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 13 Jan 17
     
    The accusation from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board (CARB)is similar to the scandal that has plagued automaker Volkswagen for more than a year. Just this week, Volkswagen agreed to pay $4.3 billion to settle charges it cheated on diesel emissions tests with more than 590,000 diesel-powered U.S.
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