Tag Archives: Accent

The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

by AlexanderGladne Posted on July 10, 2020

As the U.S. enters another month of sustained protests against anti-Black racism and police brutality, organizers are working to turn the protests’ energy into legislative action. This week the Movement for Black Lives, a nationwide coalition of Black organizations formed in December 2014, released a summary of a new legislative proposal that aims to defund police police forces around the country and give funding and support to Black communities looking to create their own models of public safety. They’re calling it the BREATHE Act.

“We crafted this bill to be big,” said Gina Clayton Johnson, the executive director of Essie Justice Group and one of the act’s creators, during a virtual announcement event reported by New York Magazine’s The Cut. “We know the solution has to be as big as the 400-year-old problem itself.”

The proposal is divided into four sections that each address different approaches to sustainable public safety: The first two sections call for the divestment of federal resources from policing and incarceration, as well as federal grant programs for alternative community-led approaches to non-punitive public safety.

The proposal’s third section, however, demonstrates that environmental justice is central to the proposal’s vision. It calls for the creation of a grant that will fund solutions for environmental justice issues that affect Black communities around the country. The grant would fund “clear, time-bound plans” for states to ensure universal access to clean water and air that satisfies Environmental Protection Agency guidelines. The section also calls for for the creation of clear state plans to meet 100 percent of their electricity demand with “clean, renewable, and zero-emission energy sources.” Funding for community-owned sustainable energy projects would be subsidized by the grant. Disaster preparedness would also be prioritized.

Environmental justice often intersects with other public health issues for Black and brown communities. In recent months, for example, it’s become clear that Black and Latino communities in the U.S. suffer higher mortality and hospitalization rates from the novel coronavirus. This May, Democrats in Congress introduced the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act to look at the connection between air pollution and disproportionate COVID-19 outcomes for these communities.

The BREATHE Act has not yet been translated into actionable congressional legislation, but Democratic Representatives Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley both expressed their support for the proposal during a virtual meeting this week.

“The BREATHE Act is bold…. It pushes us to reimagine power structures and what community investment really looks like,” Tlaib said during a recent call with activists. “We can start to envision through this bill a new vision for public safety. One that protects and affirms Black lives.”

Source: 

The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, sustainable energy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on The BREATHE Act would defund police — and fund environmental justice

This federal permit used to fast-track pipelines. Now it’s threatening them.

by EmmaDease297192 Posted on July 8, 2020

Jump to original: 

This federal permit used to fast-track pipelines. Now it’s threatening them.

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, The Atlantic, Ultima, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This federal permit used to fast-track pipelines. Now it’s threatening them.

Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

by EdwardMaskell Posted on July 3, 2020

The coronavirus may have canceled many of this weekend’s organized Fourth of July fireworks displays, but that doesn’t mean people aren’t celebrating at home. Roadside fireworks stands are seeing an explosion of business, and firework complaints are cropping up across the country. In Boston, police calls regarding illegal fireworks were 23 times higher this year compared to last year — and that was in May. In New York in the first few weeks of June, such calls were up 236 times over the same period last year.

Bill Weimer, vice president of the retailer Phantom Fireworks, says he’s been “knocked over” by this season’s booming fireworks sales. “The demand and the business we’ve seen so far has been the strongest early fireworks season I’ve seen in my years of involvement in the fireworks business,” he told CNN.

The immediate dangers from exploding fireworks — injury and fires — are high on many public officials’ minds. But as the Fourth draws near and Independence Day partygoers snatch up the nation’s supply of sparklers, StarFires, and Raging Zombies, health experts have pointed to another troubling side effect of the pyrotechnics displays: a spike in air pollution.

They’re specifically worried about particulate matter — tiny dust and soot particles that may cause human health and environmental problems. A 2015 study in the journal Atmospheric Environment found that the average level of particulate matter across the United States increased a whopping 42 percent on the Fourth of July, and the Environmental Protection Agency warns that exposure to particulate matter may cause significant respiratory problems. For people with preexisting heart or lung conditions, it can even lead to premature death.

This week, a new study published in the journal Particle and Fibre Toxicology adds to the layers of concern. Not only is particulate matter bad in general, but the study found that the emissions from fireworks may pose unique health risks. After collecting particulate matter released by 12 types of commercially available fireworks, the study’s authors found high levels of toxic metals like copper and strontium in five of them.

Most of these metals are technically allowed in fireworks, said Terry Gordon, the lead author of the study and a professor of environmental medicine at NYU Langone Health. In fact, those metals are responsible for producing the fireworks’ vivid colors. But that doesn’t mean people should be inhaling them.

Krystal Pollitt, an environmental health scientist at the Yale School of Medicine who was not involved with the new study, says that when people breathe in metal particles like the ones let off by fireworks, it can cause cells to experience “oxidative stress.” This disrupts normal cellular signaling and metabolic processes and, if left unchecked, it can lead to cell damage and even cell death.

“Oxidative stress is a mechanism that underlies a lot of different diseases,” Pollitt told Grist, including a number of respiratory conditions. It is also implicated in kidney and liver failure, as well as neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson’s.

Gordon and his team were looking for signs of oxidative stress — and that’s what they found when they exposed human lung cells in a lab to the metal-containing particulate matter from the fireworks. Some types of fireworks, like the so-called “Saturn Battery 1,” caused a stronger reaction than others. Meanwhile, cells that were exposed to a control sample of black carbon — a common and relatively innocuous component of particulate matter —showed no signs of oxidative stress.

The researchers later confirmed the damaging effects of the particulate matter in live cells by conducting an experiment on mice. After injecting a subset of the fireworks particles into the mice’s lungs, they found that the particles with higher concentrations of toxic metals caused greater inflammation.

Gordon said he was most surprised to find that emissions from two of the fireworks contained dangerous levels of lead, despite the fact that lead is not allowed in consumer fireworks. One type of firework, called the “Black Cuckoo,” produced particulate matter with lead concentrations greater than 40,000 parts per million.

“That means it was 4 percent lead, which is outrageous,” Gordon told Grist. Even though the industry says it follows rigorous testing procedures to prevent this kind of contamination, he added, either regulators or manufacturers appear to be failing to keep it out of consumer fireworks. “To me, it’s almost criminal activity,” he said.

The American Pyrotechnics Association, an industry group, expressed concern about the fireworks’ metal content, saying the contaminated products should not have gotten past routine regulatory testing. “All consumer fireworks imported into the U.S. are prohibited from containing any form of lead,” the group’s executive director Julie Heckman told Grist. However, she added that the study did not provide detailed information on the fireworks or their manufacturers, making it difficult to determine where the oversight occurred.

Though Gordon’s study focused on small-scale fireworks displays — the kind you might have in your backyard — he said his results raise questions about the safety of larger shows. Gordon suspects that big firecrackers use many of the same chemicals as the little guys, and big displays produce much greater amounts of particulate matter. Plus, air pollution from big celebrations can blanket urban areas and linger for days.

Although some of the largest Fourth of July fireworks shows won’t be happening this year — events in New Orleans, Orlando, Minneapolis, most of southern California, and elsewhere have been canceled — others are plowing ahead. Macy’s NYC fireworks show, the largest pyrotechnics display in the country, is going on as a series of short, unannounced displays to prevent crowding. And after a 10-year moratorium on pyrotechnics at Mount Rushmore due to fire danger, the Trump administration is planning to bring “THE BIG FIREWORKS” back to the national monument, along with an anticipated crowd of 7,500 people.

These events raise obvious concerns about spreading the coronavirus through person-to-person contact, but the danger posed by pollution remains unclear without more research on the population-wide toxicological effects of exposure to firework-generated particulate matter.

“We don’t know what the risks could be,” Gordon said, calling for more research. But until we know more, he says it could be worth it to investigate alternative ways of celebrating Independence Day. Laser shows, he noted, are bright and colorful without the toxic emissions.

For the time being, he recommends that viewers exercise caution, whether they’re staying home to detonate a Lava Blaster or heading to a big pyrotechnics show. “If I’m in a fireworks celebration and the wind’s blowing right at my family and me,” he told Grist. “I’m not a happy camper.”

Continue reading:

Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, Gotham, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Forecast this 4th of July: Fireworks with a chance of lead exposure

Fake news is killing us. How can we stop it?

by PBIJannieaz Posted on July 1, 2020

Salmon Arm is a little town of 17,000 in central British Columbia, not far from busy ski slopes in the Canadian Rockies. It’s home to stunning blue lakes, tree-covered mountains, and a worrying number of signs claiming that COVID-19 is a hoax.

Tim Walters

But maybe less than there used to be. Tim Walters, a professor of English at Okanagan College, has been tearing down the signs one by one since they started appearing a few months ago. The signs demand B.C. “wake up” and sport a hashtag tied to QAnon, a far-right conspiracy movement. By June, Walters was walking three or four hours a day, wandering in ever-widening circles, yanking down the signs wherever he went.

It’s become a “low-level obsession,” he said. “Because of how crazy they are, people don’t take these conspiracy theories seriously enough.”

The conspiracy theorists responded by putting their signs higher, 8 or 9 feet off the ground. But Walters is 6 feet 6 inches tall with long arms to match. People have been sending him directions to new signs in their neighborhoods that they can’t reach.

The reality is that fake news is killing people. Research shows that wearing masks could reduce the spread of COVID-19 by half, yet misleading claims about the safety of mask-wearing have proliferated. If everyone wore face masks in public, according to a model from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington, it could save an estimated 33,000 American lives by October.

“Misinformation about COVID is spreading faster than the virus itself,” said Gale Sinatra, a professor of education at the University of Southern California who’s writing a book about fake news and the public’s understanding of science. Epidemiological experts say that a pandemic is as much of a communications crisis as it is a public health emergency. It’s reminiscent of climate change — despite a mountain of evidence showing the devastating effects on our overheating planet, only two-thirds of Americans say they’re worried about it. That’s a sign that these messages aren’t reaching people, or perhaps that fake news resonated with them more.

As an added challenge, the climate crisis and COVID-19 have both gotten sucked into the vortex of polarization in America. And as the pandemic has stretched on, becoming the background of our lives, it’s activating many of the same psychological barriers that people face when confronted with climate change. “Everyone’s got COVID fatigue now,” Sinatra said.

Coronavirus denial shares many similarities to climate denial, the dismissal of the scientific consensus around global warming. It’s spread by many of the same people, and the arguments for these bonkers theories often sound a lot alike: a rejection of mainstream science, a story of governments plotting to manufacture a crisis, and a message that the best thing to do is just continue business as usual. So why should I wear a face mask?

Studies have shown that fake news spreads faster on social media than real news does. People on Twitter are 70 percent more likely to share false news than the real stuff. And it’s difficult to shut down. “Misinformation is unfortunately a bit more compelling than regular information,” Sinatra said. Conspiracists spin tales that are surprising and dramatic, like a plot twist in a movie — a contrast to the drumbeat of “COVID-19 cases are rising!” seen on the news every day. So short of tearing down posters, what can people do to shut down the spread of misinformation?

Taking misconceptions head-on is one option, Sinatra said. But it has to be done carefully, or it can backfire, because repeating wrongheaded claims in the course of refuting them risks spreading them even further. Repeating things makes them stick. As the linguist George Lakoff pointed out, when you tell people “Don’t think of an elephant” they can’t help but picture an elephant.

“Just saying ‘You’re wrong’” — that does not work,” Sinatra said. You have to explain why something is incorrect and offer a good explanation for a convincing counterpoint.

Conspiracy signs headed for the recycling. Tim Walters

“My thing is, you always have to confront them head-on,” said Walters, who incorporates rebuttals into his English classes. He recently taught a college course about the climate crisis and found that many of his students were on the fence about the science at first, unsure of what was true, before reading assignments like David Wallace-Wells’ The Uninhabitable Earth, which educated (and terrified) them. Walters equipped his students with the facts about climate change and encouraged them to discuss what they learned with their friends and family.

One resource that could help them is the new Conspiracy Theory Handbook, written by two cognitive scientists, Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook. It’s a free online source that offers tips on how to debunk conspiracy theories and talk to people who believe in them.

Even so, the best way to counter fake news might be to equip people with the tools to evaluate what’s fake and what’s real from the get-go. “It’s better to inoculate people preemptively against conspiracy theories rather than trying to go in afterward and undo the damage,” said Cook, a professor at George Mason University, in a recent interview with The Verge.

The problem, of course, is that those under the sway of misinformation aren’t willing to take the vaccine.

One nonprofit, the News Literacy Project, aims to help students across the country get savvy when it comes to identifying fake news and think critically about what they come across online. There’s evidence that this approach helps for people of all ages. One study from the University of Michigan found that people are less likely to trust, “like,” or share fake climate change news on Facebook if they read a few questions beforehand such as “Do I recognize the news organization that posted the story?” and “Does the information in the post seem believable?”

Scientists and public health experts are having a tough time in the COVID-19 pandemic, because they’re learning basic facts about the virus and how it spreads from week to week. They’re trying to communicate new findings to the public in real time, and evolving recommendations are bound to sow confusion. That’s one big difference between the two crises: Climate scientists got the basic story nailed down ages ago. “The science around climate change has been developing for decades,” Sinatra said. “COVID’s only been on the planet for the last six months.”

Read original article: 

Fake news is killing us. How can we stop it?

Posted in Accent, alo, Everyone, FF, GE, LAI, LG, ONA, Oster, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fake news is killing us. How can we stop it?

These Louisiana activists are facing ‘terrorizing’ charges for a stunt they pulled 6 months ago

by PearlGaither Posted on June 25, 2020

Early Thursday morning, two activists who have opposed a planned $9.4 billion petrochemical complex in St. James Parish, Louisiana, were arrested for “terrorizing” an oil and gas lobbyist connected to the Taiwanese plastics manufacturer responsible for the development. While the protest action leading to the charges occurred six months ago, the arrests come just a week after residents of the parish won a court battle against the company, allowing them to host a Juneteenth prayer ceremony on a slave burial site on the company’s property.

The charges against Anne Rolfes and Kate McIntosh — two members of the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, the environmental health and justice organization that’s been fighting the plastics company, Formosa, alongside RISE St. James, another grassroots environmental justice group — carry a punishment of up to 15 years in prison and a fine of $15,000.

Last year, a judge ruled that Formosa had illegally dumped billions of plastic pellets called nurdles into Texas’ Lavaca Bay and other waterways. The company agreed to pay a $50 million settlement as a result of complaints and lawsuits filed by Texas residents and environmental groups. In December, Louisiana activists sent a sealed container filled with the company’s nurdles to the home of an oil and gas lobbyist in Baton Rouge, as an act of protest against the company’s planned development in Louisiana. The package was accompanied by a letter explaining the box’s contents.

According to Bill Quigley, an attorney representing Rolfes and McIntosh, the Baton Rouge police department called him early Thursday morning, claiming that there were outstanding charges against the two. Both turned themselves in, but they were reportedly taken to the parish prison in handcuffs and leg irons. The two were released on bond late Thursday afternoon.

“The timing is suspicious,” Quigley told Grist. “It seems a little bit more than coincidental that six months pass, and now charges against them are being announced, as the community fights for the cemetery that Formosa resisted so urgently to keep them away from.”

Janile Parks, Formosa’s director of community and government relations, denied that the company had any role in or knowledge of the arrests. “[Formosa] was unaware that this action was going to be taken by the state and had only heard second hand that deliveries of plastic pellets were made … in the Baton Rouge area some months ago,” she wrote.

Quigley also added that the “terrorizing” statute is a much more serious charge than even Louisiana’s critical infrastructure law, which carries up to five years in prison and a fine of $1,000 for trespassing in the vicinity of critical infrastructure like oil and gas pipelines. The “terrorizing” charge is intended for actions such as bomb threats, according to Quigley.

“It’s really hard to believe that what [the defendants] did was a serious terrorizing threat,” he said.

Soon after Thursday’s arrests, a new coalition called the Alliance to Defend Democracy launched what it says is an effort to protect free speech in Louisiana. The alliance includes community leaders, clergy members, and grassroots environmental organizations such as the Coalition Against Death Alley, the Concerned Citizens of St. John, Extinction Rebellion New Orleans, the Greater New Orleans interfaith Climate Coalition, RISE St. James, the Green Army, 350 New Orleans, No Waste Louisiana, and the Louisiana Bucket Brigade.

St. James Parish is located in Louisiana’s 85-mile industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, which has been known for decades as “cancer alley.” The area’s Black population has suffered disproportionately from the COVID-19 pandemic, and residents have long suffered some of the highest pollution-linked cancer rates in the country. Many residents say that Formosa’s new development will only make matters worse.

St. James resident Sharon Lavigne, an outspoken critic of Formosa and the founder of RISE St. James, had previously been visited by parish sheriff’s deputies and threatened with arrest for peaceful visits to the burial site on Formosa’s property.

“This is our home, and we’re not just going to let Formosa come here and destroy our lives and the health of our community,” Lavigne told Grist. “I’ll die before I give up. We’re not going to stop. We’re going to have more people join us, and we’re going to be stronger.”

More – 

These Louisiana activists are facing ‘terrorizing’ charges for a stunt they pulled 6 months ago

Posted in Accent, alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on These Louisiana activists are facing ‘terrorizing’ charges for a stunt they pulled 6 months ago

This plastics company is trying to stop Black residents from visiting a slave burial site on Juneteenth

by BeaZKJTlag Posted on June 18, 2020

A group of Black residents from St. James Parish, Louisiana, got the green light on Thursday to hold an hour-long Juneteenth prayer service on a burial plot containing the remains of formerly enslaved people. The ceremony, planned for Friday, has been a point of contention — not due to fears over coronavirus, which has hit the community particularly hard, but because the site technically belongs to Taiwanese plastics manufacturer Formosa.

This decision is the latest incident in a long series of legal battles between the company and the community. When they found out about the remains last year, RISE St. James — a grassroots environmental justice group that has been trying to stop the plastics company from setting up shop since 2018 — had members pay visits to the site, which is part of a former sugarcane plantation, to pray, sing and place flowers. But that all changed in January when the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality approved permits for the company to construct a $9.4 billion petrochemical complex on the location.

Sharon Lavigne, president of RISE St. James, told Grist that the last time she visited the location, authorities told her that Formosa didn’t grant access permission to the site and that if she ever returned, she would be arrested.

Formosa told Grist that the company is still working to communicate with agencies to conduct research and learn more about the identities of the people buried on their property. Internal documents obtained by RISE St. James via a public records request, however, show Formosa’s own archeological findings concluded the site was indeed a slave burial ground. But in an email to Grist, Jim Harris, the company’s spokesperson, claimed “no archaeologist has been able to confirm the identity or ethnicity of the remains discovered on [Formosa] property.”

In accordance with state laws, the company said they are working to identify any descendants associated with the remains, and would eventually gather community input on the deceased’s identities. “Once this process is complete,” the company said it will “work with the state archaeologist and any identified relatives to have the remains respectfully re-interred in a proper cemetery.”

On Monday, RISE St. James received a letter from Formosa declining to give them access to the burial site on Juneteenth — a holiday that falls annually on June 19 and celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. But later that same day, a state judge granted the organization a temporary restraining order, allowing them to move forward with the prayer ceremony. Judge Emile R. St. Pierre wrote that Formosa won’t suffer any harm as a result of a peaceful prayer service, adding that holding the event was within the residents’ constitutional rights.

Formosa then submitted a motion to dismiss the restraining order which led to the trial, asking once for the judge to reconsider his decision and halt the Juneteenth prayer service due, at least in part, to the safety and liability concerns of construction evidently happening at the site. Lavigne contested that she has not seen any active construction happening on the site.

“[Formosa] recognizes the importance of acknowledging this historical and meaningful day,” Harris said. “However, once the judge has an opportunity to consider all factors in this matter, we believe he will determine that the safety and liability concerns of an active construction site are significant enough to restrict unauthorized access to the property.”

Tensions between St. James Parish’s Black residents and companies like Formosa are informed by the region’s long-standing legacy of industrial pollution. St. James Parish is part of Louisiana’s “cancer alley,” an 85-mile industrial corridor along the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Baton Rouge. The area’s Black population has been particularly hard-hit by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many residents already have underlying health conditions from industry-linked pollution that put them at risk of contracting the virus. Research from the Tulane University Environmental Law Clinic identified high levels of fine particulate matter concentrated in Louisiana’s southeast industrial corridor, which experts say could also impact the severity of COVID-19 cases.

On Thursday, the state judge reaffirmed RISE St. James ability to hold a Juneteenth Ceremony, but Formosa still marched to the state’s capital in Baton Rouge to file an appeal, which the court also rejected.

Regardless, Lavigne told Grist that she is determined Friday’s Juneteenth event will happen no matter what. “The judge already made his decision, I feel like victory is mine,” Lavigne said. “We’re going to beat them, and I can feel it in my spirit.”

Link to article:  

This plastics company is trying to stop Black residents from visiting a slave burial site on Juneteenth

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, Green Light, LAI, ONA, OXO, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on This plastics company is trying to stop Black residents from visiting a slave burial site on Juneteenth

Texas relaxed environmental enforcement during the pandemic, state data show

by sitegratis Posted on June 18, 2020

The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) is one of the largest and most influential environmental protection agencies in the country. With an annual budget of $400 million, it polices about 400,000 polluting businesses and conducts more than 100,000 inspections in a normal year. The agency inspects not only the state’s many large refineries and chemical plants, but also its neighborhood gas stations, dry cleaners, and public water systems.

Many of the state’s 29 million residents live in the shadow of heavy industry and in cities with smog levels that rank among the worst in the country. In short, a slowdown in TCEQ’s enforcement efforts could be deadly. So when the COVID-19 pandemic brought the country to a halt earlier this year, TCEQ’s chairman penned an open letter reassuring environmental advocates that, even though employees were going to work from home, the agency would continue to be “fully engaged in its mission to protect public health and the environment.”

But a Grist analysis of the agency’s internal data has found that, in the six weeks after the agency asked employees to work from home in response to the pandemic, TCEQ pursued 20 percent fewer violations of environmental laws than it did during the same period in 2019. The agency also initiated 40 percent fewer formal enforcement actions resulting in fines for polluters. Finally, in a move that appears in line with the Environmental Protection Agency’s controversial discretionary enforcement policy, TCEQ issued about 40 percent fewer violations to companies for failing to monitor and report pollutants emitted into the air and water.

Even as the agency reduced enforcement, it continued processing permits that allow construction companies, industrial facilities, and other businesses to pollute up to certain limits at about the same rate that it did last year.

Adrian Shelley, director of the consumer advocacy group Public Citizen’s Texas office, called TCEQ’s enforcement slowdown “disappointing” and said that Grist’s investigation shows that the agency prioritizes permitting over compliance.

“There’s been a large period of very little regulatory oversight,” he said. “The implications for community health and for the workers at the facilities really concern us.”

In a 7-page response to Grist’s findings, TCEQ spokesperson Brian McGovern denied that the agency had scaled back its oversight of polluting businesses during the pandemic, listing various shortcomings of the data his own agency provided. He said that TCEQ conducted a separate analysis of its enforcement work and found that inspections had decreased by just 10 percent.

“While there have been some decreases in these [enforcement] activities as staff transitioned to working remotely and the economy has slowed suddenly and dramatically, these decreases are far more modest than you have concluded,” McGovern said.

The agency has long been criticized for lax enforcement. Analyses of TCEQ’s enforcement work by environmental advocates and journalists have consistently found that the agency rarely penalizes polluters while disproportionately issuing fines against small business owners. A 2017 Texas Tribune investigation found that the agency levied fines in fewer than 1 percent of the cases in which polluters exceeded air emission limits.

“Any further relaxation of environmental protections will keep endangering Texans who are facing this triple threat of air pollution, chemical disasters, and now COVID-19,” said Catherine Fraser, an associate working on air quality issues at the nonprofit Environment Texas.

Shifting priorities

TCEQ inspectors — both full-time employees and contractors — perform more than 100,000 inspections a year. Just 5,000 of them are in response to complaints; many of the rest are routine and dictated by federal laws. (For instance, every gas station in the state is inspected once every three years due to a mandate in the 2005 Energy Policy Act.) About two-thirds of the inspections are conducted on-site while the remainder are performed remotely by reviewing self-reported data from businesses.

Once an inspection is complete, inspectors write up any violations of environmental rules they may have witnessed. These citations range from relatively minor paperwork violations to more serious infractions, like those that cause degraded air and water quality. If a polluter does not correct the issue that led to a notice of violation — or if the agency decides the violations are exceedingly serious — then TCEQ purses formal enforcement action, which is typically accompanied by fines and an order to remediate the issue.

In order to assess TCEQ’s decision-making during the pandemic, Grist requested data about the complaints the agency received, the inspections it conducted, and violations and enforcement action it pursued from the beginning of 2019 through the end of May. Due to lag times in updates to the agency’s internal database, we limited our analysis to the six-week period starting March 16, when TCEQ employees began working from home.

We found that, across the board, the agency’s enforcement work shifted after Governor Greg Abbott directed state agencies to provide remote work options to employees in March. For one, the agency conducted far fewer inspections that led to violations. Last year, the agency conducted about 2,120 such inspections every six weeks, on average. But between March 16 and the end of April this year, that number dropped to about 722 — a nearly 70 percent decrease.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

TCEQ also issued 20 percent fewer violations in March and April, compared to the same six-week period last year, and likewise found fewer more serious violations of environmental laws. Agency staff categorize violations as “major,” “moderate,” and “minor” when calculating penalties depending on the amount of pollution, the threat to public health and the environment, and the compliance history of the business in question. Major violations are the most severe and trigger mandatory enforcement action resulting in fines, while minor violations are often over paperwork. While the types of violations fluctuate dramatically over the course of a given year, Grist’s analysis found a marked decrease in “major” and “moderate” violations after the shutdown compared to last year. From mid-March through the end of April last year, the agency issued citations for 17 “major” violations, but during the same time period this year, the agency found just three. “Moderate” violations were also down by about 20 percent.

“That’s a large shift,” said Tim Doty, a former TCEQ employee who worked in the agency’s enforcement division before retiring in 2018. “Is it because companies are coming up with excuses or a natural explanation? Maybe [inspectors] can’t get an in-person look and they’re not inclined to assign [the violation] a ‘major’.”

The agency also appears to have changed how it handles violations of routine monitoring and record-keeping requests. In March, it announced that businesses that are unable to comply with environmental rules due to the pandemic may request enforcement discretion from the agency. According to a spreadsheet that the agency has been updating on its website, it has received about 150 requests for enforcement discretion and granted about 80 percent of them. The vast majority of these requests are for extensions to reporting and monitoring deadlines.

The agency’s decision to overlook these monitoring and reporting violations may partially explain the overall decrease in violations. In March and April of 2019, the agency issued about 240 record-keeping and routine monitoring violations. This year it issued about 142 of those violations — a 40 percent decrease. Similarly, notices of enforcement — formal notification to businesses that the agency intends to seek penalties for violations — were also down 40 percent.

The decrease in enforcement activity is likely not due to businesses closing down to comply with stay-at-home orders. The vast majority of facilities that TCEQ oversees — gas stations, public water systems, and oil and gas infrastructure — were considered essential and exempted from shutdown orders.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

“This is really very bad in my view, because the plants are getting away with breaking the law now,” said Neil Carman, a former TCEQ air inspector who now works for the Sierra Club in Austin. “They’re probably less worried because they don’t think anybody’s going to come out there and call them about their violations.”

McGovern, the TCEQ spokesperson, said that the “conclusion that TCEQ is choosing to pursue less severe violations is incorrect” and that the agency “does not choose which violations it finds or pursues based on severity.” He said that TCEQ does not have a policy to not pursue violations of monitoring and reporting requirements during the pandemic and that the number and severity of violations can vary from year to year for other reasons — “sometimes dramatically” and “without our knowing or ascribing a reason.”

McGovern’s main criticism of Grist’s analysis pointed to several flaws in the data that the agency itself provided, which he said did not lend itself to an “apples-to-apples comparison between 2019 and 2020.” For one, the agency provided Grist with data on investigations that led to violations — not the entire universe of investigations. (While this might impact the accuracy of the raw numbers Grist analyzed, it would not impact the accuracy of the year-to-year changes.) McGovern also said that lag times for database updates could cause an undercount of inspections for 2020.

TCEQ publishes monthly enforcement reports outlining the number of inspections conducted and enforcement actions pursued. In response to Grist’s findings, TCEQ conducted its own analysis and found that it was conducting just 10 percent fewer inspections over the ten-week period from mid-March to the end of May, compared to last year. The discrepancy in findings is likely a result of the limitations McGovern listed as well as the agency’s method of counting inspections: According to McGovern, a single investigation report can contain multiple “investigation activities.” A count of these investigation activities is reported publicly and to the state legislature.

But Grist’s findings are also reflected in data that the agency is required to submit to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA has delegated much of its permitting and enforcement authority to states. Chemical plants, steel mills, refineries, and other air polluters receive permits from TCEQ so they can emit pollutants. Then, TCEQ reports the number of inspections and fines issued to those facilities. That data show that the agency conducted about 180 inspections each month in 2019. But the inspection numbers plummeted to 88 in March 2020 before climbing back up to 156 in April and 133 in May.

“This is just further evidence that the agency is giving polluters a free pass to pollute during a pandemic, when we should really be doing everything that we can to protect our health and our environment,” said Fraser, the advocate with Environment Texas.

A downward trend

A further look back at TCEQ’s oversight of large polluting facilities also shows a downward trend in inspections over the past 10 years. At the beginning of the decade, the agency was conducting more than 7,500 inspections per year of federally-permitted facilities with limits on air emissions. Those figures have now dwindled to a little over 2,000 — despite the number of facilities the agency is overseeing remaining steady. Similarly, penalties, violations cited, and formal enforcement actions taken against these facilities have also declined significantly.

After the EPA announced its temporary relaxation of monitoring and reporting rules for polluters in March, many states and environmental groups sued. In a recent filing, they argued that the agency did not consider the effects of the policy on public health and safety — particularly on low-income communities of color that disproportionately live close to polluting facilities.

“In addition to this existing backdrop of public health concerns, mounting evidence regarding the incidence of COVID-19 in low-income and minority communities amplifies the importance of considering the Policy’s impact on public health,” the attorneys representing nine states wrote.

In Texas, too, the effects of scaling back enforcement are likely to be felt disproportionately by communities of color. An analysis by the University of Texas Health Center found that neighborhoods close to industrial facilities in Harris County — where Houston is located — are at higher risk for hospitalization and intensive care needs due to COVID-19. These neighborhoods are also already at higher risk for cancer and a slate of respiratory illnesses.

Environmental and public health advocates say that lax enforcement and poor regulatory oversight are to blame for the distressingly frequent industrial fires and explosions in the Houston area. Last year alone, two major fires at petrochemical sites near the Houston Ship Channel burned for days and blanketed the city in a plume of thick smoke. A 2016 Houston Chronicle investigation found that major chemical accidents occur in the Houston area every six weeks — and that industry being allowed to self-regulate is one major reason for the frequency of unsafe incidents.

“The lack of enforcement action taken by TCEQ is creating this culture where safety and health laws aren’t prioritized,” Fraser said. “There’s often little incentive to comply with the law.”

Clayton Aldern contributed data reporting to this story.

Follow this link – 

Texas relaxed environmental enforcement during the pandemic, state data show

Posted in Accent, alo, Citizen, FF, GE, LAI, ONA, PUR, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Texas relaxed environmental enforcement during the pandemic, state data show

Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

by yaconsyruphelica Posted on June 10, 2020

With the nation’s eyes on ongoing protests for racial justice (not to mention a seemingly endless public health crisis), last week President Trump signed an executive order that would waive key requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).

The landmark 1970 law requires federal agencies to consider the environmental impacts of proposed federal actions and projects, including the construction of major highways, airports, oil and gas drilling, and pipelines. Trump’s new executive order relaxes the law’s requirement that major new infrastructure and energy projects undergo environmental reviews to ensure they will not significantly harm the environment and nearby public. (Industry representatives often blame the environmental impact statements required by the law for the extensive delay of permit approvals.)

“From the beginning of my Administration, I have focused on reforming and streamlining an outdated regulatory system that has held back our economy with needless paperwork and costly delays,” Trump wrote in the executive order. “The need for continued progress in this streamlining effort is all the more acute now, due to the ongoing economic crisis.”

But the president’s desire to suppress the 50-year-old law long predates the coronavirus-fueled recession.

Early this year, the Trump administration announced plans to overhaul key elements of the law, including by limiting requests for community input prior project approval, disregarding project alternatives, and shortening the deadline for environmental impact statements and environmental assessments. Pollution-burdened communities have long leveraged NEPA as a defense mechanism to protect their health and the environment — examples include the fights against the controversial Keystone XL pipeline and the expansion of the 710 freeway in Long Beach, California.

The new order promotes a quicker permit approval process on these kinds of projects by invoking a section of federal law that allows individual government agencies to use their own emergency authorities to bypass environmental requirements. Trump’s order weakens standard environmental review requirements not just in NEPA, but also in the Endangered Species Act and Clean Water Act.

Even before Trump declared the novel coronavirus outbreak a national emergency, the White House Council on Environmental Quality held two public hearings in Denver, Colorado, and Washington, D.C., to gather feedback on Trump’s initial proposal to overhaul NEPA in ways that would speed up projects and de-emphasize environmental reviews. Students, construction workers, university professors, and grassroots activists testified before a panel of expressionless White House officials, testifying that NEPA’s requirements are vital for their safety, health, and the environment.

Anthony Victoria Midence and other environmental advocates in California’s Inland Empire, a region that experiences some of the country’s worst smog, have united environmental and labor groups to fight a controversial airport expansion that the government’s own assessment shows would add one ton of pollution to the region’s air each day. The groups invoked NEPA to mount a legal challenge to the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval of the project’s permits. Trump’s new executive order would have stymied their efforts, according to Victoria Midence, who is the community director for the Center for Community Action and Environmental Justice, a local social justice group.

“It’s clear that the Trump administration is willing to sacrifice working people of color for the benefit of industry,” he told Grist. “This latest move by Trump further demonstrates that he does not care about black and brown lives.”

The new executive order comes on the heels of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) finalizing a rule last week that will make it much more difficult for states, tribes, and the public to protest or block pipelines and other projects that could pollute the air and water systems. The decision, which overturns a 50-year-old understanding of the Clean Water Act, would set a strict one-year deadline for states and tribes to approve or deny proposed projects such as pipelines, dams, or fossil fuel plants.

Trump also signed another executive order last month that allows several federal agency heads to weaken regulatory requirements “that may inhibit economic recovery.” The move prompted the EPA to alert the fossil fuel industry that it could suspend enforcement of certain environmental laws, including those that require the gathering of public input on projects and the monitoring of air pollution levels.

“We need to place people over profit,” Victoria Midence told Grist. “As we suffer through this pandemic with the fear that our lungs and heart are already compromised because of diesel pollution, Trump is removing perhaps the last protections we have to raise our voices and demand environmental justice.”

See the article here:

Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, Landmark, ONA, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Trump trashes 50-year-old environmental law, blames coronavirus

Why Facebook, Netflix, and Tesla are getting climate-shamed by investors

by jack.greenfield69902008 Posted on June 9, 2020

In late March, the British banking giant Barclays announced its ambition to become a net-zero bank by 2050. While the fine print of how one of the biggest lenders to fossil fuel companies will make this transition is yet to be determined, one of the other key underlying challenges is that it’s impossible for the bank to accomplish this on its own. It will need every company it lends to to disclose data on their carbon accounting.

A surprising number of companies — more than 8,400 — already report this kind of data to CDP (formerly the Carbon Disclosure Project), an international nonprofit that runs a public environmental disclosure database. CDP asks companies to disclose data about their environmental footprint on behalf of investors who are concerned about climate change and the financial risks associated with it. But some companies refuse to participate, even after repeated requests from investors themselves.

In a sign of just how serious investors are getting about this, in recent years CDP’s investor partners have agreed to release a sort of shit list outing the companies that turned their disclosure requests down. This year’s list includes 1,051 companies, including fossil fuel giants like ExxonMobil and Chevron, media companies like Netflix and Facebook, and ostensibly climate-friendly businesses like Tesla. The companies on the list are estimated to collectively emit more than 4,800 megatons of carbon dioxide equivalent annually, which is equal to the amount emitted by the U.S. in 2017.

Not every company that refused to disclose is on CDP’s list — only the ones that investors wanted to put in the spotlight. The hope is that this public shaming will spur companies to disclose in the future. The 707 companies targeted by last year’s campaign were more than twice as likely to increase their disclosure this year.

To be fair, disclosure is not an easy ask. “No one person can sit down and, like, do their homework last minute,” Emily Kreps, global director of capital markets at CDP, told Grist. CDP collects data across three categories — climate change, deforestation, and water security. The reporting process requires going into every part of a company’s value chain, from the sourcing of raw materials all the way to the end use of its products. Kreps said the disclosure reports from CDP’s top-rated companies usually come out to between 60 and 70 pages long. Sometimes it takes a few years for a company to get the information together.

Some companies on CDP’s nondisclosure list used to participate and stopped. Exxon, for example, disclosed with CDP until 2018. At that point CDP changed its questionnaire for oil and gas companies to include more specific questions around fuel reserve levels and inventory, and Exxon decided it would release its own disclosure reports instead. “The report that Exxon put out on their own is not helpful, necessarily, in addressing all of the environmental points that investors are looking for,” said Kreps.

The CDP’s reporting process was designed to align with the recommendations of a group called the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), which was started in 2015 by Mark Carney, the former governor of the Bank of England, and former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The TCFD provides a widely applicable framework to help financial-sector organizations understand how the companies in their portfolios assess climate-related risks and opportunities. It suggests four areas for disclosure — governance, strategy, risk management, and metrics and targets — but it doesn’t dictate exactly what to disclose or how. What CDP has done is take TCFD’s recommendations and translate them into a 26-question reporting sheet. “We’re trying to standardize the indicators and data points that people look for year after year to track progress,” said Kreps.

Kreps emphasized that what’s critical about CDP’s disclosure process is that it helps companies look at both risks and opportunity. There is money to be made in the transition to a low carbon economy, she said, and those opportunities are illuminated by the reporting process. If some of the 1,051 companies that avoided disclosure this year decide to get on board, they could benefit in the long run.

Visit site:

Why Facebook, Netflix, and Tesla are getting climate-shamed by investors

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, ONA, PUR, The Atlantic, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Why Facebook, Netflix, and Tesla are getting climate-shamed by investors

US states have spent the past 5 years trying to criminalize protest

by JerilynLaguerre Posted on June 4, 2020

The Minnesota legislature has spent the last five years preparing for the kind of protests that have rocked the city over the past week in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd — by attempting to criminalize them.

From 2016 through 2019, state lawmakers introduced ten bills that either made obstructing traffic on highways a misdemeanor or increased penalties for protesting near oil and gas facilities. Most of these legislative proposals were introduced in response to ongoing protests against a controversial oil pipeline as well as those following the police killing of Philando Castile in a St. Paul suburb in 2016. The bills would have allowed protesters to be jailed for up to a year, fined offenders up to $3,000 each, and allowed cities to sue protesters for the cost of police response. Many of the bills were introduced in 2017 after racial justice activists in the state made headlines shutting down a major highway. A couple others were in response to protests in 2016 and 2019 against the energy company Enbridge’s planned replacement of a pipeline running from Alberta to Wisconsin.

None of the bills have yet become law, but three failed only because they were vetoed by the governor. Two bills introduced earlier this year are still on the table. One would make trespassing on property with oil and gas facilities punishable by up to three years in prison and a $5,000 fine. The other would make those who assist such activity civilly liable for damages.

Over the past half-decade, a wave of bills that criminalize civil disobedience has swept state legislatures across the country — particularly those controlled by Republican lawmakers. According to a new report by PEN America, a nonprofit advocating for First Amendment rights, 116 such bills were proposed in state legislatures between 2015 and 2020. Of those, 23 bills in 15 states became law. While there is no comprehensive count of the number of people arrested and prosecuted under these new laws, activists protesting oil and gas activity have been charged with felonies in Houston and Louisiana.

This year alone, four states — Kentucky, South Dakota, West Virginia, and Utah — passed laws that increased penalties and charges for either interfering with oil and gas activity or disturbing meetings of government officials. (Interfering with oil and gas activity may include obstructing the construction or operation of pipelines and other “critical infrastructure.”) As of May, 12 other bills are pending in various state legislatures — all of them introduced before the past week’s unrest. If passed, these bills would increase disciplinary sanctions for campus protesters, classify trespassing on property with oil and gas infrastructure a felony, and expand the definition of rioting, among other things.

More bills increasing penalties for protesters may be on their way. In response to the recent protests against George Floyd’s killing, a Tennessee lawmaker has proposed increasing penalties for rioting and South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has said that her administration is looking into legislative proposals to respond to the recent unrest.

“Protest, in the last several years, has absolutely been followed by efforts by state legislators to criminalize the very activity practiced in the mere months prior,” said Nora Benevidez, director of the U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America. “There is this larger narrative that is being cast that protest needs to be narrowed — and the definitions around what constitutes acceptable protests are becoming smaller and smaller.”

Benevidez found that, in the years prior to recent large-scale protests and the 2016 election victories of conservative state legislators, proposals chipping away at constitutionally-protected protest activity were few and far between. In 2015 and 2016, only six bills narrowing the rights of protesters were introduced. But in 2017 — in the wake of nationwide protests over the police shootings of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling, protests against the Dakota Access pipeline, and marches responding to President Trump’s election — that number rose to 56.

Lawmakers who supported such bills weren’t shy about their intentions. In 2018, Minnesota state senator Paul Utke — the main sponsor of a bill that would have made training, hiring, or counseling those who end up trespassing on property with a pipeline a felony punishable with up to ten years in prison and a $20,000 fine — pointed to the Dakota Access Pipeline protests as a reason for the bill. “We saw what happened in North Dakota and we have a big pipeline project coming up [in Minnesota],” he said.

Only two such laws have been challenged in court. South Dakota’s “riot-boosting” law, which allowed the state to sue protesters for damages, was found unconstitutional in 2019 because it was created in anticipation of protests against the Keystone XL pipeline. Earlier this year, however, lawmakers passed a new version of the law, which has not yet been challenged in court. Litigation against a similar law in Louisiana is pending.

Benevidez said she expects to see many more bills curtailing the right to protest in the coming months.

“The long-term and sustained ways to target certain groups comes not just from moments like this but in the months that follow,” she said. “Even if protests die down, the need to be ready to challenge some of these proposals is going to be really necessary.”

Taken from:  

US states have spent the past 5 years trying to criminalize protest

Posted in Accent, alo, FF, GE, ONA, Sterling, Uncategorized, wind power | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on US states have spent the past 5 years trying to criminalize protest