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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.

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Texas relaxed environmental enforcement during the pandemic, state data show

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For indigenous protesters, defending the environment can be fatal

by CharlotteStaton Posted on June 8, 2020

Adán Vez Lira, a prominent defender of an ecological reserve in Mexico, was shot while riding his motorcycle in April. Four years earlier, the renowned activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead in her home in Honduras by assailants taking direction from executives responsible for a dam she had opposed. Four years before that, Cambodian forest and land activist Chut Wutty was killed during a brawl with the country’s military police while investigating illegal logging.

These are some of the most prominent examples of violence faced by environmental activists in recent years — but, according to a new report, they are not unusual. As police crack down on protests demanding justice and equity in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in the U.S., it’s clear that activism in general comes at a heavy price. Environmental activists specifically — particularly indigenous activists and activists of color — have for years faced high rates of criminalization, physical violence, and even murder for their efforts to protect the planet, according to a comprehensive analysis by researchers from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, which was released last Tuesday.

The researchers analyzed nearly 2,800 social conflicts related to the environment using the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas) database, which they created in 2011 to monitor environmental conflicts around the world. The study, published in the journal Global Environmental Change, found that 20 percent of environmental defenders faced criminal charges or were imprisoned, 18 percent were victims of physical violence, and 13 percent were killed between 2011 and 2019. The likelihood of these consequences increased significantly for indigenous environmental defenders: 27 percent faced criminalization, 25 percent were victims of physical violence, and 19 percent were murdered.

“We can think of this as compounded injustice, highlighting the extreme risks vulnerable communities opposing social and environmental violence against them face when they stand up for their rights,” one of the study’s researchers, Leah Temper, told Grist.

Environmental defenders, as the researchers defined them, are individuals or collectives that mobilize and protest against unsustainable or harmful uses of the environment. Examples of the sort of conflict covered by the study are the construction of pipelines on tribal lands, illegal mining in the Amazon rainforest, oil extraction in the Arctic, and the construction of fossil fuel refineries.

The analysis draws on last year’s report from the human rights and environmental watchdog organization Global Witness, which found that at least 164 environmental activists were killed in 2018 alone. The Philippines was named the deadliest country in the world for environmental defenders, who have been called terrorists by President Rodrigo Duterte.

In fact, not long after these findings, 37-year-old Brandon Lee, an American environmental activist who was in the Philippines on a volunteer mission, was shot four times in Ifugao province by unknown assailants after his group, the Ifugao Peasant Movement — a farmers group opposing a hydropower project — had been labeled an “enemy of the state” across social media by propagandists. As of April, Lee was recovering in his hometown of San Francisco, but he remains paralyzed from the chest down.

The lead author of last week’s study, Arnim Scheidel, said he hopes that the analysis gives lawmakers and the public a better understanding of the causes of the violence that protesters still face around the world.

“Globally, indigenous peoples suffer significantly higher rates of violence in environmental conflicts,” Scheidel said. “Being aware of these connections may help to connect struggles against various forms of racism worldwide. Protest is key for the success of such struggles, particularly when using diverse channels and building on broad alliances.”

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For indigenous protesters, defending the environment can be fatal

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Here’s how coronavirus affected carbon emissions in every state

by NannieWhitelegg Posted on May 19, 2020

The pandemic is far from over, but some states are opening back up again, creating a situation where life is going back to some semblance of normal in some areas of the United States and staying eerily quiet in other places. A new analysis in the science journal Nature Climate Change sheds light on what happened to emissions during the months when the U.S. was maximally locked down.

Previous estimates of emissions reductions due to COVID-19 said the pandemic would take an 8 percent bite out of global emissions this year. This study, published Tuesday, is the first to analyze and quantify emissions drops on a day-to-day basis across 69 countries and state by state in the United States.

It found that the world is on track for the biggest emissions drop since World War II, or maybe even the biggest drop in history, depending on how long global lockdowns stay in place. (The study estimates that by the end of the year emissions could decline anywhere between 2 to 13 percent overall, depending on the nature and duration of governments’ lockdown policies.) During the peak of global lockdowns in early April, average daily emissions decreased by 17 percent compared to the 2019 average, hitting their lowest point since 2006. Nearly half of those emissions were from “surface transport,” like car rides.

In the U.S., emissions dropped by about a third for a couple of weeks in April, a development that Robert Jackson, a co-author of the study and a Guggenheim fellow at Stanford University, told Grist was “absolutely unprecedented.” On a national level, emissions decreased by about a quarter on average during each country’s peak of confinement.

Jackson and his fellow researchers created a “confinement index” to describe how locked down 69 countries were between the months of January and April according to three levels of confinement ranging from broad travel restrictions to “policies that substantially restrict the daily routine of all but key workers.” By examining six economic sectors — aviation, electricity, transportation, public buildings and commerce, residential, and industry — the study’s authors were able to determine to what extent economic activity, and the carbon dioxide emissions that accompany it, slowed as a result of which lockdown measures. The 69 countries they analyzed represent 97 percent of global CO2 emissions.

In the U.S., the study showed some major differences between states’ daily maximum emissions reductions. Washington state, for example, saw a more than 40 percent drop in emissions during its peak confinement, whereas the pandemic swallowed up just under 18 percent of Iowa’s emissions during its peak. Jackson says there’s a fairly straightforward reason why some states saw such big emissions deficits. “In general, states that are more rural acted much more slowly than states with big cities,” he said. In a few months’ time, those differences between states could deepen even more as the easing of lockdown restrictions in some states spur an increase in emissions.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

For the most part, the emissions decline will only last as long as the lockdowns. “Previous crises have not dented emissions very much,” he said, referencing the 2008 financial crash that decreased emissions globally by 1.5 percent for a year. By 2010, emissions had come roaring back, increasing 5 percent globally. “We’re forcing people to stay at home,” Jackson said. “That won’t last. If they hop back in their cars and consume at the same levels things will go back to normal.”

But Jackson says the pandemic has provided an opportunity for people to rethink transportation, at the very least. Sitting in an hour of traffic to get to work doesn’t sound super appealing after months of commuting 30 seconds to the dining room table. “That could jolt us into a longer-term drop in emissions,” he said.

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Here’s how coronavirus affected carbon emissions in every state

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Thirteen – Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.

by Myrna Posted on December 8, 2019

READ GREEN WITH E-BOOKS

Thirteen

The Apollo Flight That Failed

Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.

Genre: Science & Nature

Price: $1.99

Publish Date: December 31, 2013

Publisher: Open Road Media

Seller: OpenRoad Integrated Media, LLC


An “exciting” minute-by-minute account of the Apollo 13 flight based on mission control transcripts from Houston ( The New York Times ). On the evening of April 13, 1970, the three astronauts aboard Apollo 13 were just hours from the third lunar landing in history. But as they soared through space, two hundred thousand miles from Earth, an explosion badly damaged their spacecraft. With compromised engines and failing life-support systems, the crew was in incomparably grave danger. Faced with below-freezing temperatures, a seriously ill crewmember, and a dwindling water supply, a safe return seemed unlikely. Thirteen  is the shocking and miraculous true story of how the astronauts and ground crew guided Apollo 13 back to Earth. Expanding on dispatches written for the New Yorker , Henry S. F. Cooper Jr. brings readers unparalleled detail on the moment-by-moment developments of one of NASA’s most dramatic missions.   

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Thirteen – Henry S. F. Cooper Jr.

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Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ water crisis, one year later

by Victoriapw5 Posted on April 21, 2019

This story was originally published by CityLab and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In January 2018, when officials in Cape Town announced that the city of 4 million people was three months away from running out of municipal water, the world was stunned. Labelled “Day Zero” by local officials and brought on by three consecutive years of anemic rainfall, April 12, 2018, was to be the date of the largest drought-induced municipal water failure in modern history.

Photos of parched-earth dams and residents lining up to collect spring water splashed across news sites. The city’s contingency plan called for the entire population to collect its water — a maximum of a two-minute-shower’s-worth a day per person — from 200 centralized water centers, each serving the population equivalent of an MLS soccer stadium.

Then April 12th came and went, and news of the crisis evaporated.

One year on, Cape Town has apparently made it through the worst of a historic drought without turning off the taps, although the water supply is still tenuous. How the city managed to evade disaster — a combination of water conservation and efficiency measures, smarter use of data, and a little help from Mother Nature — serves as a largely hopeful precedent for cities globally facing increasing risk of extreme environmental events. Still, serious challenges in establishing a resilient and sustainable water supply system for Cape Town remain.

90 critical days

The countdown to Day Zero was 90 days. So what did Cape Town do to beat it? Unsurprisingly, it was not a silver bullet but a barrage of efforts that averted disaster. One big boost came in February 2018, when the national government throttled allocation of water in the region earmarked for agriculture, allowing more to flow to urban residents. The same month, farmers also agreed to divert additional water stored for agricultural purposes to the city.

However, the city’s conservation efforts were as important, and more remarkable. Cape Town’s government ramped up water tariffs and enforcement of prohibitions on heavy users, prohibiting use of municipal water for swimming pools, lawns, and similar non-essential uses. The city’s government also implemented a new water-pressure system in January, saving roughly 10 percent of overall municipal water consumption.

The effect was stunning. Cape Town’s municipal water-use levels historically oscillate throughout the year, showing up on a graph as a standing wave pattern with troughs coinciding with wet winters, and peaks mirroring the dry summer months when people rely more on taps for water. Like an ocean wave crashing onto shore, this wave pattern fizzled out as Cape Town implemented drought restrictions, cutting its peak usage by more than half in three years.

The January 2018 announcement alone galvanized a 30-percent drop in residential consumption after a steady but slower decline in earlier stages of the drought, according to City of Cape Town statistics.

A city changes its habits

Technical fixes and regulatory controls implemented by the municipality were important to curbing water consumption, but reaching such levels of conservation would not have been possible without large-scale cooperation by a wide swath of residents, businesses, and other stakeholders.

“It doesn’t matter how much technical expertise you’ve got, but you actually have to stand back and understand the system more broadly,” notes Gina Ziervogel of the University of Cape Town, who has researched the crisis. For the city, this meant using data more effectively to prompt people to save water.

Starting in 2017, the municipality had begun ratcheting up its drought-awareness campaign, publishing weekly updates on regional dam levels and water consumption and using electronic boards on freeways to notify drivers of how many days of water supply Cape Town had left. Then, in January 2018 and with Day Zero looming, the city got more aggressive. In addition to announcing its Day Zero countdown, the city launched a city-wide water map to show water consumption on a household level, allowing people to compare their consumption to their neighbors and the rest of the city.

Heightened outreach regarding the crisis prompted wide discussion: The municipality’s weekly water report became a regular topic at social gathenings and on the radio. Governmental and civic organizations published water-saving techniques, and people traded tips on social media. In an unusual turn of events, techniques used in the poor, water-strapped township areas gained traction in wealthier areas.

Prompted by new water-use tariffs, businesses also began increased efforts to communicate the need to save water to customers and employees. Bathroom signs explaining “If it’s yellow, let it mellow … ” became ubiquitous in restaurants and bars, while startup and corporate types initiated “dirty shirt” challenges to see who could go the most days without washing their work shirt.

Crisis averted (for now)

By the end of March 2018, the emergency efforts had provided a small additional buffer in the city’s water reserves, allowing city officials to push back Day Zero beyond the upcoming rainy season. In June 2018, the region saw average rainfall for the first time in four years. With the rain, dam levels rose, and officials were able to call off Day Zero indefinitely.

Cape Town’s multi-pronged effort to stave off Day Zero succeeded. Still, the challenges to achieving water security persist. Although dam levels are above the lows experienced during the drought, they remain below pre-drought years and currently stand at 50 percent of capacity. Meanwhile, daily water use for the city has crept higher over the past year.

Furthermore, disparities in access to water in Cape Town continue to be related to extreme economic inequality, which generally runs along the racial lines established during South Africa’s colonial and apartheid eras. For a large proportion of Cape Town’s poor citizens, whose only normal access to water is a communal tap, Day Zero remains a constant reality. Combine this with a complex political climate and historical distrust of state policies, and it is easy to understand that a sustained unified effort to conserve water is fraught with tension.

Cape Town is making a longer-term effort to diversify its water resources, but that too is prompting concerns. Projects to desalinate ocean water and tap the aquifer beneath the city have proven far more expensive than initially thought, and have also faced questions about their environmental impacts on local ecosystems and overall sustainability. An increase in private wells drilled by wealthier households has added pressure to the future availability of this source. Although plans for both desalination and groundwater extraction are progressing, neither alone will solve Cape Town’s water issues.

For now, the city and its residents are still enduring moderate drought conditions. Urban water restrictions remain in place, although less strict than before, and the legacy of the drought can still be seen all around Cape Town. Many businesses continue to remind customers to restrict their usage in signs taped to bathroom mirrors and above toilets. That’s probably just as well — water-scarcity issues are not likely to go anywhere, considering the increased risks of drought caused by climate change and population growth.

As for other cities facing similar resource crises: Ziervogel advises “to make sure you’ve got those relationships and partnerships in place so that when a crisis hits you can actually draw on those partnerships.”

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Cape Town’s ‘Day Zero’ water crisis, one year later

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Tofurky is suing over Missouri’s definition of ‘meat’

by MurrayCalder Posted on August 29, 2018

On Tuesday, Missouri became the first state to ban “meat” from the product labels of plant-based and lab-grown alternatives. The new law, part of a larger agricultural bill, prohibits “misrepresenting a product as meat” if it doesn’t come directly from an animal. Violators are subject to a fine of $1,000 and — wait for it — a year in prison.

Harsh punishment for calling vegetarian sausage “sausage,” huh? Tofurky seems to think so. The vegan company filed a lawsuit against Missouri on Monday to block the law, joined by the Good Food Institute, Animal Legal Defense Fund, and American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri. The suit seeks to defend the right to market meatless products with meaty words on First Amendment grounds.

The Missouri Cattlemen’s Association lobbied to pass the law. The beef industry has been working to protect what it calls “beef nomenclature” with stricter labeling rules, which could potentially leave environmentally friendlier plant-based or lab-grown options with some unappetizing names (anyone want some textured vegetable protein for dinner?). In April, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association president wrote to the U.S. Department of Agriculture to raise the alarm over the “flagrantly deceptive food product labels proliferating the marketplace.”

To counter the claim that “vegan bacon” and the like are confusing shoppers, Tofurky’s lawsuit includes a surprising etymology lesson. The text points out that “the very oldest usages of the term ‘meat,’ and its analogues in the predecessor languages to Modern English … are to describe nourishment or food generally.”

We’ve used the word “meat” in this broader sense since the 9th century, Kory Stamper, lexicographer and author of Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, told me last month during our conversation about similar tactics over the label “milk.”

Old English speakers used the word to refer specifically to animal flesh in the 1300s, Stamper said. But just a century later, people were also using it for the flesh of a fruit or a nut, like the meat of a walnut — another factoid cited by Tofurky’s lawsuit.

The suit notes that plant-based product labels have included words like “beef” and “sausage” for decades. It suggests that this practice has resulted in little confusion for shoppers: “[T]here have been no consumer protection lawsuits in Missouri — or any other state — challenging the accuracy of plant-based meat products’ marketing or packaging.”

If Missouri’s law stands, it could end up setting the standards for the whole country. As Quartz reports, it’s a big pain for food companies to tweak their packaging for just one state.

The U.S. has seen battles over vegan terminology before, like the vegan “mayo” controversy of 2015. And last month brought news that the FDA was officially reviewing the question of whether almond milk can be labeled as milk (after all, “an almond doesn’t lactate,” according to the FDA commissioner).

While Missouri is the first state to legislate a restricted definition of meat, there’s an international precedent: The language purists in charge of France approved a similar meat terminology ban in April.

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Tofurky is suing over Missouri’s definition of ‘meat’

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Leaked letter: Kinder Morgan broke rules for months during Trans Mountain Pipeline construction

by MargeneNeudorf Posted on June 16, 2018

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Kinder Morgan put fish, porpoises, sea lions and other marine life in danger during recent construction work near an oil terminal in Vancouver, says a leaked federal letter that warns the company could face prosecution for its violations.

The letter from the federal Fisheries and Oceans Department (DFO) notes that the company also went months without filing mandatory monitoring reports to the government and First Nations before federal officials noticed the Texas company was breaking the rules.

The department sent the warning to an executive at the company’s Canadian unit, Trans Mountain, in a letter dated June 6, 2018, and obtained by National Observer. That was just days after the Trudeau government announced a deal to take over the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion project and buy many of Kinder Morgan’s Canadian assets for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars ($3.4 billion).

It has prompted environmental lawyer Eugene Kung to raise this question: “Down the line, if the feds become the owner, what does it look like for them to prosecute themselves?”

Letter identifies four violations

The letter contrasts with recent assurances by the federal government that its officials have kept a close eye on the company and taken adequate measures through a “world-leading” plan to ensure that the Trans Mountain west coast pipeline and tanker expansion project will proceed without damaging the environment or public safety.

The Trudeau government approved the expansion project in November 2016, prompting fierce opposition from several affected First Nations and communities along its proposed route. But at the time, the government said that it was also imposing 157 conditions on Kinder Morgan, as recommended by the federal energy regulator, the National Energy Board (NEB), to ensure that the project would be safe. These conditions included requiring the company to obtain more than 1,000 federal, provincial, and municipal permits required for different stages of the construction.

The fisheries department gave Trans Mountain permission to begin some expansion work on its Westridge Marine Terminal on Sept. 8, 2017, provided that it meet a number of safety and environmental conditions. Noncompliance would contravene a major Canadian environmental law, the federal Fisheries Act, that is used to protect bodies of water inhabited by marine species.

The warning letter identifies four different violations related to pile driving during expansion work on the Burrard Inlet in the metro Vancouver region near the Kinder Morgan terminal between January and May 2018. The company exceeded safe underwater noise limits for such marine species as the harbor porpoise and the Steller sea lion as it proceeded with the pile driving activity, according to a separate email sent by the federal department to members of an Indigenous Advisory and Monitoring Committee that was set up to keep tabs on the project.

The letter also noted that the company failed to file required construction monitoring reports to the federal department and members of the special committee, including First Nations representatives, for three consecutive months, from January to March. The department said in the letter, sent to Trans Mountain vice president David Safari, that it only noticed that Trans Mountain wasn’t filing its mandatory reports after email correspondence with the company on April 26, 2018.

“By way of this letter, we are therefore providing you with a written warning for having contravened the Fisheries Act, particularly for having carried on works, undertakings and activities without complying with the conditions prescribed by the Minister under … this Act,” said the four-page letter, signed by Tracey Sandgathe, a regional manager from the department’s fisheries protection program.

“Please note that this warning letter does not exclude prosecution under the Fisheries Act in respect of this project in the event of future instances of non-compliance.”

The letter also said that the department had reviewed noise monitoring records in April, noting that construction work exceeded an underwater noise threshold for injury to finfish on six separate occasions during impact pile driving on April 3, 2018. Each time Trans Mountain exceeded the limit, the monitoring records indicated that it attempted to reduce noise levels without any success, the letter said.

“Despite adjusting the mitigation measures after each of the six separate exceedances of the underwater noise threshold, the noise threshold continued to be exceeded after each subsequent attempt,” Sandgathe wrote in the letter. “Despite failing to reduce noise levels to below the threshold, Trans Mountain nonetheless resumed pile driving after each exceedance.”

DFO reviewed the violations while government and company officials were criticizing land defenders and water protecters who wanted construction activity halted and risked arrest for violating a B.C. Supreme Court injunction requested by lawyers for Kinder Morgan.

The email shared with members of the advisory committee said that the department based the letter on a review of construction reports and follow-up with Trans Mountain between April 3 and May 29, the latter being the date that the government announced that it was making an offer to buy the project for 4.5 billion Canadian dollars.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and other government officials have said that Canada is a country based on the “rule of law” — warning opponents, including the B.C. government, that they have no authority to stop the oil and tanker expansion project since it was approved by the federal government and falls under its jurisdiction.

More than 200 people have been arrested for violating the injunction near the terminal on Burnaby Mountain, and thousands more have pledged to do whatever it takes to stop the Trans Mountain expansion.

‘Part of a pattern’

The Trudeau government made its offer to buy the project after the company threatened to abandon the expansion due to uncertainty caused by fierce opposition in British Columbia. Trudeau has said that the project is critical to Canada’s economy since it would enable producers in Alberta’s oil sands to bypass their main customer in the United States and find new markets in Asia.

Trudeau also told National Observer in an interview last February that the project was helping to ensure support from Alberta, home to the world’s third largest oil reserves after Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, for a national climate change plan. Opponents say that the Trans Mountain expansion is too risky and would push Canada’s international climate change goals out of reach.

Under the deal, Safari, the vice president who received the warning letter, and Kinder Morgan Canada president Ian Anderson, would each receive bonuses of 1.5 million Canadian dollars ($1.1 million) if they remain in their current positions, after the sale is completed, until July 2020.

Kung, a lawyer from West Coast Environmental Law, a firm providing advice to one of the First Nations affected by the project — the Tsleil-Waututh — noted that this isn’t the first time Kinder Morgan has been caught breaking the rules.

Last fall, the federal pipeline regulator, the National Energy Board, ordered the company to stop using anti-spawning mats in streams inhabited by fish, after it had started to do this work without authorization.

“It’s part of a pattern that we’ve observed and sadly not all that surprising about Kinder Morgan not being able to even meet the minimal requirements that were the result of the NEB process and here’s another example of them violating the conditions and essentially having very little consequences, which is what DFO is saying,” Kung said in a phone interview.

DFO didn’t immediately respond to questions about the warning letter. Trans Mountain told National Observer in a statement that it is “committed to compliance with its environmental and regulatory obligations,” and “aggressively implementing measures to avoid future non-compliance.”

The company also said it was engaging with DFO “directly, transparently and collaboratively through ongoing site inspections, information request exchanges and required reporting.”

“The Trans Mountain process for responding to underwater noise exceedances is designed to protect marine life. In the case described in the April monitoring report, it is key to note that each exceedance resulted in an immediate response by Trans Mountain. In each instance, pile driving was stopped, the situation was assessed and further mitigation was undertaken.”

The company also said it “recognized and reported exceedances of the thresholds and followed a mitigation plan which included providing the occurrence details, mitigative actions taken and results in the reports and responses to Information Requests from DFO.”

Regarding the missing reports, Trans Mountain said it started sending them after they were told the committee wasn’t receiving them, but it didn’t explain why it had failed to send these reports in the first place.

Last summer, the company had said it was taking an “innovative approach” to reducing noise from pile driving, by using special noise shrouds “to cover the hammers that drive piles into the ocean floor” for the new terminal.

“The shrouds, which are about two stories tall and wide enough to hold a medium-sized SUV, dampen the sound of hammer impact by 65 to 95 percent,” Trans Mountain said on its website on July 6, 2017.

The project’s director for the Lower Mainland region, Randy Brake, said on the website that this technique had been used in other ports around the world, but that it would be the first time it was being used for a piling project in the Vancouver Port.

Several months later, some local residents living near the terminal in Burnaby said that the pile driving was shaking their homes and causing small tremors, Burnaby Now reported on March 7, 2018. One resident even told the local publication that the noise and vibrations were enough to wake him up on a Saturday morning in his home on a hill, about 700 meters above the terminal.

“You could literally feel it through the bed and obviously through the walls. You put your ear or your hand up to the wall, and literally you can feel it,” the local resident, Aaron Keogh, told Burnaby Now. “The further concern from that is what effect will weeks of ongoing activity like that … have on the structures — basically the houses and such —  surrounding the area?”

Trans Mountain declined to respond to a question about whether the “noise shrouds” had worked as it had anticipated.

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Leaked letter: Kinder Morgan broke rules for months during Trans Mountain Pipeline construction

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California is shattering renewable records. So why are greenhouse emissions creeping up?

by AntonBussey1724 Posted on May 23, 2018

The green beacon that is the state of California is making clean-energy strides, according to new stats out this week. It’s harnessing a record amount of solar power, building more turbines to capture wind power records, and closing in on the moment when the grid goes 100 percent carbon free.

And yet it’s also starting to generate more greenhouse gases. WTF?

Every month California’s electricity managers put out a report showing what that climate-conscious state is up to. And this one brings sunny signs of progress, unheralded achievements, and fun factoids. Earlier this month, for instance, California set a new record for solar power generated.

And on April 28, at precisely 1:25 p.m., renewables provided 72.7 percent of California’s electricity needs. That’s also a record, but not an aberration. It’s consistent with a longstanding trend as California’s policies connect more solar panels and wind turbines to the grid. As you can see in the next graph, California keeps hitting new records — usually around noon — when renewables provide the majority of the electricity for a few hours.

California Independent System Operator

Since 2015, renewables have helped California decrease the amount of greenhouse gases its power plants released into the atmosphere. But this past February, the state’s electricity was more carbon intensive than it was in 2017, and in March it was even worse:

California Independent System Operator

What’s that all about? There’s a hint in the report. California had to dump about 95,000 megawatt hours of renewable power in April, because all that power would otherwise have flooded onto the grid when people didn’t need it — blowing fuses, igniting fires, and melting every computer without a surge protector. That’s a lot of energy, enough to provide all of Guatemala’s electricity for the month.

Transporting electricity and storing it is expensive, so the people managing the electrical system ask power companies to stop putting power on the grid, to curtail their production. It’s called “curtailment” in electric-system jargon. As the number of solar panels feeding the grid increases, so do curtailments.

The thing is, every new panel sending electricity to the grid is still displacing fossil fuel electricity. So that can’t explain why California is burning more fossil fuels than in the last couple of years.

What’s the real problem, then? It’s almost certainly the lack of water. When wind and sun stop generating electrons, we’d like to have other low-carbon source of electricity that we could turn to — what some energy wonks call a “flexible base” of power generation.

California’s big source of reliable low-carbon electricity has been hydropower. But the state is bracing for a drought after a warm, dry winter. So California is hoarding water behind dams, rather than letting the water run through turbines to generate electricity. As a result, hydropower generation is down. And the state’s nuclear, geothermal and biomass plants are already running at capacity. As a result California is replacing the missing waterpower with fossil-fuel generation, namely natural gas.

All this serves as a good reminder that renewables can’t provide us with all of our electricity needs alone. We’ve also got to create bigger and better batteries, string up international transmission lines and build more low-carbon power plants that we can ramp up and down to complement those renewables. If California gets that done, its power grid will be cleaner and more energizing than a $5 shot of wheatgrass juice sold from a food truck by a man with a well-conditioned beard.

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California is shattering renewable records. So why are greenhouse emissions creeping up?

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California is turning farms into carbon-sucking factories

by EllenDMOYi Posted on May 11, 2018

In a grand experiment, California switched on a fleet of high-tech greenhouse gas removal machines last month. Funded by the state’s cap-and-trade program, they’re designed to reverse climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. These wonderfully complex machines are more high-tech than anything humans have designed. They’re called plants.

Seriously, though: Plants breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen. They break open the tough CO2 molecule and use the carbon to build their leaves and roots. In the process, they deposit carbon into the ground. For years people have excitedly discussed the possibility of stashing carbon in the soil while growing food. Now, for the first time, California is using cap-and-trade money to pay farmers to do it on a large scale. It’s called the California Healthy Soils Initiative.

In April, trucks full of fertilizer trundled into Doug Lo’s almond orchards near Gustine, California, and spread composted manure around his trees. He then planted clover to cover the ground between the trunks. In theory, these techniques will pull 1,088 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere every year. Lo’s is one of about fifty farms getting money from the state of California to pull greenhouse gas from the air. California is paying him $50,000 to try it out.

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“We’re trying to sequester some carbon,” Lo said. “It should also help with the water-holding capacity of the soil, and the flowers in the cover crop should feed bees after the almond bloom is over.”

This is the first major utilization of farms as state-sponsored carbon-sucking factories. (To be fair, Oklahoma, of all places, has been experimenting with soil carbon since 2001, albeit on a smaller scale.) Agriculture and climate nerds — we wonkiest of wonks — have been anticipating this for the last decade as the scientific evidence accumulated.

In 2014 we wrote about the people pushing this research in California. And Grist told the story last year of how scientist Jonathan Sanderman put together key pieces of this puzzle after finding jars of old dirt, long forgotten in storage. And just recently, the New York Times Magazine ran a story summarizing the state of the science. But for years it’s felt like a lot of talk and not much action. That’s changing with the Healthy Soils Initiative, which makes money available for farmers like Lo, and monitors the results.

So how do you turn a farm into a carbon-sucking machine? Lo figured the money from the state would allow him to experiment without risk. He made a deal with a compost company to truck manure from dairies across California’s central valley then spread precisely 5.3 tons per acre under his almond trees as required by the state guidelines. An inspector from the California Department of Food and Agriculture showed up on the day the trucks arrived in April to make sure Lo was actually doing the work and not just doing the paperwork. Next, Lo planted clover and other cover crops in the rows between the trees.

A lot is riding on this, but it’s not a foregone conclusion that it will work. In theory, compost and cover crops should get carbon out of the sky and into the ground. But will it work in practice on Lo’s farm? With the farm’s particular soil structure, irrigation pattern, as well as the dirt’s microbiome? We don’t know how fast carbon will accumulate in his soil, or how long it will stay there.

When I asked Lo how confident he was that he was going to get exactly 1,088 tons of carbon into the ground he responded: “Well, that’s just what the soil scientists said. We’re going to see I guess!”

As of last Thursday the soil samples on Lo’s farm haven’t shown an increase in carbon content, but it takes about three years for compost to break down, he said. Other farmers and state officials will be watching this rollout of carbon-sucking farms closely. And if it works, and these farms manage to capture enough carbon, program could scale up massively. California’s Healthy Soils Initiative could serve as a model for other states.

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California is turning farms into carbon-sucking factories

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In 3 Months, 3 Immigrants Have Died at a Private Detention Center in California

by AlfonzoN10 Posted on June 2, 2017

Mother Jones

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A Honduran immigrant held at a troubled detention center in California’s high desert died Wednesday night while in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Vincente Caceres-Maradiaga, 46, was receiving treatment for multiple medical conditions while waiting for an immigration court to decide whether to deport him, according an ICE statement. He collapsed as he was playing soccer at the detention facility and died while en route to a local hospital.

Caceres-Maradiaga’s death is the latest in a string of fatalities among detainees held at the Adelanto Detention Facility, which is operated by the GEO Group, the country’s largest private prison company. Three people held at the facility have died in the last three months, including Osmar Epifanio Gonzalez-Gadba, a 32-year-old Nicaraguan found hanging in his cell on March 22, and Sergio Alonso Lopez, a Mexican man who died of internal bleeding on April 13 after spending more than two months in custody.

Since it opened in 2011, Adelanto has faced accusations of insufficient medical care and poor conditions. In July 2015, 29 members of Congress sent a letter to ICE and federal inspectors requesting an investigation into health and safety concerns at the facility. They cited the 2012 death of Fernando Dominguez at the facility, saying it was the result of “egregious errors” by the center’s medical staff, who did not give him proper medical examinations or allow him to receive timely off-site treatment. In November 2015, 400 detainees began a hunger strike, demanding better medical and dental care along with other reforms.

Yet last year, the city of Adelanto, acting as a middleman between ICE and GEO, made a deal to extend the company’s contract until 2021. The federal government guarantees GEO that a minimum of 975 immigrants will be held at the facility and pays $111 per detainee per day, according to California state Sen. Ricardo Lara (D-Bell Gardens), who has fought to curtail private immigration detention. After that point, ICE only has to pay $50 per detainee per day—an incentive to fill more beds.

Of California’s four privately run immigration detention centers, three use local governments as intermediaries between ICE and private prison companies. On Tuesday, the California senate voted 26-13 to ban such contracts, supporting a bill that could potentially close Adelanto when its contract runs out in 2021. The Dignity Not Detention Act, authored by Lara, would prevent local governments from signing or extending contracts with private prison companies to detain immigrants starting in 2019. The bill would also require all in-state facilities that hold ICE detainees, including both private detention centers and public jails, to meet national standards for detention conditions—empowering state prosecutors to hold detention center operators accountable for poor conditions inside their facilities.

An identical bill passed last year but was vetoed by Gov. Jerry Brown. “I have been troubled by recent reports detailing unsatisfactory conditions and limited access to counsel in private immigration detention facilities,” Brown wrote in his veto message last September. But he deferred to the Department of Homeland Security, which was then reviewing its use of for-profit immigration detention. In that review, the Homeland Security Advisory Council rejected the ongoing use of private prison companies to detain immigrants, citing the “inferiority of the private prison model.” Yet since President Donald Trump took office, the federal government has moved to expand private immigration detention, signing a $110 million deal with GEO in April to build the first new immigration detention center under Trump.

Nine people have died in ICE custody in fiscal year 2017, which began October 1. Meanwhile, private prison stocks have nearly doubled in value since Election Day.

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In 3 Months, 3 Immigrants Have Died at a Private Detention Center in California

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