Tag Archives: justice

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.”

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

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A bill in Congress could get to the bottom of how coronavirus links air pollution and racism

by adellbrody Posted on June 12, 2020

It’s becoming clear that black and Latino communities in the U.S. suffer disproportionately from the novel coronavirus. The COVID-19 mortality rate for black New York City residents, for example, is twice that of white residents, and a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report has suggested that black Americans in general are hospitalized for COVID-19 at much higher rates. Research is also emerging showing that exposure to air pollution likely makes COVID-19 deadlier. In other words, when it comes to COVID-19 outcomes, it’s clear that race matters and that pollution matters. What is not yet clear is how, exactly, these two troubling trends are related.

In hopes of finding concrete connections between air pollution in communities of color and COVID-19 outcomes, last month Democrats in Congress introduced the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act, which would allocate an additional $50 million to existing Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grant programs and prioritize that funding for projects that “investigate or address the disproportionate impacts of the COVID–19 pandemic in environmental justice communities.”

The measure was included in the HEROES Act, the $3 trillion pandemic relief legislation that passed the House of Representatives last month with mostly Democratic support. The legislation’s future in a Republican-controlled Senate is shaky, but at a House Committee on Energy and Commerce hearing on Tuesday, lawmakers and advocates continued to push for the bill funding the study of the relationship between pollution and racial disparities in COVID-19 outcomes.

“COVID-19 has exacerbated what we have known all along,” said California Representative Raul Ruiz, one of the bill’s cosponsors, during the hearing. “[At-risk communities are] disproportionately breathing polluted air and drinking dirty water due to neglect or decisions by others.”

Jacqueline Patterson, director of the NAACP’s Environmental and Climate Justice Program, discussed how black and Latino communities in the U.S. face more extensive exposure to pollutants, making them more susceptible to lower respiratory illnesses like COVID-19. More than 70 percent of black Americans “are living in counties in violation of federal air pollution standards,” she told the panel of lawmakers.

Patterson also criticized the Trump administration’s approach to environmental policy.

“Instead of strengthening regulations to reinforce protections for communities made vulnerable by poor air quality, we have an administration that has rolled back over 100 regulations in the context of COVID-19,” she said, referring to the Trump administration’s broad relaxation of environmental enforcement during the pandemic.

Patterson said that the funding provided by the Environmental Justice COVID-19 Act would help existing organizations, like local chapters of the NAACP, study the way environmental factors affect public health for communities of color. However, she isn’t sure that the $50 million allocated is enough to accomplish the bill’s aims.

“[The bill] is going to make a difference, but I think ‘enough’ is gonna be a hard bar to reach at this point because the needs are so great,” she told Grist. “Air pollution standards aren’t even stringent enough in the first place.”

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A bill in Congress could get to the bottom of how coronavirus links air pollution and racism

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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.”

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

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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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Hurricanes disproportionately harm communities of color. TV news ignores that fact.

by Alanna3121 Posted on June 5, 2020

When Hurricane Florence slammed into southeastern North Carolina in September 2018, the worst-hit communities were already dealing with a litany of hazards: poverty, pollution from coal ash ponds and lagoons filled with livestock waste, chemicals in the drinking water, not to mention many were still in the process of rebuilding after Hurricane Matthew tore through two years earlier. According to Naeema Muhammad, organizing director of the North Carolina Environmental Justice Network, people in these largely black and brown communities in cities like New Bern and Lumberton, and rural towns like Faison, struggled to evacuate.

“People are pretty much left on their own to try to navigate out of danger,” Muhammad told Grist. When the flooding came, it flushed coal ash, animal waste, and human waste from wastewater treatment plants into the waterways, which spilled over riverbanks and into the streets. “People had to navigate through that water,” she said.

If you had been following coverage of the hurricane on one of the major nightly news shows at the time, you might have missed this story entirely. That’s because not a single segment that aired on ABC’s World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, or the NBC Nightly News reported on the disparate impacts Florence had on marginalized communities, according to a new analysis by Media Matters.

The media watchdog nonprofit analyzed 669 segments produced by those shows from 2017 to 2019 covering seven hurricanes, including Florence, and one tropical storm. Not one addressed the fact that these extreme weather events did not affect everyone in their paths equally — that the devastation they brought to poor communities and communities of color was far worse — despite ample research highlighting this disparity.

“It does not come as a surprise at all,” Muhammad said of the study. “We have a lot of issues going on in the floodplain areas that do not get addressed by the media. It’s mainly because of the faces in those areas,” which are predominantly black, Native American, and Latino.

Marginalized communities already have and will continue to suffer disproportionately from the extreme weather that becomes more common with climate change, from hurricanes and flooding to heat waves and wildfires. This is not just because they are more likely to live in the floodplain or the line of fire, although that is part of it, and is often the result of racist practices like redlining. Low-income and minority communities are also more likely to live in poor-quality housing and to not have the means to evacuate, rebuild, or relocate. As the Media Matters report states, “These events expose vulnerabilities stemming from historic and systemic inequities, but they too often go unexplained — partly because broadcast TV news fails to even do the minimum of reporting on who is being harmed the most, let alone delving into why some communities are being disproportionately affected.”

By contrast, PBS Newshour produced nine segments over the same time period that specifically addressed the disproportionate impacts hurricanes had on marginalized communities. While they represented only about 4 percent of the public broadcaster’s total hurricane coverage, the segments were at least substantive: One highlighted how undocumented families in Texas who did not qualify for disaster aid were faring in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey. Another focused on black residents in a neglected North Carolina public housing project who had no evacuation plan during Hurricane Florence.

Juan Declet-Baretto, a social scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists who researches climate vulnerability and environmental justice, warned about the dangers of the media not visiting these communities and talking to residents about what they experience. “It creates a huge blindspot in people’s perception, public perception and policymakers’ perception,” he told Grist. “It sends a message that there are some people in society that we collectively deem that they are not important, that it is not worth saving their lives.”

Media Matters found that this blind spot extends beyond extreme weather events to other environmental justice issues. When it comes to the novel coronavirus, the organization found that the same three corporate broadcast news shows failed to report on the connection between air pollution and the high COVID-19 death rate among people of color, especially black people.

Last Saturday morning, Muhammad said she woke up and lay in bed feeling angry. Over the previous few days, mass protests had spread to major cities all over the country in response to the police killings of George Floyd in Minneapolis and Breonna Taylor in Louisville, Kentucky, and the fatal shooting of Ahmaud Arbery by two white men while he was out for a jog in Brunswick, Georgia. “I’m angry that this policeman could so casually murder somebody in plain view, in broad daylight, as if it was nothing,” said Muhammad, referring to Floyd’s killing.

But the ongoing demonstrations are not about a few specific violent incidents; they are about the enduring structural racism and everyday violence inflicted on black Americans, of which environmental injustice is one manifestation.

“And then I said, man, on top of that, we have all of this environmental degradation in our communities, where people feel like they got a right to dump crap that they don’t want onto poor communities, and predominantly people of color, without a thought, and without being held accountable for the damages that they’ve caused,” Muhammad continued.

“And yet, communities gotta be made to prove that they’re being harmed when all this stuff happens, whether it’s a hurricane, whether its animal waste, whether its coal ash, GenX, murder, you name it. You gotta be made to prove that you’re being harmed.” (GenX is the brand name of one of the types of polyfluoroalkyl and perfluoroalkyl substances, the “forever chemicals” also known as PFAS.)

Muhammad urged the media to try harder to get to the root of the story, to go into impacted communities and talk to folks. “The evidence is already there,” she said. “If you sit there and hear the story and look around, people are not making this shit up. It’s real. People are living this stuff every single day.”

While the protests rage on, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to take more lives every day, and an active Atlantic hurricane season is in the forecast.

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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.”

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

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Deforestation, oil spills, and coronavirus: Crises converge in the Amazon

by ShaunaPaschke68 Posted on May 29, 2020

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Deforestation, oil spills, and coronavirus: Crises converge in the Amazon

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Who’s financing deforestation in Papua New Guinea? A new report follows the money.

by DarleneDon Posted on May 18, 2020

Papua New Guinea has one of the largest expanses of tropical rainforest on the planet. But in recent years the island nation just north of Australia has seen a surge in deforestation from logging and mining, which has threatened to release large stores of carbon into the atmosphere.

Deforestation has left behind patches of bare land across the country, and indigenous communities bear the brunt of the environmental consequences. Many are wary of companies that clear the land without providing something to the local community in return. So in 2017, when the Malaysian timber company Maxland secured a permit to clear rainforest on the country’s Manus Island, it promised to plant three to five million rubber trees and said it would benefit nearby communities through jobs, royalty payments, and improved infrastructure.

Critics say that Maxland is a wolf in sheep’s clothing. According to a new report released this month by the human rights and environmental watchdog Global Witness, Maxland has not planted a single rubber tree, despite being two years into its five-year contract. Instead, the report claims that the company has prioritized illegal logging and exporting the island’s valuable hardwood timber, raking in millions of dollars in the process.

What’s more, Global Witness discovered that the company is linked to some of the world’s most prominent financial institutions, including BlackRock — the planet’s largest asset manager — which announced in January that it would place sustainability at the center of its investment approach and divest from companies that present significant climate-related risks. The non-governmental organization’s investigation found that BlackRock is among the top 20 shareholders of the three banks financing Maxland’s “mother company,” the Joinland Group, a Malaysian conglomerate with a history of logging projects in Papua New Guinea.

Norway’s $1 trillion Government Pension Fund Global, which just last week decided to blacklist large coal-dependent companies from its portfolio, is also among the top 20 shareholders of those banks — despite the fact that it publicly divested from a slew of companies tied to deforestation last year. Other financial supporters include The Vanguard Group, T. Rowe Price Associates, and the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS). At the time of Global Witness’ analysis, these financial institutions had hundreds of millions of dollars tied to the banks that made Maxland’s Manus Island project possible.

“It’s broadly understood now that unregulated finance is contributing to climate change by propping up the fossil fuel industry, and the same is true of the financing of industries involving deforestation,” said Lela Stanley, the lead investigator for the Global Witness report. “Ordinary people whose savings are invested with these financiers may be unwittingly connected as well.”

Grist reached out to BlackRock for comment on how this fits into their sustainability goals but did not receive a response in time for publication. In an email to Grist, a spokesperson for the Norweigan pension fund said that, in 2019, it continued “dialogue with banks in Southeast Asia on their policies for lending to companies that contribute to deforestation.” The Vanguard Group told Global Witness it would incorporate the report into its “ongoing analysis with the companies in question.” T. Rowe Price did not comment on its specific investments, but it told Global Witness that environmental and social factors were key components in its investment approach. Meanwhile, CalPERS declined Grist’s request for comment.

Maxland’s Manus Island venture, the Pohowa Integrated Agro-Forestry Project, has frustrated the indigenous residents of Manus Island, according to Global Witness. The local villages are still in dire need of critical infrastructure and services such as major roads, as well as additional air and water transportation options. Some villages are nestled between the rainforest and the sea — and the only way to reach the main market in the island’s port and provincial capital on the opposite side of the island is by boat, which requires a fare and takes two hours each way.

Maxland promised residents that it would build a road to make their lives easier, while also culling the forest and replacing it with millions of rubber trees that would potentially open up rubber farming jobs. Many locals thought it was a good deal, but when Global Witness visited the site in October 2019, Maxland seemed to have failed to deliver on its promises. The investigators did observe a few thousand rubber seedlings on the far side of Manus Island, on a site that did not belong to Maxland, but they appeared neglected and were in poor condition. And by that time, the company had already exported nearly 19 thousand cubic meters of hardwood timber worth roughly $1.8 million to China and Japan.

Josephine Kenni, the head of Papua New Guinea’s National Rubber Board, which manages the rubber industry in the country, told Global Witness that 60,000 more rubber seedlings were expected to arrive from Malaysia by the end of May. However, Kenni also told Global Witness that Maxland was violating the law and the board’s project plan. As of April, Global Witness received local reports confirming that no rubber has yet been planted at the project site. However, a huge logging camp appeared to be operating in full swing, with water tanks emblazoned with Joinland’s company name and a petrol station to serve the company’s fleet of trucks.

Thomas Hah, a Malaysian entrepreneur and founder of the Joinland Group, responded to Global Witness by denying its findings and warning that the organization would receive “an official letter” from his lawyer. (Hah did not reply to Grist’s request for comment in time for publication.)

“For your information, all our projects in Papua New Guinea are granted by the National Forest Authority,” Hah said in an email to Global Witness. “We reserve our legal rights towards any baseless and false allegations.”

The approval of Maxland’s permits was initially rejected by the Provincial Forest Management Committee. However, Papua New Guinea’s National Forest Authority overruled that decision and issued a permit, as Hah noted, despite what Global Witness determined to be the company’s violation of the Forestry Act, which requires permit applicants to submit “evidence of past experience in any agriculture or other land use developments.” Maxland lacks prior experience with rubber plantations, according to the report. On top of that, an earlier Global Witness report documented Maxland’s parent company Joinland performing a similar logging operation on the island of New Hanover.

Since Maxland laid eyes on Manus Island, the company worked hard to court and gain the trust of major players and leaders on the island. The report found that Maxland bought houses for public officials in the area and paid police officers to perform private security functions (a relatively common practice for logging companies that set up shop in the country).

For now, Global Witness told Grist it hopes the report will spur the government of Papua New Guinea into action.

“We hope … that this report prompts the government to thoroughly investigate this instance,” Stanely said, “and to finally enforce its own laws that protect the land and forests that its rural communities depend on.”

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Who’s financing deforestation in Papua New Guinea? A new report follows the money.

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These air pollution standards kept people out of the hospital. Trump just rolled them back.

by AnneQuiles Posted on April 21, 2020

The Trump administration isn’t letting the COVID-19 pandemic get in the way of its deregulatory agenda. Last week, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it would not tighten air quality standards for fine particle pollution, despite warnings from scientists, including former agency staffers, that the current rules were not strict enough and could result in tens of thousands of premature deaths. The agency then finalized a decision on the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, determining that it is not “appropriate and necessary” to regulate mercury and other pollutants from power plants despite the fact that utilities have already spent millions of dollars to comply with the standards.

The announcements arrived the same week as a new study that links these two regulations to tangible public health improvements. When these rules, in addition to other air quality regulations, were strengthened under the Obama administration, Louisville Gas and Electric (LG&E), a utility in Kentucky, was forced to retire three coal plants and spent almost a billion dollars upgrading another plant to comply with the rules.

The study, published in the journal Nature Energy last week, analyzed public health data in Louisville to see how rates of asthma-related hospitalizations, ER visits, and symptom flare-ups changed in relation to improvements in air quality. Using zip code–level data from the city’s Department of Public Health and Wellness, the researchers found that after one of LG&E’s power plants in Louisville was retired in 2015, and pollution controls were installed on three other coal plants in the area, there were approximately three fewer asthma-related hospitalizations and ER visits per zip code per quarter over the following year across the county’s 35 zip codes. That adds up to nearly 400 avoided doctor visits.

The researchers also analyzed data from a program that tracked inhaler use among 207 residents with the help of digital inhalers, and found that after new pollution controls were added to one of the coal plants in 2016, average inhaler use went down by 17 percent. Among participants who had the highest inhaler usage before the controls were added, average use went down by 32 percent.

In Louisville, as in the rest of the country, the health impacts of air pollution aren’t distributed equally. The study shows a clear concentration of asthma-related hospitalizations and ER visits in the West End of Louisville, a predominantly African American neighborhood, even after the controls were installed. The coal plants are only one part of the picture there — the neighborhood is also home to a cluster of chemical and manufacturing plants dubbed “Rubbertown.”

The city implemented a toxic air reduction program in the early 2000s that was largely successful in reducing emissions from the Rubbertown plants, but the West End still suffers disproportionately from the impact of ongoing pollution. According to a health report published by the city in 2017, inpatient admissions for asthma in west Louisville are more than 10 times that of more affluent neighborhoods to the northeast. Higher cancer death rates and lower life expectancy are also clustered in the western half of the city.

The COVID-19 pandemic thrust the reality of these health disparities into the headlines recently, when a preliminary study showed that people who lived near major sources of pollution are more likely to die of the virus, and new data revealed that it is killing black Americans at higher rates than any other demographic. “Communities of color, they’ve always been the sacrifice zones,” said Mustafa Ali, the vice president of environmental justice, climate, and community revitalization for the National Wildlife Federation, in a recent Twitter video. “They’ve been the places where we’ve pushed things that nobody else wants.”

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the leading public health expert on President Trump’s coronavirus task force, acknowledged the structural inequality underlying the numbers during a White House press briefing earlier this month. “When all this is over — it will end, we will get over the coronavirus — but there will still be health disparities which we really do need to address in the African-American community,” he said. The research from Louisville shows that upholding — and strengthening — our air quality standards is one place to start.

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These air pollution standards kept people out of the hospital. Trump just rolled them back.

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‘A threat multiplier’: The hidden factors contributing to New York City’s coronavirus disparities

by Aracely82H Posted on April 21, 2020

Earlier this month, the New York City health department released a map showing confirmed COVID-19 cases by zip code. The highest case counts were concentrated in lower-income neighborhoods in Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. The same week, the city released preliminary data highlighting higher rates of death among black and Latino New Yorkers.

Environmental advocates say that hazardous environmental conditions have contributed substantially to the coronavirus outbreak’s severity in New York City’s low-income communities of color.

The city’s data shows that a higher volume of cases are concentrated in neighborhoods with more environmental health hazards, according to Rachel Spector, director of the environmental justice program at New York Lawyers for the Public Interest, a nonprofit civil rights law firm. Major arterial highways, waste transfer facilities, power plants, and other polluting infrastructure create daily air quality challenges for residents of these neighborhoods — challenges that can take a cumulative toll on residents’ health, leading them to become more vulnerable in the face of a respiratory illness.

Three zip codes in Queens, for instance, have seen roughly 30 documented COVID-19 cases per thousand residents, which is double the citywide average. These neighborhoods — among them Astoria Heights, East Elmhurst, and Jackson Heights — are criss crossed by traffic-clogged highways like Interstate 278 and the Grand Central Parkway. Nearby sources of fine particulate matter — or PM 2.5, a pollutant particularly harmful to respiratory health — include LaGuardia Airport and several of the city’s power plants.

“It’s a classic environmental justice issue,” Spector told Grist. “You have a concentration of polluting infrastructure located in black and brown communities that are often high-poverty neighborhoods — people living in poor and crowded housing conditions, who continue to work and take public transportation because many of them are low-wage essential workers. So they’re disproportionately and continuously exposed.”

The coronavirus is not the only thing they’re exposed to, Spector added. Many of these communities disproportionately experience underlying health conditions as a result of years of chronic exposure to air pollution. The South Bronx, a predominantly low-income neighborhood of color, sees an annual average of 11 to 13 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter, compared to the World Health Organization’s air quality guideline of 10. The same area sees the city’s highest rate of emergency care visits for asthma as well as respiratory hospitalizations. It has also been among the neighborhoods hardest hit by COVID-19.

“The coronavirus is exposing the inequities that have been around for so long in our society,” Spector said.

The link between coronavirus deaths and pollution exposure is coming into focus. Earlier this month, Harvard researchers released a nationwide study that links long-term exposure to air pollution to increases in the exposed area’s COVID-19 death rate. They found that every additional microgram of PM 2.5 per cubic meter is associated with a 15 percent increase in the death rate from COVID-19.

Nevertheless, the EPA announced last week that it will not tighten or change the nation’s ambient air quality standards. Democratic lawmakers subsequently sent a letter to EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler criticizing the decision. The senators cited evidence that air pollution in the form of fine particulate matter is detrimental to human health and could increase COVID-19 vulnerability, using New York City as an example.

Spector says that the areas hardest hit by the coronavirus — parts of Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx — also face acute challenges posed by particulate matter pollution. Although levels of PM 2.5 across the city aren’t as bad as those in areas near large-scale oil, gas, and chemical infrastructure, the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and mapping tool indicates that these New York City neighborhoods still have higher risks of cancer and respiratory illnesses from inhaling diesel emissions — conditions that could make them more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 complications.

Priya Mulgaonkar, a resiliency planner for the NYC Environmental Justice Alliance, co-wrote a 2016 report that analyzes the impact of truck traffic on the city’s air quality and the communities that host waste transfer facilities. One of the report’s key findings is that commercial waste trucks accounted for a significant amount of truck traffic, worsening the air quality of nearby communities, particularly in the South Bronx. These same communities ended up being among the hardest hit by COVID-19.

“The disparities for COVID-19 really mirror the disparities that New York City’s environmental justice communities have faced for decades,” Mulgaonkar told Grist. “Similarly to climate change, COVID-19 is really acting as a threat multiplier: exacerbating a lot of these inequalities that are due to environmental racism in New York City.”

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‘A threat multiplier’: The hidden factors contributing to New York City’s coronavirus disparities

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