Tag Archives: justice

How vulnerable is your community to coronavirus? These new maps reveal a familiar pattern.

by FredricAIN Posted on April 2, 2020

The predominantly black and low-income communities living near the back-to-back petrochemical refineries of Louisiana’s “cancer alley” have long suffered compromised immune systems and high rates of disease. Now, the state’s fast-growing COVID-19 outbreak is poised to hit them especially hard.

Yet behind the veil of the pandemic, last week the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a temporary policy — with no end date specified — to suspend its enforcement of key environmental regulations, allowing industries like Louisiana’s petrochemical giants to make their own determinations as to whether or not they are complying with requirements to monitor pollution levels. Ironically, as the EPA relaxes its rules for polluters, the link between long-term exposure to environmental hazards and the most severe outcomes of coronavirus infections is starting to come into focus.

Jvion, a healthcare data firm, has collaborated with Microsoft to launch a new COVID-19 community vulnerability map to identify the populations most vulnerable to severe complications following a coronavirus outbreak. The interactive map aggregates socioeconomic and environmental factors, such as lack of access to transportation, exposure to toxins, unemployment, and mortality rate. According to the map, these factors make certain “cancer alley” communities particularly vulnerable.

“Our most heavily weighted and frequent determining risk factor was air quality, though that doesn’t mean that it’s the most predictive factor,” said John Showalter, chief product officer for Jvion. “There’s definitely a biologic rationale that environmental health hazards that lead to pulmonary and cardiovascular conditions would then lead people with those conditions to do poorly during a COVID-19 outbreak.”

JVION

Jvion used machine learning to analyze block-level data from the U.S. Census to help identify “environmental health hazard” as one key socioeconomic factor that makes a population more vulnerable to severe COVID-19 outcomes, based on the health effects of polluted air, contaminated water, and extreme heat. They also factored in how chronic exposure to outdoor air pollutants, such as fine particulate matter, can increase the risk of cancer, respiratory illnesses, and cardiovascular disease — preexisting conditions that physicians say can make the novel coronavirus more severe and fatal.

A side-by-side comparison of Jvion’s vulnerability map with the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screen (EJScreen) suggests a stark correlation between a community’s proximity to industrial facilities and its projected risk of severe COVID-19 outcomes.

Jvion labels Harris County, Texas, as having a high vulnerability for COVID-19 — and a key socioeconomic influencer for that determination is its “above average environmental health hazard.” A new analysis from the University of Texas Health Science Center echoes Jvion’s map: The report shows where risk factors for severe COVID-19 outcomes (mostly preexisting health conditions) are distributed across Harris County to determine which neighborhoods are most at-risk of hospitalization and intensive care for COVID-19. Cross-referencing the EJScreen, it becomes clear that the Harris County map highlights communities in close proximity to industrial facilities and those at a higher risk of cancer from breathing airborne toxins.

“There’s a familiar pattern in these maps, and it’s a pattern that you see in mobility rates and mortality rates, race and ethnicity demographics, as well as the distribution of industry in our country,” said Corey Williams, the research and policy director for Air Alliance Houston. “All those things overlap to a great extent, so there is a correlation, but it’s difficult to prove causation.”

Philadelphia has seen a rapid uptick in coronavirus cases, and its pockets of vulnerability have similar characteristics to Houston’s. Jvion’s map shows that the predominantly black and low-income neighborhoods of Point Breeze and Grays Ferry are considered to have an “extremely high” vulnerability risk for COVID-19 due to environmental hazards, elevated unemployment rates, and low incomes. The EJScreen shows that the areas are close to major highways with heavy traffic, wastewater plants, and industrial facilities.

It’s clear that the novel coronavirus is already compounding underlying systemic inequities in communities with more people of color, poverty, migrants, and those without access to resources like medical care. These maps can help ensure that government response and medical capacity in these at-risk populations can meet the needs of those likely to be severely ill from the virus, including those living near heavy industry and fossil fuel infrastructure.

In a letter submitted to the EPA last week, environmental groups demanded to know why polluting facilities are now excused from complying with environmental regulations, even as their operations continue relatively unfettered. “What is the basis for presuming that the pandemic means companies can no longer comply with environmental rules while they continue to operate and process all other forms of corporate ‘paperwork’?” the memo asked.

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How vulnerable is your community to coronavirus? These new maps reveal a familiar pattern.

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Amazon climate strikers demand stronger coronavirus protections for warehouse workers

by clintonsuffolk Posted on April 2, 2020

The country is grinding to a halt, but Amazon warehouses are still churning out packages at a breakneck pace. Amazon employees at 19 different facilities have been hit by the virus. Workers in fulfillment centers and warehouses have been asked to follow new safety protocols, but masks and other protective equipment are in short supply, and the cramped nature of many of those facilities don’t allow for effective social distancing.

Despite all this, the tech giant owned by the richest man on Earth is only offering paid sick leave to employees who have been put into quarantine or have tested positive for coronavirus. Amazon is in the process of hiring 100,000 new employees to keep up with a surge in demand from Americans ordering stuff from the confines of their homes. To raise awareness about unfair working conditions for the company’s frontline workers, Amazon warehouse employees are organizing strikes and protests. “How can we be essential workers when our lives are not essential?” an Amazon employee at a facility in Chicago said in a video on Monday.

This isn’t the first time Amazon has responded to a global crisis with measures its employees deem inadequate. A group of tech employees within the company came together last year to put pressure on Amazon leadership to adopt a more aggressive plan to reduce the company’s carbon footprint and end web service contracts with oil and gas companies. When Jeff Bezos unveiled a plan to reach the goals of the Paris climate agreement 10 years early, employees with the group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, publicly criticized the CEO for not being aggressive enough, risking their jobs in the process.

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Now, some of those same employees are speaking out in support of the workers on strike. In a letter on Medium, the Amazon climate group drew parallels between the two global disasters. “This pandemic — like the climate crisis — stresses our society, its systems, and institutions. Both crises threaten everybody, but not equally,” the letter said.

“Climate Justice demands that we no longer view Earth and our fellow human beings as expendable resources to be exploited for the gain of a few,” said Maren Costa, a principal user experience designer at Amazon, in a separate statement.

The show of solidarity is a prime example of how the climate movement can uplift wider efforts to achieve justice for blue-collar Americans. Green groups have overlooked working-class people, especially minorities, in the past. That’s due in no small part to the fact that the environmentalism movement has historically had some racist strains. But lately, traditional green groups and justice organizations have been coming together more often to advocate for a more inclusive climate agenda. The momentum for a Green New Deal, an idea popularized by New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is evidence of that progress (though even that initiative caused some friction between climate and labor advocates).

As of Wednesday afternoon, more than 5,000 Amazon corporate and tech workers had signed an open letter to Bezos calling for better protections for workers. They’re demanding paid sick leave regardless of COVID-19 diagnosis, childcare pay and subsidies for affected workers, hazard pay, and other measures. “While Amazon has made some limited coronavirus accommodations, it needs a comprehensive plan to ensure the safety of all of its workers and the larger public,” the letter said. Solidarity; you love to see it.

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Coronavirus has city dwellers heading for the hills. Here’s why they should stay put.

by CharliSimmons1 Posted on March 27, 2020

In the beginning of March, as the first cases of COVID-19 were reported in New York City, Anne Hilton Purvis, a realtor with Coldwell Banker Village Green — a real estate company that serves Upstate New York — started getting calls from clients. They were looking for “a lot of short-term rentals — three months, six months, some people wanted to buy something cash,” she said. At first, Purvis, who is a family friend of this reporter, advised prospective buyers to reach out to Airbnb hosts who might be offering up longer stints instead of daily or weekly listings.

But as the state’s outbreak worsened, and the governor imposed restrictions culminating in a shutdown of the state’s nonessential businesses, she realized it was time to stop showing houses to urbanites trying to flee the big city. “In the short term, if we can follow the rules and stay where we are, that might make this thing not so prevalent,” she said.

Cities across the United States, and New York City especially, are dealing with explosive virus transmission rates and dwindling hospital resources. It makes sense that city dwellers are itching to flee urban areas: Density, as the New York Times recently reported, is the Big Apple’s Achilles’ heel in its fight to contain COVID-19. But there are a number of reasons why they should suppress that urge.

The suburbs and rural areas aren’t necessarily safer from coronavirus than cities are. While cities do have higher populations and higher levels of social contact, living in the suburbs or countryside still requires some contact with other people —which provides opportunities for the virus to spread. Epidemiological sparks in cities can migrate to the suburbs and beyond as people move around. So it’s not really a question of if coronavirus will start circulating in earnest in Upstate New York and other rural and suburban areas, but when. Once it does, rural Americans are at a disadvantage — they’re further from hospitals and have fewer medical resources available to them. Not to mention more than one in five older Americans, who are especially susceptible to coronavirus, live in rural areas. If you leave a city for the countryside, you’re putting them at risk.

A pandemic-fueled mass exodus out of cities doesn’t just potentially put a massive strain on suburban and rural resources, it also adds fuel to another looming crisis: climate change. Density is actually good for us when there isn’t a pandemic afoot (aka the vast majority of the time). It allows for robust mass transit networks, efficient housing, bike lanes, and foot traffic. All of that, in turn, is good for mitigating climate change.

It may sound counterintuitive, since cities have historically suffered from dangerous pollution problems, but city dwellers actually have smaller carbon footprints than folks living in rural places. One report found that average emissions in NYC were less than a third of the U.S. average, mostly because New York’s famously cramped apartments use less energy than the large houses enjoyed by other Americans and because New Yorkers use public transportation instead of driving everywhere. A different study found that the average Manhattan household produces 32 metric tons of carbon each year, while households in a nearby suburb produce 72.5 metric tons on average.

If that isn’t evidence enough to convince urbanites to resist the temptation to trade their tiny dwellings for a pastoral lifestyle, they should consider this: Singapore and Hong Kong, denser cities than New York, have been generally successful in containing the coronavirus thanks to early testing, dogged contact tracing, and mass compliance from its citizens. Much of America is under mandatory social distancing measures right now not because cities are inherently bad, but because the federal government handled the outbreak poorly and Americans are loath to give up their personal freedoms.

So if you’re a city dweller who cares about reducing the spread of COVID-19 and slowing down climate change, stay where you are. Purvis knows that’s not an easy pill to swallow. “We’re a country that doesn’t like to follow rules,” she said. “But the only way to make the virus go away and not hit so many people is if we do follow all of the rules.”

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Coronavirus has city dwellers heading for the hills. Here’s why they should stay put.

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One more way the world wasn’t prepared for coronavirus: Air pollution

by DegaLockyer Posted on March 19, 2020

The coronavirus pandemic is changing everything — including the quality of the air we breathe.

In three coronavirus hotspots, satellite imagery revealed a dramatic decline in air pollution in recent weeks as China, Italy, and Iran were brought to a standstill. One Stanford scientist estimated that China’s coronavirus lockdown could have saved 77,000 lives by curbing emissions from factories and vehicles — nearly 10 times the number of deaths worldwide from the virus so far.

But the blue skies are unlikely to last. Just as the temporary dip in global carbon dioxide emissions could be reversed when companies eventually increase production to make up for lost time, air pollution could rebound with a vengeance when factories and traffic spring back to life. On Tuesday, the Chinese government said it plans to relax environmental standards so factories can speed up production.

Air pollution and the virus have a close relationship. Breathing unclean air is linked to high blood pressure, diabetes, and respiratory disease, conditions that doctors are starting to associate with higher death rates for COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus. Physicians say that people with these chronic conditions may be less able to fight off infections and more likely to die of the disease.

“The air may be clearing in Italy, but the damage has already been done to human health and people’s ability to fight off infection,” said Sascha Marschang, acting secretary general of the European Public Health Alliance, in a statement.

Evidence suggests that bad air quality may have increased the death toll of a previous coronavirus outbreak, the SARS pandemic of 2003. One study of SARS patients found that people living in regions with a moderate amount of air pollution were 84 percent more likely to die than those in regions with cleaner air.

And now, health officials are warning that people who live in polluted places anywhere may be at greater risk again. “I can’t help but think of the many communities where residents breathe polluted air that can lead to chronic respiratory problems, cancer, and disease, which could make them more vulnerable to the worst impacts of COVID-19,” wrote Gina McCarthy, the president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a post this week about how the organization is responding to the coronavirus.

Clearing the air could help vulnerable people fight off the threat of deadly disease — during this pandemic as well as any future ones — and save millions of lives in the meantime. Governments already have a pretty good idea of how to clean up air pollution, and it doesn’t involve a global pandemic.

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One more way the world wasn’t prepared for coronavirus: Air pollution

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Report: Utilities are less likely to replace lead pipes in low-income communities of color

by BerryOberle Posted on March 12, 2020

Aging water infrastructure needs constant attention and investment to ensure safety for everyone — especially if the U.S. wants to avoid another Flint water crisis. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, water utility companies should invest more than $300 billion over the next two decades to renew and improve their networks of service lines and underground pipes, many of which contain lead. In part this is because the health effects of lead exposure are so severe: Even low levels can cause irreversible neurological damage.

Eliminating lead pipes across the country is the ultimate goal, but the standard practice of many utilities makes this exceptionally difficult. Utilities generally consider pipes on private property as belonging to customers — so they often won’t use government or utility money to replace them. Instead, they’ll opt to replace only the portion of the system on public property, unless homeowners volunteer to pay for service line replacements on their lots. If property owners fail to opt in, the lead service line is only partially replaced — and this ultimately provides limited or no long-term decrease in exposure risks. In fact, it can actually increase the possibility of lead seeping into drinking water in the short term.

As a result of this approach, low-income communities of color can see much spottier replacement rates in their neighborhoods — in large part because property owners in these areas are unwilling or simply unable to front the significant costs required to achieve a full replacement of service lines.

“If a program primarily benefits those with money, you’re going to have an environmental justice problem,” said Tom Neltner, chemicals policy director with the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). “We need to make sure all residents, without regard to how much money they make or the color of their skin, benefit from these rules designed to protect people and protect public health.”

A new report from the EDF and American University’s Center for Environmental Policy bears this out. Researchers analyzed more than 3,400 lead service line replacements in Washington, D.C., that occurred between 2009 and 2018. During this 10-year period, the local water utility only covered the cost of replacing lead service lines on public property, requiring customers to pay for the remainder of the service occurring on private property.

After cross-examining the city’s neighborhood demographics and the participation rate of those who chose to front service costs, researchers discovered vast disparities between predominantly low-income African American households and wealthier white households. The city’s Ward 3, for instance, where the median household income is $107,499 and a large majority of residents don’t identify as black or African American, had the highest rate of customer-initiated lead service line replacements. Meanwhile, Wards 7 and 8, both predominantly low-income black neighborhoods, had the lowest rates of service replacements.

Clayton Aldern / Grist

“Washington D.C. was very aggressive in a good way in making it easy for residents to participate,” said Neltner. “But the numbers showed us results of the unintended consequence — where people with money participated in the program and those without, didn’t.”

The analysis also highlights that the Trump administration’s recent proposed revisions to the Lead and Copper Rule would amplify the financial burden on low-income communities of color by continuing the existing replacement paradigm, where utilities are only responsible for paying for lead pipe replacements on public property.

“We work closely with utilities across the country, and what they need is to find a way to move out of this paradigm that residents are fully responsible for paying to replace on private property,” Neltner said. “I want them to look and say: ‘We need to do this not only for public health benefit, but also because of environmental justice concerns.’”

As of today, Madison, Wisconsin, and Lansing, Michigan, are the only major cities ahead of the curve, having successfully removed all of their aging lead service lines. It wasn’t easy for Madison, but after court hearings and public battles, officials eventually launched an ambitious program in 2000 to replace every single lead service pipe across the city. Lansing, Michigan, followed suit and removed its last lead water service line in 2016. After what happened in Flint, Michigan, many other cities are also beginning to move more quickly towards the same goal of eliminating lead-based pipes.

Last year, Washington, D.C., passed a new law that bans partial lead service line replacements during infrastructure projects and emergency repairs — meaning property owners no longer have to shoulder the costs in these cases. The policy also amends the previous regulations by providing financial support to homeowners who didn’t get a chance to replace their pipes under the old policy.

“It’s going to take a while, but we need every opportunity we can get to fully replace these lines,” said Neltner. “Once you realize that lead pipes are a significant source of health risk to children and adults, you then realize you need to get them out of the ground.”

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Report: Utilities are less likely to replace lead pipes in low-income communities of color

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Researchers blast ‘forever chemicals’ into oblivion with plasma

by JustinaMcNally Posted on February 24, 2020

Christopher Sales is an environmental microbiologist, and until recently, his world was about harnessing the power of microorganisms to break down contaminants in the environment. But a resilient intruder that does not succumb to the same old tricks has shaken up the remediation community and led Sales to look outside of his field for a solution. It’s a chemical that’s been found in water, soil, and food all over the planet: PFAS.

PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) are a group of chemical compounds used in carpet, waterproof clothing, nonstick pans, and many other common products, that have gone unregulated and been dumped into the environment for decades. Exposure studies have linked some forms of PFAS to thyroid disease and some cancers, but there’s very little health research on most of them. They’ve been dubbed “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down over time, and now scientists like Sales are racing to figure out how to clean PFAS up.

“PFAS is becoming a big issue,” Sales told Grist. “It’s being found in a lot of different places, and unfortunately we haven’t found a microorganism that can degrade it.”

Sales is a professor at Drexel University, and he has experimented a little bit with biological treatments for PFAS with little success. But while chatting with one of his colleagues at Drexel’s Nyheim Plasma Institute, he learned that plasma was being used to kill bacteria and other contaminants in water, and wondered if it might be effective on PFAS. Plasma is the fourth state of matter after solids, liquids, and gases, and it is created by applying heat or electricity to gas. In September 2017, when the Department of Defense announced new funding for technologies to degrade PFAS, Sales asked the Nyheim researchers if they would be interested in collaborating. They secured a grant and got to work.

In January, Sales published a study detailing the results of that collaboration. After testing a new plasma-based treatment system on water samples contaminated with 12 different types of PFAS, they found that it degraded significant amounts of all of the compounds, and for some types of PFAS, the system degraded more than 90 percent of the contamination.

Degrading PFAS doesn’t necessarily remove their threat, because it can result in new, smaller molecules of PFAS. The real target, and the more challenging one, is to defluorinate them, or break apart their carbon-fluorine bond. In some of the tests at Drexel, the plasma treatment system successfully defluorinated about a quarter of the compounds.

“In terms of treatment efficiency, plasma technology ranks really high,” said Jinxia Liu, an environmental engineering professor at McGill University who was not involved in the study. Liu said that plasma treatments for PFAS are promising because they do not require any added chemicals and do not seem to produce harmful byproducts.

There are two ways to remove PFAS from water. Right now, the most widely used approach is to filter them out. But because PFAS don’t break down, filters just transfer the contamination from one medium to another. If the filter ends up in a landfill, PFAS can still seep out into groundwater. The other approach is to try to destroy the compounds altogether. Currently, the only scalable method to destroy PFAS is incineration, but that requires large amounts of heat and is very energy intensive.

Sales’ plasma treatment still requires energy, but much less. In plasma, what were once gas molecules have been broken apart, creating what scientists call a highly reactive environment. The freely floating electrons, ions, and unstable neutral atoms in this environment can be deployed as a sort of arsenal of weapons against other molecules. Depending on what the original gas was, some of these weapons will attack pollutants like PFAS. In their study, the Drexel researchers used regular air, which is cheap and abundant, as the gas.

The study results are encouraging, but they do not necessarily translate to a breakthrough in real-world decontamination efforts. The concentrations of PFAS in the water in Sales’ experiments were much higher than levels that are found in the environment. Sales said that at lower levels, the compounds become more difficult for the plasma to target. But this system was just a proof of concept on one liter of water. If Sales can secure another grant, he plans to scale the experiment up.

Another lab at Clarkson University has developed a plasma treatment system with comparable results using real groundwater samples. Last fall, the Clarkson researchers were also able to test it in the real world with a field demonstration on the groundwater at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Groundwater near military bases is notoriously contaminated with PFAS, since the chemicals have long been a key ingredient in the firefighting foam used to put out blazes during training exercises.

The EPA recently announced long-awaited plans to develop a drinking water limit for two specific PFAS compounds, PFOA and PFOS. Currently, the agency has only set a recommended “health advisory level” for drinking water of 70 parts per trillion. Although they haven’t published the results yet, Clarkson researcher Thomas Holsen told Grist that his team’s system lowered PFAS concentrations below that level at Wright-Patterson in most of the experiments. Their system can treat one gallon per minute, which doesn’t exactly compare to the filtration systems at wastewater treatment plants that process hundreds of gallons per minute. Then again, those systems don’t actually destroy PFAS.

Liu said the best application of plasma might be at the end of a treatment train, after other technologies have concentrated the contamination. “There are a lot of different treatment needs. There’s drinking water treatment, groundwater, processing water” — the kind used in industrial plants. “There’s no one solution that fits all. People need all these different technologies, and it depends on the situation,” she said.

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Researchers blast ‘forever chemicals’ into oblivion with plasma

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This tiny but mighty California bureau is taking on polluters

by sseerss4tr Posted on February 21, 2020

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This tiny but mighty California bureau is taking on polluters

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It’s official: Federal judge shuts down the largest oil refinery on the East Coast

by LRIDarin36909 Posted on February 14, 2020

A federal judge finally confirmed the Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan of Philadelphia Energy Solutions (PES) on Thursday. The plan includes the sale of PES’s 1,300-acre refinery complex to a real estate company — putting an end to the largest oil refining operation on the East Coast.

A month earlier, dozens of Philadelphia-based climate activists made a trek to New York City to protest outside the building where a closed-door auction to sell the refinery site was being held. The activists hoped to prevent the site from being sold to a bidder with plans to keep the site running as a refinery. The following week, their wish seemed to have come true: Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a Chicago-based real estate company with a track record of turning defunct fossil fuel infrastructure into logistics centers, was the selected winner. For a moment, the future of the site looked bright. All that was left was approval from the bankruptcy court.

But the other bidders didn’t give up so easily. Industrial Realty Group (IRG), which had made a higher bid than Hilco, teamed up with Phil Rinaldi, the former chief executive of PES, to try to get the results of the auction voided so that IRG could continue running the site as a refinery. With the support of union leaders representing former refinery workers, Rinaldi urged the White House to get involved, arguing that more than a thousand jobs and national security interests were at stake. Peter Navarro, the assistant to President Trump for trade and manufacturing policy, openly backed IRG’s plan, telling the Philadelphia Inquirer, “We’d love to see that remain as a refinery.”

U.S. Bankruptcy Judge Kevin Gross had a tough decision to make. Last week, the Delaware judge delayed the confirmation hearing to give stakeholders more time to object to the plan. But on Thursday, he officially signed off on the plan. “I’m very much satisfied that the sale to Hilco is the highest bid and sale,” Judge Gross said. “Clearly is in the best interest of the community as well, given the risks that were attended to the prior operations with the refinery, and a refinery frankly that had numerous and repeated problems over the years.”

As a result of yesterday’s hearing, Hilco is now set to buy the plot of land for $252 million, $12 million more than what was initially agreed upon. The final bankruptcy plan also includes $5 million in severance for laid-off refinery workers, as part of a larger settlement for all the refinery’s unsecured creditors. In addition, the plan will also pay PES executives as much as $20 million in bonuses on top of the millions of dollars in bonuses paid to them right after the refinery exploded last June.

Since the explosion, Philly Thrive — the grassroots environmental justice group that organized the protest of the auction — ramped up its efforts to organize and rally against the refinery for threatening public health. The group held several protests in front of the refinery, hosted call banks, wrote testimonies, and occupied government-owned buildings. Meanwhile, a report released last week found that the PES refinery, which processed 335,000 barrels of crude oil each day, released the highest levels of cancer-causing benzene pollution of any refinery in the country.

“Some people can’t afford to get up and move,” South Philadelphia resident Carol White, who lives about a mile away from the refinery and is also a member of Philly Thrive, told Grist after the June explosion. “There are older people living here inhaling fumes, newborn babies, kids under five, and ultimately, it’s impacted people of color.”

Philly Thrive’s months-long fight to end the refinery — along with its years-long fight to breathe clean air — have paid off. The PES refinery will now be permanently shut down and most likely be redeveloped as a mixed-use property. But the group said it’s not an end to the fight, and it looks forward to working with Hilco in determining the future of the land.

“Thrive members are already seeing and planning for the next fight ahead of us, including holding Hilco to a process of involving the public around redevelopment, taking on measures to get whatever justice we can around the benzene emissions, and also linking up with efforts around a Green New Deal,” Philly Thrive organizer Alexa Ross told Grist. “This is not the end of the fight.”

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It’s official: Federal judge shuts down the largest oil refinery on the East Coast

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Calls for law firm to #DropExxon go national with law student boycott

by shanelidriess7 Posted on February 10, 2020

What started as a single protest against the law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP by law students from Harvard University last month is now growing into a movement.

During a recruitment event in New Haven, Connecticut on Thursday night for Yale Law students, 40 protestors unveiled a “#DROPEXXON” banner and began to chant at the other students and Paul, Weiss partners mingling with glasses of wine and cocktails at the bar.

“You heard it from students at Harvard, and now you’ll hear it from us,” they shouted in a call-and-response speech. “We will not work for you as long as you work for ExxonMobil. Our future is on fire and you are fanning the flames.”

Paul, Weiss recently helped ExxonMobil win a case brought by the New York district attorney alleging that the company misled investors about the costs of climate change to its business. The firm is also representing Exxon in a similar case in Massachusetts, as well as other climate cases brought by the cities of San Francisco and Oakland, California and Baltimore, Maryland. In those cases, the cities are seeking damages from multiple fossil fuel companies to pay for impacts of climate change they are already experiencing and to fund adaptation measures.

The action at the Yale reception went on for just over 10 minutes before the students pointedly filed out and left the reception. “I think it went well,” Tim Hirschel-Burns, one of the organizers, told Grist. “It is discouraging that the partners from Paul, Weiss continue to not take the climate crisis seriously, but law students certainly are, and I think they’re going to continue seeing that students are not going to accept their indifference.”

Now Harvard and Yale law students are working together to build momentum and start a larger movement. After Thursday’s protest, the coalition launched a #DropExxon pledge that asks law students around the country to refuse to interview with or work for Paul, Weiss until it drops ExxonMobil as its client. Organizers of the pledge said that students at other schools are planning additional protests.

In a press release, Yale students involved with the protest pointed out that Paul, Weiss claims that it does not “sacrifice culture and values in favor of the bottom line,” and that it has a commitment “to serve the broader public interest.” They argued that the firm cannot live up to these values while helping Exxon, citing investigative reporting that found that the company has known the dangers of climate change since the 1970s but chose to fund climate denial to protect its business.

Paul, Weiss did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

An age-old ethical dilemma

The movement raises questions about the role of lawyers in society and the right to equal representation before the law. In Harvard’s newspaper, the Crimson, Harvard student Andrew Liang wrote, “In providing such representation, Paul, Weiss is not defending climate change. It is defending the law. The legal profession does not exist to pass moral judgment on a client, but to uphold the process.”

Organizers at Yale told Grist that they are not disputing that people and companies deserve representation but said that doesn’t mean the firm does not have a choice in whom it represents. “Paul, Weiss has no shortage of paying clients to choose from, but is giving priority to a company that is sabotaging humanity’s chance to address climate change,” Yale Law School student Ify Chikezie said in a press release.

Charles Nesson, a professor at Harvard Law School, said that these are questions students need to think through as they move ahead in the profession. “A lot of students face this problem of going off into law firms and making money to pay off their student debts and finding that they’re doing work that may not be completely savory as far as the climate is concerned or justice is concerned,” said Nesson. “The amount of acceptance within the profession of legal tactics that produce unjust results is considerable.”

Nesson recently had students discuss the protest against Paul, Weiss in a class called Ideal Discourse. He said that most of his class approved of the protest, but brought up concerns about whether the action would be effective, whether it would hurt the protesters’ careers, and why they were targeting Paul, Weiss over other firms. In an online class discussion board for the class, one student wrote, “This discussion about how we square our principles with our professional roles is so important and for a lot of us, hard.”

Divestment campaigns ramp up

Outside of the law schools, others in the Harvard and Yale communities made strides last week in their campaigns to get the two universities to divest their endowments from fossil fuel companies.

On Tuesday, Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences passed a motion, 179 to 20, to call on the Harvard Management Company, the school’s endowment gatekeepers, to divest from companies that “explore for or develop further reserves of fossil fuels.” An online petition started by a group called Harvard Faculty for Divestment now had almost 1,000 signatures as of Friday. While the faculty vote has no direct influence on the endowment, University President Lawrence Bacow said he would bring the motion to the school’s governing body for consideration.

The faculty vote follows another successful campaign by Harvard alumni to nominate five candidates who will support divestment for election to the Board of Overseers, which has the power to approve who is on the board that manages the school’s endowment.

At Yale, the undergraduate student government voted unanimously on January 25 to become a part of the Yale Endowment Justice Coalition and support the group’s mission to get the school to cancel its holdings in Puerto Rican debt and divest from fossil fuel companies.

Outside of the Ivy League, Georgetown University’s president announced on Thursday that the school’s board of directors has decided to divest its holdings in fossil fuel companies.

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Calls for law firm to #DropExxon go national with law student boycott

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Sold: Bankrupt Philadelphia oil refinery goes to a real estate company

by ethan966336461 Posted on January 23, 2020

Last Friday, 35 Philadelphians rose early to board a charter bus bound for New York City at 6:30 a.m. That day, a closed-door auction held in Manhattan would determine the new owner of the 1,300-acre plot that housed Philadelphia Energy Solutions, the largest oil refinery on the East Coast, which filed for bankruptcy after an explosion and fire tore through the complex last summer. Though they wouldn’t be allowed to attend the auction, the Philadelphians on the bus — members of a grassroots environmental justice group called Philly Thrive — were determined to have a say in the fate of the land. Their hope? To prevent it from ever operating as a refinery again.

Alongside New York-based climate activists, Philly Thrive set up shop in the lobby of the building where the auction was taking place on the 50th floor. One by one, the activists walked up to the security guards and asked if they could go upstairs. They said things like “My life is at stake here” and “I have as much of a say as the men in suits upstairs.” Later, the protestors sang, told stories about how the refinery affected their health, and recited poems as office workers stepping out for lunch navigated their way through.

“These polluting industries think they can come into our communities and just set up shop,” Cameron Powell, a Philly Thrive organizer, told Grist. “They’re destroying the environment, and they think that’s okay. We as residents of the city of Philadelphia and New York are simply here to let them know that it’s not.”

Carol Hemingway asking security if she could enter the building where the closed-door auction is being held. Rachel Ramirez / Grist

Though details are still scarce, it looks like Philly Thrive’s members may have gotten their way. According to court documents filed on Wednesday, Philadelphia Energy Solutions has agreed to sell its refinery complex for $240 million to Hilco Redevelopment Partners, a Chicago-based real estate company that has a history of acquiring defunct fossil fuel infrastructure for redevelopment, often turning the sites into logistics centers. Although the company’s plans for the site have not yet been disclosed, a Philadelphia city official who attended the auction told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday that Hilco does not intend to reopen the refinery.

When rumors emerged on Tuesday that Hilco was the buyer, Alexa Ross, one of the founders of Philly Thrive, said the group was “cautiously pleased” that it wasn’t a fossil fuel company but still had many questions about Hilco’s plans. “We want Hilco to know for a fact that leasing out land to operate the refinery or other polluting industries is not going to fly with us, and we’re going to keep up the same level of opposition to any kind of plans to lease with polluting companies,” Ross told Grist on Tuesday.

Philly Thrive Organizer Alexa Ross speaking at St. Bartholomew’s Church before the rally. Rachel Ramirez / Grist

Recent projects by Hilco offer insight into what that fight might look like. In 2017, the company purchased a retired coal-fired power plant in Little Village, a neighborhood on the west side of Chicago, with plans to turn it into a million-square-foot warehouse and distribution center.

The coal plant closed after it could not afford upgrades to meet federal air quality standards and under mounting pressure from grassroots groups concerned about air pollution. That’s not so different from the situation in Philadelphia. But now, those same groups are worried that Hilco’s Chicago warehouse will bring more diesel trucks to the area, replacing one major polluter with many smaller sources of pollution. Hilco CEO Roberto Perez told Block Club Chicago that the company would build electric vehicle charging stations at the development and encourage prospective tenants to use electric trucks but said Hilco ultimately doesn’t have control over tenant operations.

The Chicago project also illuminates how long it might be before any development on the site in Philadelphia is up and running. Hilco initially expected the development to be ready to lease in early 2020, but now, two years after the sale was approved, they are still in the demolition phase.

Climate activists gather in the streets of New York City to protest the closed-door auction to sell PES land. Rachel Ramirez / Grist

The Philadelphia refinery is laden with more than 150 years of contamination, and a complex web of players are involved in the remediation process.

Sunoco, an earlier owner of the refinery, is responsible for cleaning up hazardous waste accumulated on the site through 2012, and that clean-up process is ongoing. Through its purchase agreement, PES became responsible for any new contamination to the site after 2012, and will now pass that responsibility on to Hilco under the terms of the sale. But the remediation process is further complicated by a potential land use change under Hilco’s ownership. Under Pennsylvania’s Land Recycling and Environmental Remediation Standards Act, Sunoco was responsible for restoring the site to a standard appropriate for an oil refinery. If Hilco decides to redevelop the land for a different use, which seems likely, the company may need to remediate the site to a higher standard.

Despite the complicated nature of the cleanup, there are signs the company intends to turn the site around quickly. Brian Abernathy, the city of Philadelphia’s managing director, who attended the auction on Friday, told the Philadelphia Inquirer that Hilco’s timeline is aggressive, and that the company has already been in talks with Sunoco, the EPA, and the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection. He said the company planned to redevelop the property in phases.

In a press release issued Wednesday, Philly Thrive stated that its members will continue raising their voices as the sale is finalized. The group provided an initial list of requests for Hilco, including barring any new refining operations on the site, involving the public in plans for redevelopment, and setting aside union jobs for folks in surrounding neighborhoods like Grays Ferry.

“Good jobs for young people in Grays Ferry would change lives,” former refinery worker and Philly Thrive member Rodney Ray said in the statement. “Let’s get some apprenticeship programs started. I know there will be less violence and less crime if people have the option to make a decent paycheck. That’s what I want for my community: the right to breathe clean air and good jobs.”

Climate activists gather in the streets of New York City to protest the closed-door auction to sell PES land. Rachel Ramirez / Grist

As Philly Thrive members wrestle with what the sale will mean for their community and health, former employees of the refinery have also been left hanging. Prior to the explosion and closure, the United Steelworkers Union had more than 600 members employed at the refinery.

“The nail’s probably in the coffin for the refinery,” Ryan O’Callaghan, the president of the USW Local 10-1, told the Inquirer. “We’re waiting to see what Hilco’s plans are.”

While the prospect of a deal with USW seems unlikely, the development is sure to bring new jobs to the area. In 2012, the parent company of Hilco Redevelopment Partners bought the Sparrows Point steel mill near Baltimore, Maryland, and began transforming it into “Tradepoint Atlantic,” a logistics center. The 3,100-acre site now houses operations for companies like Amazon and FedEx, as well as a 100,000-square-foot indoor farm, and a total of 10,000 new jobs are expected to be created on the site by 2025.

The Philadelphia sale is still contingent on approval by PES’s creditors and U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Kevin Gross. A confirmation hearing is scheduled for February 6th. Philly Thrive — in collaboration with Youth Climate Strike leaders — is mobilizing for another rally at the refinery on Saturday to emphasize their demands ahead of the bankruptcy hearing.

Philly Thrive “has been a part of creating this wave against fossil fuels,” said Ross. “We’re going to see it all the way to the end until healthy land use is occurring over there and residents are really at the center of final decisions and negotiations of how that business is going to operate.”

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Sold: Bankrupt Philadelphia oil refinery goes to a real estate company

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