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Can anything be done to Trump-proof the environment?
By Douglas Main
As advocacy groups brace for a new administration under President-elect Donald Trump —fearing a slew of deregulation and policy changes that would undermine a range of environmental health measures —some are pondering ways to try to “Trump-proof” the planet.
Trump racked up the worst environmental record of any president during his first term, according to several advocacy organizations, and many worry his second time around will be even worse.
They expect across-the-board cuts to federal budgets and staff, including the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior, and other agencies that play key roles in protecting human and environmental health. And they forecast efforts to reverse environmentally friendly policies protested by powerful corporate players.
“I suspect Trump will be less restrained than last time… more aggressive and damaging,” said Brett Hartl, with the Center for Biological Diversity. “We’ll wait for the storm to hit and fight back,” he added.
These concerns come after the Biden administration has implemented of many hard-fought measures such as new standards to address widespread contamination of US drinking water with per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), and environmental justice initiatives to better protect marginalized communities from industrial pollution.
The current administration has, just this month alone, completed a series of steps lauded by conservationists and environmentalists that include finalizing rules to limit oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and finishing a proposal to restrict oil exploration and grazing in 65 million acres of sage grouse habitat.
US EPA enables polluting plastics plants by failing to update wastewater limits, report says
By Shannon Kelleher
Federal regulators have enabled US plastics plants across the country to dump dangerous chemicals into waterways by failing to update wastewater limits for over 30 years, according to a new analysis by a watchdog group.
While the Clean Water Act requires the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to review wastewater discharge limits every five years to keep up with advances in water treatment technologies, the agency has not updated its guidelines for the plastics sector since 1993.
“Most folks don’t know that the plastics industry is not required to use modern wastewater treatment controls to limit the amount of pollution they pour into our waterways,” Jen Duggan, the executive director of EIP, said in a press call Thursday. “It’s long past time these plants clean up.”
In its analysis, the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) focused on 70 plants that make raw plastics called “nurdles,” tiny pellets later used to make products such as water bottles, food containers and toy
Over 80% of the plants violated pollution limits in their permits at least once between 2021 and 2023, according to the report, yet the EPA only issued financial penalties to 14% of violators, the report found. The Chemours Washington Works plant in West Virginia received 115 violations over this period – more than any other plant studied – but was not issued any penalties by regulators, the EIP analysis found.
Additionally, 40% of the plastics plants are operating on outdated water pollution control permits, the study found.
The EPA said it is reviewing the report and would “respond appropriately.”
What’s hampering federal environmental justice efforts in the hydrogen hub build-out?
By Kristina Marusic and Cami Ferrell
This is part 2 of a 2-part series originally published at Environmental Health News. Read part 1: Hydrogen hubs test new federal environmental justice rules
One Wednesday evening last May, Yukyan Lam stared into the camera on her computer, delivering carefully prepared remarks during a virtual listening session convened by the US Department of Energy (DOE).
The goal of the event was for the federal agency to hear concerns and questions from communities that could be impacted by the Mid-Atlantic hydrogen hub, one part of a massive federal program working to establish a national hydrogen energy network.
Lam, the director of research at The New School’s Tishman Environment & Design Center, had just three minutes to present research on a wide range of potential health impacts associated with carbon capture and storage and hydrogen energy deployment, including increased rates of respiratory issues, premature mortality, cardiovascular events, and negative birth outcomes. Later, after reading the DOE’s public summary of the event, she felt frustrated.
“I didn’t feel like they accurately summarized the research I shared, or that the DOE really heard or valued what was said in the listening session,” Lam said. “They’re moving these projects forward but they haven’t meaningfully engaged with communities yet.”
Lam, who had been providing research and technical assistance to the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance, a nonprofit following the development of the hub, wasn’t alone in her frustration.
The Mid-Atlantic hub is one of seven proposed, federally funded networks of infrastructure — an initiative borne from the Biden administration’s 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law — that aim to use both renewable and fossil fuel energy to create hydrogen for energy use by heavy industries that are difficult to electrify like steelmaking, construction and petrochemical production. The hubs support the administration’s objective of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2050 and achieving a 100% clean electrical grid by 2035.
Hydrogen hubs test new federal environmental justice rules
By Kristina Marusic and Cami Ferrell
(This is part 1 of a 2-part series originally published at Environmental Health News.)
On a rainy day in September, Veronica Coptis and her two children stood on the shore of the Monongahela River in a park near their home, watching a pair of barges laden with mountainous heaps of coal disappear around the riverbend.
“I’m worried they’re not taking into account how much industrial traffic this river already sees, and how much the hydrogen hub is going to add to it,” Coptis said.
Coptis lives with her husband and their children in Carmichaels, Pennsylvania, a former coal town near the West Virginia border with a population of around 434. The local water authority uses the Monongahela as source water. Contaminants associated with industrial activity and linked to cancer, including bromodichloromethane, chloroform and dibromochloromethane, have been detected in the community’s drinking water.
Coptis grew up among coal miners, but became an activist focused on coal and fracking after witnessing environmental harms the fossil fuel industry caused.
Now, she sees a new fight on the horizon: The Appalachian Regional Hydrogen Hub, a vast network of infrastructure that will use primarily natural gas to create hydrogen for energy. Part of the new Appalachian hydrogen hub is expected to be built in La Belle, which is about a 30 minute drive north along the Monongahela River from her home.
“I have a lot of concerns about how large that facility might be and what emissions could be like, and whether it’ll cause increased traffic on the river and the roads,” said Coptis, who works as a senior advisor at the climate advocacy nonprofit Taproot Earth. “I’m also worried that because this will be blue hydrogen it will increase demand for fracking, and I already live surrounded by fracking wells.”
In Amish country, an unlikely partnership with beef giant JBS roils community
By Keith Schneider
EDON, OH – For 60 years, this one stoplight Ohio town has been known as a place where time appears to stand still. With more than 400 Amish residents settled in and around the rural community that straddles the Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan state lines, it has been common to see large families traveling by horse-drawn black buggies to and from farms where they milk dairy cows and grow corn.
Adhering to a strict religious doctrine that resists new technology, Amish farmers here spent decades largely eschewing industrial farming practices that have become common around the United States.
But that bucolic tableau of plain people earnestly cultivating the rich soil is eroding here, splintered by an industrial farm alliance between one of the area’s leading Amish farming families and JBS Foods, the world’s largest beef producer. Over the last two years, the partnership has established a mammoth vertically integrated concentrated cattle feeding operation that is confining more than 100,000 male calves and steers in large concrete, steel, and vinyl-covered feeding barns, and generating thousands of tons of solid manure each day.
The operations have prompted complaints of odor and contamination, and state investigators have found uncontained manure running off waste piles and out of barns, draining into streams and wetlands. Water samples collected by state inspectors contained high concentrations of nitrogen ammonia, a contaminant of manure. Following the inspections, regulators cited multiple farms for manure mismanagement, and issued modest penalties to some farms for failing to secure proper operating permits.
Nine Amish farms were cited for violations of manure management regulations in August alone. The state also ordered the largest mounds of manure, some towering two and three stories tall, to be removed. The cited farms are close to each other in Williams County, Ohio and are all owned by one extended Amish family.
Area residents say the manure contaminants, which are often spread on farm fields as fertilizer, are leaching into waterways, polluting streams, lakes, and the St. Joseph River. Water samples collected by two area environmental groups showed persistently high concentrations of nitrates, phosphorus, and dangerous E-coli bacteria in streams and lakes in the region. The animal waste is considered a source of the pollutants that cause an annual toxic algae bloom in Lake Erie.
Five years ago, Ohio launched a $172 million multi-year project aimed at bringing algal blooms under control by encouraging farmers to to limit contaminants coming from their farms. But with the new large feeding operations on multiple farms, the effort seems doomed, critics say.
Over 20 agrochemicals, including common herbicides, linked to prostate cancer
By Douglas Main
New research adds to evidence that several types of agrochemicals — including the widely used herbicides 2,4-D and glyphosate — may raise the risk of prostate cancer.
A study published November 4 in the journal Cancer examined the relationship between the quantity of pesticides used in US counties over certain spans of time and then the rates of prostate cancer 14 years later. Nearly two dozen of these chemicals were consistently associated with an elevated risk of the disease, which is the most common cancer in men, and is considered the second-most deadly.
The results suggest more research is urgently needed to further understand the role these chemicals may play in the development of this and other cancers, the authors wrote.
“Many pesticides have not been sufficiently studied for their potential carcinogenic effects, particularly in relation to prostate cancer,” said study co-author Simon Soerensen, a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University.
The findings add to concerns about the health impacts of chronic exposure to pesticides, and are merely the latest in years of research to link chemicals used in farming with different cancers and other diseases.
The World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classifies 2,4-D as “possibly” carcinogenic to humans, for instance. And six other chemicals looked at in the study are currently classified as “potential human carcinogens” by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA classifies the herbicide diuron in particular, as a known/likely carcinogen.
Napa Valley landfill dumped toxic waste into waterways for decades, workers allege in federal lawsuit
By Shannon Kelleher
A California landfill has been illegally dumping toxic waste into the Napa River for years, polluting waters that feed a valley known around the world for the quality of its vineyards, according to a federal lawsuit filed by landfill employees.
Fifteen workers from Clover Flat Landfill and Upper Valley Disposal Service (UVDS) in Napa County, California, allege that operators of the landfill intentionally diverted what is called “leachate” – untreated liquid wastewater often containing heavy metals, nitrates, bacteria and pathogens – into the Napa River and other area waterways for decades. The actions were done to “avoid the costs of properly trucking out the toxic leachate” to facilities designated for safe disposal, the lawsuit alleges.
“Defendants’ deliberate pollution of the Napa River watershed with toxic wastewater is particularly disturbing because Napa Valley contains some of the most valuable agricultural land in the country, and water from the Napa River is used by local wineries to irrigate Napa’s famous vineyards, and is a significant community water resource,” the complaint said.
The workers say the practice not only endangered the public but created unsafe working conditions, exposing the employees to “toxic chemicals, pollution, and poisons” without providing employees proper protective gear.
The action, which was filed Oct. 28 in US District Court in San Francisco, seeks more than $500 million in damages and names as defendants both current owner Waste Connections, a nationwide waste management company, as well as the facilities’ former owners.
Postcard from California: Climate change is fueling faster-spreading, more extreme wildfires
By Bill Walker
This summer, the Park Fire burned more than 425,000 acres near Chico, Calif. – the fourth-largest wildfire in the state’s history. It started when an arsonist pushed a flaming car into a grassy, brush-strewn gully, sparking California’s largest-ever deliberately set wildfire. But what set the Park Fire apart from the 7,194 wildfires that have burned more than 1 million acres in California this year was how fast it grew.
After first igniting on July 24, it spread an estimated 5,000 acres an hour – about one football field a second. In 24 hours it burned 150,000 acres, and in 72 hours incinerated an area larger than San Francisco. Fire experts said it was among the fastest-growing wildfires in history.
As it burned, Zeke Lunder, director of Deer Creek Resources, a wildfire management consulting firm in Chico, told The Washington Post that in 25 years of mapping large fires throughout the Western US, he couldn’t recall another blaze that spread so far so fast. He said the Park Fire “was moving in ways we aren’t used to seeing.”
It’s settled science that the climate crisis is increasing the number and frequency of wildfires. A 2016 study estimated that from 1984 to 2015, human-caused climate change contributed to the burning of almost twice the acreage in 11 Western states than might have burned in its absence.
Now, new research confirms that Western wildfires are also spreading faster.
In a study published Oct. 24 in the journal Science, a team of researchers analyzed images from NASA satellites to track the day-by-day spread of more than 60,000 fires in the continental US from 2001 to 2020.
They found that in that period, the average peak daily growth rate of wildfires in the West more than doubled. In California, wildfires spread almost four times as fast in 2020 as in 2001. They cited other research predicting that if global warming continues at its current pace, the frequency of the fastest-spreading fires in the West could double in 30 years.
“The modern era of megafires is often defined based on wildfire size, but it should be defined based on how fast fires grow,” the researchers wrote. “Speed fundamentally dictates the deadly and destructive impact of megafires… [F]ire speed matters more for infrastructure risk and evacuation planning.”
Proposed factory farm ban divides California county
By Shannon Kelleher
When voters head to the polls on Tuesday to decide the next US president, residents of Sonoma County, California, will be asked to decide another contentious issue – they will be voting on a measure that would make their county the first in the nation to ban factory farms.
Measure J would prohibit farm operations that meet the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s definition of a concentrated animal feeding operation (CAFO), requiring them to either close or downsize within three years. The measure would also prevent new CAFOs from coming into the county.
Proponents say that CAFOs, where large numbers of animals are crowded together generating massive amounts of manure, are “major polluters” that pose a threat to wildlife and “vital watersheds” and present a “serious risk to public health” by providing a breeding ground for disease and creating other hazards. They cite one Sonoma County poultry operation with more than 500,000 birds as well as “documented criminal animal cruelty” at some CAFOs.
The measure appears to have only a slim chance of passing, facing staunch opposition from powerful farming organizations as well as business groups and even sustainability groups. But backers of the measure say their effort contributes to a groundswell of support for action against CAFOs.
In July, a state court in Michigan ruled that state regulators could take stronger actions to manage manure waste from CAFOs there, and in June 2023, Oregon passed a bill to tighten CAFO permitting to help mitigate water pollution. Calls for moratoriums on new CAFOs have been heard in recent years by legislatures in Iowa, Missouri, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.
“There’s been a lot of attempts, but there’s nothing yet that has been an actual vote among the people on prohibiting factory farms,” said Cassie King, an organizer with the activist group Direct Action Everywhere and the Yes on J campaign. “I think there’s a latent desire across the country to stop factory farming. This measure would provide not only a blueprint but also the inspiration that’s needed to kick more action into gear.”
Measure J is modeled on the Farm System Reform Act, said King, which was introduced in 2023 by US Sen. Cory Booker but has yet to move forward. The bill proposes phasing out CAFOs on a national level by 2041.
Measure J supporters state that only 21 of the more than 700 animal farms in the county would be affected if it passes.
But opponents, including the Sonoma County Farm Bureau, maintain the measure will have a number of negative ripple effects, including jeopardizing the existence of even small farming operations and reducing the availability of local meat, dairy and eggs.
US Congress members call on EPA to ban paraquat, citing risk of Parkinson’s and other diseases
By Carey Gillam
More than 50 US lawmakers are calling on the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to join dozens of other nations in banning a widely used weed killer linked to Parkinson’s disease and other health dangers.
In an Oct 31 letter to the agency, seven US senators said that paraquat, a weed killer commonly applied on US farms, was a “highly toxic pesticide whose continued use cannot be justified given its harms to farmworkers and rural communities.” The call for a ban from the senators came after 47 members of the US House of Representatives sent a similar letter to the EPA calling for a ban earlier in October.
The lawmakers cite scientific links between paraquat use and development of Parkinson’s and other “life threatening diseases” as well as “grave impacts on the environment”. The lawmakers note that approximately 70 countries have banned paraquat.
“Numerous studies” have found that paraquat causes “serious health risks for workers who use the substance as well as the surrounding communities,” the lawmakers wrote. “These health risks include a higher risk of Parkinson’s disease, with some studies finding a 64% increase in the likelihood of developing Parkinson’s, non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, thyroid cancer, and other thyroid issues.”
Sen. Cory Booker, organizer of the Senate letter, said the risks of paraquat exposure are “well documented” and that it is “irresponsible” for the EPA to continue to allow its use. “I hope the EPA will follow the science and ban paraquat,” Booker said.
The congressional letters add to mounting pressure on the EPA to remove paraquat from the market.