Carey Gillam

About Carey Gillam

Posts by Carey Gillam:

November 13, 2024

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.

November 12, 2024

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.”

November 8, 2024

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.

November 4, 2024

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.”

November 1, 2024

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.

October 22, 2024

EPA cancels pesticide shown to be harmful to unborn babies

By Carey Gillam

Citing a need to protect the unborn babies of pregnant women, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on Tuesday banned a pesticide used to kill weeds on farms, golf courses and athletic fields.

The action comes after years of mounting scientific evidence of the dangers posed by exposure to the chemical dimethyl tetrachloroterephthalate, also known as DCPA or Dacthal.

“With the final cancellation of DCPA, we’re taking a definitive step to protect pregnant women and their unborn babies,” Michal Freedhoff, assistant administrator for the EPA Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention, said in a press release. “The science showing the potential for irreversible harm to unborn babies’ developing brains, in addition to other lifelong consequences from exposure, demands decisive action to remove this dangerous chemical from the marketplace.”

The agency said “robust studies” demonstrated “thyroid toxicity,” and said that unborn babies whose pregnant mothers are exposed to DCPA could experience changes to fetal thyroid hormone levels. Such changes are “generally linked to low birth weight, impaired brain development, decreased IQ, and impaired motor skills later in life, some of which may be irreversible,” the EPA said.

DCPA was registered to control weeds in both agricultural and non-agricultural settings, but has largely been used to control weeds in fields growing crops such as broccoli, brussels sprouts, cabbage and onions.

October 22, 2024

Bayer’s new Roundup products appear more toxic than prior formulations, new report asserts

By Carey Gillam

New types of Roundup weed killing products marketed to US consumers contain chemicals that pose greater health risks to people than prior formulations suspected of causing cancer, according to an analysis by an environmental health advocacy group.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) reported Tuesday it found four chemicals have recently been added to Roundup products that have been scientifically shown to cause a variety of health problems, including reproductive defects, kidney and liver damage, cancer, and neurotoxicity.

The analysis comes after the agrochemical company Bayer pledged that it would remove glyphosate from its popular Roundup herbicide products sold for residential lawn and garden use starting in 2023.

Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018, made the change to try to curtail the filing of future litigation as it battles thousands of lawsuits filed against Monsanto by cancer patients who claim they developed non-Hodgkin lymphoma from using Monsanto’s Roundup and other glyphosate-based herbicides.

But FOE said it found the chemicals used in the new Roundup formulations are, on average, 45 times more toxic to humans experiencing chronic exposure than glyphosate-based Roundup. The chemicals were roughly four times more acutely toxic, the group said.

Notably, all four of the added chemicals pose greater risk of long-term and/or reproductive health problems than does glyphosate, based on the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) evaluation of safety studies, FOE said.

Of the four chemicals found in the products – diquat dibromide, fluazifop-P-butyl, triclopyr, and imazapic – the “worst offender”, according to FOE, is diquat dibromide. It is 200 times more toxic than glyphosate when exposure occurs over a long period of time, the group said, and is banned in the European Union. It is 27 times more toxic in acute exposures, the group said.

Kendra Klein, FOE deputy director for science and an author of the report, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be providing stronger oversight.

“People need to realize that the EPA has long put the profits of companies like Bayer ahead of their health when it comes to pesticides,” Klein said. “And now, they’ve allowed Bayer to quietly swap out the chemicals in Roundup, making it far more toxic to people’s health, without changing the packaging or warning consumers of the increased risks.”

October 18, 2024

Running dry – US Army base under fire for high water use in drought-stricken Arizona

By Carmela Guaglianone

The San Pedro River, nestled in southeastern Arizona’s San Pedro Valley just north of the US-Mexico border, is one of the last undammed rivers in the Southwest and is considered a biodiversity hotspot. Lined with cattails, willows and cottonwoods, the marshy waterway shelters hundreds of diverse bird species, including many considered endangered and protected by federal law.

The area is also home to the Fort Huachuca US Army base, which has been heralded as an example of the military’s efforts to become more environmentally conscientious due to its use of solar power and other “green” initiatives.

Ten years ago, Fort Huachuca forged a plan to achieve “net-zero” by 2025. But today, that goal has been largely abandoned, and an expanding group of critics says the installation’s well-meaning conservation efforts are falling short, and the Army instead is posing a dire threat to a protected conservation zone as a result of the base’s rampant pumping of precious groundwater.

The Army and the nearby municipalities whose residents rely on the base for employment, are the most prolific groundwater users, withdrawing an estimated 10,000 acre feet per year, according to a 2020 report from the U.S. geological society. That amount would fill nearly 41 million bathtubs.

October 13, 2024

Deadly refinery leak adds to US toxic accident toll

By Dana Drugmand

A Texas oil refinery with a history of environmental violations was the site of a deadly hydrogen sulfide leak last week, killing two people and injuring more than two dozen others and adding to a long list of US industrial accidents US regulators say they are trying to rein in.

The chemical release is also the latest accident at the Houston refinery. The facility has been cited for nearly 2,000 environmental violations over the past decade.

Located in Deer Park, Texas along the Houston Ship channel, the 1500-acre refinery complex is owned by the Mexican oil company PEMEX, which took over full ownership of the facility from Shell in 2021.

The incident at the refinery, which occurred on the afternoon of October 10, killed two PEMEX employees, and at least 35 others were treated on the scene or transported for further medical attention, according to officials.

Hydrogen sulfide is a colorless, extremely flammable, highly toxic gas that gives off a rotten egg odor. Exposure at lower concentrations can cause headaches, dizziness, nausea, irritation of the eyes, throat and respiratory tract and loss of smell, and acute exposure at high concentrations can result in unconsciousness and even death.

“Unfortunately, Texas has a poor track record of forcing petrochemical facilities to take safety and compliance seriously,” Luke Metzger, executive director of Environment Texas, said in a statement. “It makes me wonder if this awful incident could have been prevented.”

October 9, 2024

“Like steroids for hurricanes” – Scientists say Helene just a warning of what is to come

By Dana Drugmand

As the full extent of the devastation unleashed by Hurricane Helene in the southeastern United States becomes clear nearly two weeks after the monstrous storm made landfall, a new scientific analysis confirms what many have already surmised – climate change worsened the hurricane’s catastrophic impacts.

As Helene demonstrates, more destructive storms are likely in store as society continues to burn oil, gas and coal, driving a rapidly warming Earth, the analysis warns.

“Yet again, our study has shown that hurricanes will keep getting worse if humans keep burning fossil fuels and subsequently warming the planet,” said Friederike Otto, a climatologist at Imperial College London and lead of the World Weather Attribution initiative, which released the study on Wednesday.

In the aftermath of extreme weather events, World Weather Attribution scientists use observational data and climate models to conduct what are called rapid attribution analyses. Their analysis of Hurricane Helene revealed that climate change increased the intensity of the storm’s damaging rainfall and winds. It also found that elevated sea surface temperatures, which fueled Helene’s development, were made up to 500 times more likely by anthropogenic warming.

“It is clear that the rainfall, wind speeds and conditions leading to Hurricane Helene have all increased due to climate change,” the study states, noting that such conditions will intensify as the planet heats up.

Helene made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane along the Florida panhandle late on September 26, generating heavy rains, winds, and record-breaking storm surge along the coast. The storm then tracked inland, bringing torrential rains and flooding to Georgia, South Carolina, Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia. With more than 230 reported fatalities, Helene is the deadliest hurricane to hit the mainland US since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

“Unfortunately, Helene is another warning that the effects of climate change are already here,” said Julie Arrighi, Director of Programmes at the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

This warning and the new analysis come as Florida braces for a hit from another major hurricane. Hurricane Milton, projected to slam into Florida’s Gulf Coast late on Wednesday, briefly upgraded to a Category 5 hurricane on Monday as it moved across overheated waters in the Gulf of Mexico. Sea surface temperatures in the area where Milton is brewing are at record-breaking highs, and scientists say that climate change made those temperatures up to 400 to 800 times more likely over the past two weeks.

Climate scientists agree that planetary warming, which is primarily driven by fossil fuel combustion, results in more destructive hurricanes. Oceans absorb the vast majority of the heat added to the Earth’s climate, and hotter marine temperatures provide more energy to fuel tropical storm systems. With the atmosphere also warming, it can retain more moisture that subsequently releases in the form of heavier rainfall.

“The heat that human activities are adding to the atmosphere and oceans is like steroids for hurricanes,” Climate Central chief meteorologist Bernadette Woods Placky explained.