EPA

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 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 1, 2024

Postcard from California: State sues ExxonMobil for plastics recycling fraud

By Bill Walker

Last year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta filed a monumental lawsuit against five of the world’s largest petrochemical companies for an alleged “decades-long campaign of deception” about fossil fuels’ harm to the climate and the climate crisis’ devastating impacts on the state. The complaint built on similar fraud and liability suits against Big Oil by US cities, counties and states, and “rolled them all into a super-case” backed by the legal resources of the world’s fifth-largest economy.

Now Bonta has filed another sweeping lawsuit against ExxonMobil, also named in last year’s suit, alleging that for more than 50 years it has deceived the public by fraudulently promoting recycling as the solution to the ever-growing global plastic waste crisis.

Plastics are made from polymers – synthetic chemical substances derived from oil and gas – and ExxonMobil is the world’s largest producer of polymers used to manufacture single-use plastics. The suit claims that ExxonMobil’s advertising, marketing and lobbying campaigns have peddled the false promise of plastics recycling, even while knowing recycling “will never be able to process more than a tiny fraction of the plastic waste it produces.”

Americans discarded more than 50 million tons of plastic waste in 2021, but despite the deceptive chasing-arrows symbol on most plastic items, only about 5% was recycled into new plastic goods. The vast majority of plastic waste is dumped in landfills, eventually fouling oceans and rivers, littering the landscape, endangering wildlife and building up in our bodies. Curbing the crisis will require slashing plastic production, but the plastics industry keeps making more. Worldwide production is projected to reach 590 million metric tons by 2050, an increase of 30%.

“For decades, ExxonMobil has been deceiving the public to convince us that plastic recycling could solve the plastic waste and pollution crisis when they clearly knew this wasn’t possible,” Bonta said in a news release. “ExxonMobil lied to further its record-breaking profits at the expense of our planet and possibly jeopardizing our health. Today’s lawsuit shows the fullest picture to date of ExxonMobil’s decades-long deception.”

September 12, 2024

EPA battles environmentalists in court over regulation of CAFOs and water pollution

By Keith Schneider

A coalition of environmental organizations faced off against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in federal appellate court on Thursday in the latest skirmish in a long-running battle over the agency’s regulatory approach to water contamination connected to industrial agricultural operations.

The groups, led by the nonprofit Food & Water Watch, told a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals that the EPA must strengthen its oversight of what are known as concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).

The agency is unlawfully allowing roughly half of the nation’s more than 20,000 big livestock and poultry feeding facilities around the country to operate without permits required under the 1972 Clean Water Act, the groups argued to the court. And, they said, the agency is violating the law by authorizing CAFOs to store and spread manure so haphazardly that the drinking water for millions of people is at risk as thousands of streams, lakes and other waterways are polluted with harmful bacteria, nitrates, phosphorus and other contaminants.

The agency has “failed” for more than a decade to adequately regulate these operations, Food & Water Watch lawyer Emily Miller told the court.

The hearing Thursday stems from a petition filed by Food & Water Watch and other groups in 2017 that called for the EPA to require CAFOs to obtain water quality permits and strengthen permit standards to protect waterways from the manure generated by the animal operations. The petition also urged the agency to reconsider an exemption that immunizes CAFOs from any water pollution caused by storms washing manure off of saturated fields.

The Trump administration ignored the petition. Last summer, the EPA formally denied the petition, but announced it would form a committee to recommend any changes in how the agency regulated CAFOs. Food & Water Watch, joined by four other national organizations and eight environmental groups from five states, then sued the EPA, demanding it reconsider its decision.

In the court hearing, EPA attorney Paul Cirino told the judges that the agency had initiated a detailed study of CAFO operations and pollution in January and established a study group last summer that is scheduled to issue recommendations on CAFO oversight next year. The new information, he said, would guide the agency’s actions about how to respond to the environmental groups’ concerns.

But Miller pushed back. “EPA has already spent seven years when it could have been taking its statutory mandate seriously,” she said. “Now they want some undefined amount of time thinking rather than acting.”

A court ruling on the matter could take months.

August 12, 2024

Movement to limit CAFO pollution seen strengthened by Michigan court ruling

By Keith Schneider

A recent state court decision could transform how animal agriculture is regulated in Michigan, and potentially influence how other state and federal regulators oversee the industry’s mammoth waste stream, according to environmental lawyers and activists.

The optimism from environmental advocates comes after the Michigan Supreme Court ruled on July 31 that the state’s Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) has full authority to require industrial animal agriculture to take much stronger actions to manage the torrent of manure waste polluting waterways. The closely watched case pit the administration of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer against the powerful agricultural industry, led by the Michigan Farm Bureau.

“The decision is extremely powerful language for EGLE to act,” said Carrie La Seur, the legal director of For Love of Water, an environmental law and policy group that intervened on behalf of the state. “It’s clear that EGLE gained a lot of authority through this ruling.”

Michigan is one of many US states contending with rampant ground and surface water pollution caused by agricultural production. A key source of the pollution are the nation’s more than 21,000 large dairy, cattle, hog, and poultry operations, known as Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations or CAFOs.

The nationwide problem extends across the ocean. On Aug 9, the Center for Food Safety environmental group gave legal notification to a Hawaii “megadairy” of their intention to file a lawsuit in federal court. The allege the dairy has been illegally “discharging animal waste, solid manure, liquid manure, milk waste, and chemical pollutants” into the state’s waterways and into the Pacific Ocean.

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August 1, 2024

Legal battle over fossil fuels and climate heats up

By Dana Drugmand

As climate change fuels increasingly damaging extreme weather events across the United States, litigation is growing against fossil fuel companies accused of being to blame for the devastation. But a series of recent legal moves by the industry and mixed judicial decisions underscore the challenges that local and state government plaintiffs face in the multi-billion-dollar battle.

Just last month, the industry scored a significant win when a Maryland circuit court judge tossed out a six-year-old climate liability case against more than two dozen of the world’s largest fossil fuel companies. The case, filed in 2018 by Baltimore officials, accused the companies of hiding the climate-harming impacts of their products, causing rising sea levels, severe storms, flooding, heatwaves and other “dire effects on the world.”

The fossil fuel companies successfully argued, however, that because the legal claims center on global greenhouse gas emissions, they stretch beyond the bounds of state laws. Greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels are regulated by the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), and federal law – particularly the Clean Air Act – preempts state law claims pertaining to those emissions, according to the industry.

“Regulation of interstate and international greenhouse gas emissions is beyond the role of state law,” Phil Goldberg, special counsel for an industry initiative working to combat climate litigation, said in a statement.

July 16, 2024

A battle in rural Midwest as farmers fight carbon capture pipeline

By Nina Elkadi

Kathy Stockdale and her husband have spent almost 50 years working the land in central Iowa. As a family farmer raising corn and soybeans, Stockdale knows how to deal with harsh weather, poor crop prices, and an array of other challenges that come with a making a living in agriculture.

But the operation she has spent a lifetime cultivating now faces a threat unlike any Stockdale has previously faced: Developers are planning to carve through her property with a pipeline carrying hazardous CO2 gas from ethanol plants, and there is little she can do to stop them.

The pipeline would run a mere 700 feet from Stockdale’s front doorstop and would create a barrier between the home she shares with her husband and the nearby home where her son lives. The farm’s soils and wetlands would be forever altered by the pipeline intrusion, and if the pipeline were to rupture, the damage could be catastrophic, Stockdale fears.

“It consumes your thoughts. You don’t sleep. You ask any of the landowners who have been fighting this, it’s been hard, it’s been stressful,” she said.

The Stockdales are among many farm families in Iowa and four other Midwestern states fighting to kill the pipeline, which was proposed three years ago by Summit Carbon Solutions (SCS) as the “world’s largest carbon capture and storage project.” SCS had initially planned to start operating the 2,500-mile pipeline network, dubbed the Midwest Carbon Express, this year. But opposition across the rural Midwest has delayed the project.

July 11, 2024

Congress should follow science and reject Bayer push to block lawsuits

By Nathan Donley

Millions of American users of glyphosate-based Roundup have likely assumed the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would never have approved the pesticide unless it was safe.

But the science-based truth has never been as cut and dried as the EPA and Bayer, which bought Roundup maker Monsanto in 2018, have made it sound. In a series of trials across the country, juries – and the public – have learned that despite the safety claims by Bayer and the EPA, hundreds of studies by independent scientists link glyphosate herbicides to serious health harms, including cancer.

Even though Bayer maintains that its glyphosate products are safe and not carcinogenic, the company has thus far agreed to pay out more than $10 billion in settlement costs to tens of thousands of glyphosate users suffering from non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL), and thousands of lawsuits remain.

In an effort to block further litigation, the chemical giant has turned its focus to getting federal and state legislation passed to block Roundup users from suing the company for damages. According to a recent Washington Post article, Bayer helped draft language for a legislative measure that would limit the types of lawsuits brought by the Roundup users. That measure is included in the US House of Representatives version of the 2024 Farm Bill, which is slated to be finalized later this year. The company has also been pushing lawmakers in several states to pass similar measures.

Key to Bayer’s messaging to legislators is that, because glyphosate is EPA-approved, research showing its harms should be rejected. But the process by which the EPA approved glyphosate decades ago has never been reassuring to independent scientists such as myself.

July 11, 2024

Monsanto Roundup trial win overturned by Oregon court

By Carey Gillam

An Oregon appeals court on Wednesday overturned a trial victory by Monsanto owner Bayer AG in a decision that adds to an ongoing debate over the company’s efforts to create a nationwide legal and legislative shield from lawsuits alleging Roundup weed killer causes cancer.

The court found that the trial judge in the case improperly barred key evidence about the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from being presented to the jury, which could have led the jury to find in favor of the plaintiff. And, notably, the court rejected arguments by the company that claims about the dangers of its products should be barred because those products carry the EPA’s stamp of approval.

Other courts have similarly rejected so-called “preemption” arguments by Bayer, which bought Monsanto in 2018. But after failing to get court backing, Bayer has been pushing state and federal lawmakers to give it and other pesticide makers the protection the courts have rejected. A proposed measure is being considered by lawmakers for inclusion in the US Farm Bill. Monsanto unsuccessfully argued to the appeals court that the case never should have even gone to a jury because the claims should have been preempted.

Bayer did not respond to a request for comment on the latest ruling.

Attorney Andrew Kirkendall, who represented the plaintiff in the case, said he welcomed the court’s decision and was eager to retry the case with the evidence about the EPA included.

The testimony that the trial judge refused to allow was to have come from Charles Benbrook, a former research professor who served at one time as executive director of the National Academy of Sciences board on agriculture. Benbrook has authored papers critical of the EPA’s handling of glyphosate herbicides, noting that the agency has given little weight to independent research regarding the actual products sold into the marketplace and used by millions of people around the world. Instead, the EPA has mostly relied on studies paid for by Monsanto and other companies selling glyphosate herbicides that found no cancer concerns.

“There is important new science to share with the jury that clarifies why and how Roundup can cause cancer,” Benbrook said this week after learning of the court ruling.

June 12, 2024

Biofuels manufacturing found to be a significant source of hazardous air pollution

By Dana Drugmand

Hazardous air pollutants emitted in the manufacturing of biofuels is nearly as bad as air pollution stemming from oil refineries, and for several types of dangerous pollutants such as formaldehyde the emissions from biofuel production are far greater, a new report finds.

The assessment, which was conducted by researchers with the environmental watchdog group Environmental Integrity Project (EIP), looked at emissions generated by 275 ethanol, biodiesel and renewable diesel facilities in the United States. The researchers found that the facilities frequently violated air pollution permits while at the same time benefiting from legal exemptions and federal policy supports such as fuel-blending mandates.

As the biofuels industry continues expanding with more than 30 new facilities under construction or proposed, the industry should be seen as a threat to public health, the report warns. Stronger regulatory oversight from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is needed, according to EIP.

“Despite its green image, the biofuels industry releases a surprising amount of hazardous air pollution that puts local communities at risk – and this problem is exacerbated by EPA’s lax regulation” Courtney Bernhardt, EIP director of research, said in a statement.

According to the EIP report released on Wednesday, biofuels manufacturing generated 12.9 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants in 2022. That compares to 14.5 million pounds of hazardous air pollutants emitted by oil refineries that year, according to data from EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory.

Emissions from biofuel factories were significantly higher than oil refineries for four types of hazardous pollutants – formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, and hexane, according to the EIP report. In 2022, biofuel facilities reported releases of nearly 7.7 million pounds of hexane, over 2.1 million pounds of acetaldehyde, 235,125 pounds of formaldehyde, and 357,564 pounds of acrolein. By comparison, oil refineries that year emitted 2.6 million pounds of hexane, 10,420 pounds of acetaldehyde, 67,774 pounds of formaldehyde, and zero pounds of acrolein.