regulation

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December 9, 2022

Postcard from California: Food waste law fights hunger and climate change

By Bill Walker

California produces far more food than any other US state, but we throw a lot of it away. Meanwhile, more than one in five Californians don’t always know where their next meal is coming from. Food insecurity is higher among Black and Latino households, and inflation is making the problem worse.

Now the state is aiming to relieve hunger by reducing food waste – and at the same time, help to address climate change.

A state law that was passed in 2016 but took effect this year, requires businesses and facilities that sell or serve food to donate edible food they would otherwise throw out to local food banks. Grocery stores, wholesalers and distributors had to start donating earlier this year. Restaurants, hotels, schools, hospitals, state office cafeterias and event venues must comply by January 2024.

According to the state agency CalRecycle, Californians send more than 11 billion pounds of food to landfills every year. Nationally, about 80 billion pounds of wasted food goes to the dump yearly, making food the single largest constituent of municipal landfills.

Food rescue
While not all discarded food is fit to eat, the newly implemented law – SB 1383 – requires that by 2025 California will recover 20% of wasted food to feed people in need. Washington State has the same goal, but by mandating fines for non-compliance, California’s is the strongest “food rescue” measure in the country.

Rescuing edible food is only one front in the war on food waste.

December 5, 2022

Amid energy policy debates, a battle over a natural gas pipeline in Appalachia

When developers first approached West Virginia farmer Maury Johnson in 2015 seeking to bury part of a 303-mile-long natural gas pipeline on his property, Johnson was not eager to comply. But with eminent domain laws giving Johnson few options to oppose the move, developers began construction a few hundred feet from his house in 2018.

It didn’t take long for Johnson to determine that the project was going to be a problem. Developers of the Mountain Valley Pipeline (MVP) project did not appear to be taking into consideration the nature of the area terrain, blasting the fragile landscape without regard for the underground caves, sinkholes, and natural springs that characterize the region.

Soon he realized his well water he relied on for his household needs had become strangely murky. He started washing his clothes at a laundromat 25 miles away and catching rainwater to use for bathing. He remains without “usable” water now, he said in an interview.

Johnson is among a contingent of critics who have come to view MVP as a dire threat to the health of Appalachian communities. They have a range of fears, including the potential contamination of air, water and soil with toxic chemicals used in the project. One particular fear is tied to the fact that some scientists see the pipeline as uniquely dangerous: Because it snakes through highly unstable soils in landslide-prone mountain terrain, the pipeline could break and potentially explode, the critics warn.

November 16, 2022

Guest column: EPA has lost its way

By Tim Whitehouse

It has been more than 20 years since I worked as a senior attorney at the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), using my legal training to help enforce the Clean Water Act, and advise agency managers on a range of hazardous waste issues.

When I joined the regulatory agency in 1992, I felt my work would matter; that I would play a small role in protecting public and environmental health. And during the ten years I worked there, I always felt I was making a positive difference and my managers were usually able to apply the law in ways that balanced the interests of various stakeholders.

Over the years, however, it has become more apparent that this is often no longer the case, and that powerful corporate interests have taken too much control over EPA’s decision-making processes. Nowhere is this more apparent than in EPA’s chemicals and pesticides programs.

The last 30 years have brought countless examples of EPA’s appalling incompetence and willful corruption as the agency routinely capitulates to the interests of the chemical industry and ignores or minimizes human health and environmental risks.

Newly unearthed documents regarding one such chemical – the weed killer paraquat – provide just the latest example of how inept the agency has become in protecting public health.

At the organization I work for now – Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility – we are currently representing EPA scientists who have bravely put their careers on the line to speak out publicly about the wrongdoing they’ve witnessed with the agency.

Through a series of disclosures to EPA’s Inspector General and Congress these scientists have provided extensive evidence of a system that operates in a black box where threats to human health from chemicals are routinely deleted from risks assessments, where agency managers routinely bow to industry wishes, where key managers move back and forth between jobs at the EPA and the chemical industry with scant scrutiny, and where managers ignore risk indicators and intimidate staff into signing off on assessments with insufficient data to reach a conclusion.

November 2, 2022

A dire warning: California report documents climate impacts

By Pam Strayer

California is getting hotter and drier, and extreme weather events are increasingly disrupting the state’s natural environment and the lives of the nearly 40 million people who live there, according to a study released by state officials this week.

The 664-page report, compiled from research by more than 100 state scientists and experts, concludes that the state is experiencing a rapid decline in key indicators of ecosystem health related to climate change. The report identifies dozens of significant threats that could weaken California’s status as the fifth largest economy in the world, currently valued at $3.4 trillion.

“Across the state, we live the experience of extreme weather, deepening drought. and deadly wildfires and heatwaves,” said California Environmental Protection Agency (CalEPA) Secretary Yana Garcia. “This report shows scientifically what we know from experience.”

Among the worrisome findings is the extent to which drought is taking a hold on the state. California has been getting drier since 1895 but by the end of the 2021 water year (which began in October 2020 and ended in September 2021), drought conditions were comparable to the most severe drought period on record, according to the report.

The period from 2000 to 2021 was the driest 22-year period over the past 1,000 years for California and much of the southwestern US, what scientists refer to an emerging “megadrought” era.

October 28, 2022

Postcard from California: Carbon capture won’t solve climate crisis

Four miles from my house, a Silicon Valley company wants to drill an 8,000-foot-deep well to store millions of tons of carbon dioxide (CO2), the greenhouse gas identified as the main cause of the climate crisis.

The well, planned at the site of a former Army ammunition plant in Riverbank, Calif., could be one of a network of CO2 storage wells California is hoping will help the state reach its ambitious climate goals.

The idea is to trap emissions from petrochemical refineries, power plants and other industrial and agricultural sources, super-chill them into liquids that are piped through earthquake-vulnerable terrain, and pumped deep underground to to keep them from heating up the atmosphere.

This Rube Goldberg-like scheme is called carbon capture and sequestration. The captured CO2 can also be used in other industrial processes. A related scheme, direct air capture, sounds even more like science fiction, making use of giant vacuums to suck existing CO2 out of the atmosphere.

At first carbon capture may sound like a smart idea: The company seeking a permit to drill in Riverbank is named Aemetis, which it says means “one prudent wisdom.” But the type of carbon capture Gov. Gavin Newsom’s climate policy counts on to reach “net-zero” CO2 emissions by 2045, is neither wise or prudent.

October 27, 2022

Amid calls for ban on weed killer linked to Parkinson’s, a battle over science

By Carey Gillam

When US regulators issued a 2019 assessment of the widely used farm chemical paraquat, they determined that even though multiple scientific studies linked the chemical to Parkinson’s disease, that work was outweighed by other studies that did not find such links. Overall, the weight of scientific evidence was “insufficient” to prove paraquat causes the brain disease, officials with the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared.

The EPA reiterated its assessment in a 2021 report. The agency said after extensive analysis of numerous factors, including concerns about Parkinson’s risk, it determined farmers could safely continue to apply the weed killer across millions of US acres to help in the production of soybeans, corn, cotton and an array of other crops.

The determination has been significant for Syngenta, the longtime maker of paraquat weed killers. The company is facing calls in the US for a paraquat ban, as well as more than 2,000 legal claims brought by farmers and others alleging they developed Parkinson’s disease because of their exposure to paraquat.

Syngenta cites the EPA assessment of the science on paraquat in defense of the pesticide, and says scientific research “does not support” a causal relationship between the chemical and the disease. On a Syngenta-run paraquat information website, the company highlights several studies it says also backs that position, including many conducted by company scientists or by outside scientists who received company funding for their work.

Last week the Guardian and The New Lede reported that internal corporate records show Syngenta had knowledge of science linking paraquat to Parkinson’s decades ago but sought both to refute the evidence with various secret tactics. The documents are available at the Paraquat Papers Media Library.

US farmworker, health and environmental advocacy groups say in contrast to the corporate science, research conducted by independent scientists provides abundant evidence of paraquat’s ability to cause Parkinson’s and other health dangers, and the EPA is improperly discounting that body of research.

More than 50 groups have called for the US to follow the lead of dozens of other countries in banning paraquat. The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research submitted a petition to the EPA with 107,000 signatories calling for a ban. The foundation cited a study that found people exposed to paraquat in their teens or as young adults had an increased Parkinson’s risk of 200 to 600 percent, depending on the overall exposure.

October 21, 2022

A human toll- paraquat users blame Syngenta for Parkinson’s disease

By Carey Gillam and Aliya Uteuova

When Illinois farmer Ron Niebruegge was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease at the age of 55, he was certain it must be a mistake. Niebruegge had always been healthy and active, someone who loved horseback riding and taking his wife dancing on weekend nights.

But a dizzy spell and a fall in 2007 led him to visit a neurologist, and then another. Both doctors agreed that the little things Niebruegge had started to notice – a left arm that didn’t seem to work quite right, some stiffness in his joints – were undeniable signs of the onset of Parkinson’s, a progressive debilitating brain disease for which there is no cure.

Now 70 years old, Niebruegge lives a very different life: The horses he loved have been given away and the horse trailer sold. Dancing is a thing of the past; Niebruegge struggles simply to walk across a room. He uses a cane but falls so frequently and unexpectedly that he fears leaving home.

One recent fall left him with a dislocated shoulder that required surgery. And his wife of 49 years has transitioned from dance partner to caregiver.

Niebruegge is far from alone. More than 8 million people globally suffer from what scientists see as the fastest growing neurological disorder in the world. And while scientists see multiple toxins as potential causes, one pesticide popular with farmers across the US has been prominently linked to the disease: a weed killer called paraquat that has grown in use over recent decades.

The longtime manufacturer of paraquat, Syngenta AG, along with Chevron USA, the successor to a former US paraquat distributor, are now being sued by thousands of Parkinson’s sufferers. The plaintiffs claim scientific studies show that exposure to paraquat can cause, or significantly increase the risk of, Parkinson’s disease, but rather than warn users, the companies prioritized paraquat sales over human health.

October 20, 2022

Secret “Paraquat Papers” reveal corporate tactics to protect weed killer linked to Parkinson’s disease

By Carey Gillam and Aliya Uteuova

For more than 50 years, Swiss chemical giant Syngenta has manufactured and marketed a widely used weed killing chemical called paraquat, and for much of that time the company has been dealing with external concerns that long-term exposure to the chemical may cause the dreaded, incurable brain ailment known as Parkinson’s disease.

Syngenta has repeatedly told customers and regulators that scientific research does not prove a connection between its weed killer and the disease, insisting that the chemical does not readily cross the blood-brain barrier, and does not affect brain cells in ways that cause Parkinson’s.

But a cache of internal corporate documents dating back to the 1950s obtained by The New Lede in a reporting collaboration with the Guardian suggests that the public narrative put forward by Syngenta and the corporate entities that preceded it has at times contradicted the company’s own research and knowledge.

And though the documents reviewed do not show that Syngenta’s scientists and executives accepted and believed that paraquat can cause Parkinson’s, they do show a corporate focus on strategies to protect product sales, refute external scientific research and influence regulators.

In one defensive tactic, the documents lay out how the company worked behind the scenes to try to keep a highly regarded scientist from sitting on an advisory panel for the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The agency is the chief US regulator for paraquat and other pesticides. Company officials wanted to make sure the efforts could not be traced back to Syngenta, the documents show.

And the documents show that insiders feared they could face legal liability for long-term, chronic effects of paraquat as long ago as 1975. One company scientist called the situation “a quite terrible problem,” for which “some plan could be made….”

October 3, 2022

Postcard from California: State falling short on promise of clean water

By Bill Walker
In 2012, California became the first US state to establish a legal right to clean water.

The law declares that “every human being has the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

The law is less a mandate than an ideal: It requires state agencies to consider the right to water in all decisions, but explicitly says it does not obligate the state to provide or pay for safe water.

Now, ten years since the law’s enactment, a state oversight agency’s investigation shows how far short of its aspiration California has fallen.

In July, a report from the California State Auditor found that nearly 1 million Californians lack access to safe drinking water.

September 15, 2022

Pesticides plague Californians of color, new study shows

by Shannon Kelleher

Carmen Obeso was pulling weeds at a strawberry field in Ventura County, California when she smelled something strange. Not far from where she stood, she spotted a machine spraying pesticides. With watering eyes and a sickened stomach, Obeso, a Latina farmworker, reported the incident to her crew leader. After insisting on treatment, she was permitted to visit an on-site health care clinic, where she says a doctor reassured her that she had not been exposed to anything harmful.

Obeso was interviewed by the county agricultural commissioner that same day and was asked if she felt droplets on her skin. She said she had not, since she could not feel the pesticide spray through her long sleeves, hat and face covering. Obeso says that because she said this, her case was never escalated further, and the company expected her back at work the following Monday.

But Obeso didn’t feel better by the next week, nor in the weeks that followed. Her eyes kept watering and began to feel grainy. She knew something was wrong, but the on-site physician still insisted she was fine. Finally, Obeso went to see a different doctor, who confirmed that her eyes had been damaged.