The Environmental Protection Agency

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EPA approves California rules phasing out diesel trucks

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — The Biden administration cleared the way Friday for California’s plan to phase out a wide range of diesel-powered trucks, part of the state’s efforts to drastically cut planet-warming emissions and improve air quality in heavy-traffic areas like ports along the coast.

https://apnews.com/article/california-trucks-epa-greenhouse-gas-emissions-02e279026cf9d9b5c088f9ebdfad3fd9?

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Surprise! Florida leads the nation in lead pipes carrying water supply

EPA survey points out hidden danger that state hasn’t bothered to track

https://floridaphoenix.com/2023/04/13/surprise-florida-leads-the-nation-in-lead-pipes-carrying-water-supply/?

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EPA unveiling 'strongest ever' auto emissions standards in EV push

The Biden administration on Wednesday is unveiling the "strongest ever" tailpipe emissions standards that are expected to push automakers to accelerate the proportion of electric vehicles in their U.S. sales to 67% by 2032.

https://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/2023/04/12/epa-unveiling-strongest-ever-auto-emissions-standards/70093593007/?

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Residents near Indiana warehouse fire may have asbestos on their property, EPA says

Federal officials are telling people near the site of an Indiana warehouse fire that broke out last week not to touch any debris they find on their property since it may contain asbestos, a known carcinogen.

https://www.npr.org/2023/04/16/1170316970/indiana-warehouse-fire-debris-asbestos-richmond?

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EPA set to take on a major source of carbon pollution

A rule expected as soon as next week would limit greenhouse gases from power plants, less than a year after the Supreme Court hobbled the agency’s powers.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/04/21/epa-to-float-power-plant-climate-crack-down-00093337?

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EPA: New pollution limits proposed for US coal, gas power plants reflect ‘urgency’ of climate crisis

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Biden administration proposed new limits Thursday on greenhouse gas emissions from coal- and gas-fired power plants, its most ambitious effort yet to roll back planet-warming pollution from the nation’s second-largest contributor to climate change.

https://apnews.com/article/epa-climate-change-coal-gas-power-plants-809d38eff9b33d051a98541a4045f69d

Carbon dioxide emissions reached a record high in 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — Communities around the world emitted more carbon dioxide in 2022 than in any other year on records dating to 1900, a result of air travel rebounding from the pandemic and more cities turning to coal as a low-cost source of power.

https://apnews.com/article/climate-emissions-global-warming-carbon-dioxide-coal-494ef490f16abe381ea2a4107f779670

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Manchin vows to oppose all Biden’s EPA nominees over climate plan

Sen. Joe Manchin, chair of the Senate Energy Committee, said Wednesday he would oppose every Biden administration nominee for the Environmental Protection Agency in anticipation of a “radical” regulation the agency is expected to propose Thursday regulating emissions from fossil fuel power plants that are driving climate change.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/05/10/manchin-biden-epa-nominees-00096197?

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EPA proposes emissions caps on existing power plants in major climate effort

If finalized, the proposed rules would mark the first time the federal government has restricted carbon dioxide emissions from power plants.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/joe-biden/epa-proposes-emissions-caps-existing-power-plants-major-climate-effort-rcna83909?

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Will Biden’s hard-hat environmentalism bridge the divide on clean energy future?

WASHINGTON (AP) — When John Podesta left his job as an adviser to President Barack Obama nearly a decade ago, he was confident that hundreds of miles of new power transmission lines were coming to the Southwest, expanding the reach of clean energy throughout the region.

https://apnews.com/article/biden-climate-change-clean-energy-permitting-rules-fe49da78c69f080d22c48424d93699c2

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Environmentalists in Virginia and West Virginia Regroup to Stop the Mountain Valley Pipeline, Eyeing a White House Protest

The U.S. Forest Service’s recent pipeline approval, coupled with Sen. Joe Manchin’s unflagging support, help define the stakes in a long-running battle. One activist called the pipeline “a climate disaster.”

https://insideclimatenews.org/news/28052023/environmentalists-in-virginia-and-west-virginia-regroup-to-stop-the-mountain-valley-pipeline-eyeing-a-white-house-protest/?

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West Virginia Governor’s Coal Empire Sued by the Federal Government — Again

The lawsuit, filed by the Justice Department, seeks millions in unpaid environmental fines as Gov. Jim Justice begins his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

https://www.propublica.org/article/jim-justice-coal-empire-sued-by-federal-government-again?

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EPA announces $115 million for Jackson, Miss., water infrastructure

June 6 (UPI) -- Jackson, Miss. received a federal lifeline in its water crisis on Tuesday with the Environmental Protection Agency promising $115 million to support critical water infrastructure in Mississippi's capital city.

https://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2023/06/06/Jackson-Mississippi-EPA-115-million-water-infrastructure/4811686067178/?

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“Forever Chemicals” Makers Hid Dangers for Decades

The manufacturers of “forever chemicals” used in products like nonstick pans and waterproof clothing knew about the dangers their materials posed more than 40 years before the general public, according to previously secret industry documents. By following the same playbook as Big Tobacco, including suppression of their own research, the companies successfully stymied regulation for decades while the cancer-causing chemicals became ubiquitous in the water, air, and soil.

https://www.levernews.com/forever-chemicals-makers-hid-dangers-for-decades/

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The Right-Wing War on Clean Air

Steve Milloy, a longtime lobbyist for polluting industries from tobacco to coal to oil and gas, is back in the news thanks to the wildfire smoke that recently blanketed the U.S. East Coast. Milloy appeared on Fox News to tell people that there are “no negative health impacts” from breathing in wildfire smoke. It’s the latest salvo in a war he’s been waging against air pollution regulation since the 1980s.

https://theintercept.com/2023/06/11/wildfire-smoke-air-pollution-steve-milloy/?

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‘Unprecedented does not begin to describe this event’: Wildfire haze smothers East Coast

Soot levels in the air reached dangerous levels in cities across the U.S. on Wednesday, some reaching more than 10 times the standard that EPA considers safe for breathing.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/06/07/canada-wildfires-east-coast-air-quality-00100671

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We’ve all seen images of the apocalyptic orange skies above New York City, which had the worst air quality of anywhere in the world last week. Seasonal wildfires are erasing decades of progress towards cleaner air — but thanks to a loophole backed by Big Oil, their toxic smoke is erased from official federal data. In today’s featured story, Rebecca Burns unpacks how the fossil fuel lobby helped smuggle climate denial into the implementation of the Clean Air Act, and details the changes needed to protect communities from ever larger and more dangerous wildfires

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Oil Lobby Pushed Pollution Loophole for Wildfire Smoke

By Rebecca Burns

Pedestrians pass the One World Trade Center in New York amid smokey haze from Canadian wildfires on June 7, 2023. (AP Photo/Julie Jacobson)

Seventy-five million people nationwide were under air quality alerts last week, as days of smoke-filled skies sent soot levels soaring more than 10 times beyond what federal regulators consider safe for breathing.

But in federal air quality data, it will be as if those days never happened. That’s because a Big Oil-backed exemption in federal environmental law allows states to discount pollution from “exceptional events” beyond their control, including wildfires. And while environmental regulators are considering cracking down on soot and particle pollution, industry groups are opposing those reforms, too.

Under current rules, states like New York, where residents have been urged to remain indoors, won’t have their “hazardous” air quality index levels count against their compliance with the federal Clean Air Act — so emissions sources in the state, for example, won’t be required to reduce other discharges to help offset the smoke pollution.

“Every air quality monitor from New York to D.C. is going to blow past the limit,” said Sanjay Narayan, a managing attorney with the Sierra Club’s Environmental Law Program. But instead of localities counting that data towards the overall standards they’re required to maintain, he said, “They’ll say, ‘This is caused by wildfires, so we’ll continue to do what we normally do.’”

Environmental justice groups in cities like Phoenix, Chicago, and Detroit have previously accused states of exploiting the wildfire loophole to avoid cleaning up air that’s already dangerously dirty — often to the benefit of polluters that also helped push changes to the Clean Air Act beginning in the mid-2000s.

Those changes allow states to skip reporting pollution from natural occurrences like dust storms, thereby reducing the likelihood of triggering enhanced cleanup measures that could impact industrial activities. In 2016, the oil industry’s top lobbying group even took the rare step of siding with federal environmental regulators in a court challenge from green groups arguing that they had illegally expanded the reporting exemptions to include some human-caused pollution.

In an echo of its larger campaign of climate denial, oil lobbyists argued that it was virtually impossible to differentiate between “purely natural emissions” and those connected to human activity — so regulators should treat wildfires and other similar occurrences as “natural events.”

Last year, a panel of outside scientific experts took the opposite position, questioning whether federal regulators should continue to treat wildfires as “exceptional” given that they’re now seasonal events.

“The dramatic increase in wildfires over the last decade is not natural,” wrote the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee in its March 2022 recommendations, noting that the causes included both climate change and land management practices. “Given the potential for significant adverse health events, it may be time to reconsider the current approach.”

Dirtying The Clean Air Act

When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, its advocates were concerned primarily with pollution spewing from industrial sources like smokestacks — problems regulators could pinpoint and reduce. Under the law, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sets pollution control standards that states must find ways to meet and maintain. States are also required to report any air quality data falling below those standards.

The loophole for exceptional events, which was codified in 2005 amendments to the Clean Air Act, was intended to avoid penalizing states for events they can’t control. While New York City suffers through the worst air quality in the world last week, for example, there’s little state regulators can do to stop Canadian wildfires.

At the time, oil lobbyists praised the move, encouraging the EPA in 2006 regulatory comments to “expand the definition of exceptional events to include all emissions and events that are beyond the control” of states, and they explicitly cited particle pollution from wildfires as an example. Over time, the federal agency has continued to expand the definition, making it easier for states to receive waivers.

But while pollution from wildfires may not fit neatly into the existing regulatory paradigm, environmental groups say regulators can’t afford to ignore it. Residents forced to breathe soot-filled air aren’t concerned about the source, and erasing smoke pollution from the record doesn’t undo the damage its buildup can cause to the heart and lungs over time.

Seasonal blazes have already reversed decades of progress on clean air, according to a recent study from the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

Part of the problem, some wildfire science experts say, is a framework that can ding states for smoke from the kind of controlled burns that help prevent wildfires, while letting them off the hook for the larger, more dangerous conflagrations that often result.

In public comments on proposed changes to the EPA’s “exceptional events” rule in 2016, one fire science expert suggested the agency take “the exact opposite” approach to regulating wildfire smoke.

“The state air regulatory agencies should count wildfire emissions,” wrote Scott Stephens, a wildland fire science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, arguing that doing so “would become a driver for ecologically appropriate prescribed fire and managed wildfire use.”

The Cost Of Doing Nothing

The EPA didn’t incorporate suggestions from fire scientists in the 2016 changes.

But the agency did loosen the overall standards for what could be counted as an exceptional event — a move the American Petroleum Institute (API), the oil and gas industry’s top lobbying group, had backed in its own regulatory comments.

In prior years, API had lobbied alongside Exxon on proposed legislation to relax the criteria for states seeking air quality waivers from such events.

Environmental groups challenged the laxer rule in federal court in 2016, arguing that it created too large a loophole for some types of human-caused emissions. In response, the oil lobby did something unusual: intervene on the side of the EPA.

API’s attorneys wrote in a brief that overturning the agency’s rule would force states to report more data showing poor air quality — a move that could negatively impact its members’ operations. In other words, forcing states to more fully account for air pollution, even from sources they didn’t completely control, could mean a crackdown on more sources they do control.

The court sided with the EPA and the oil lobbyists. In recent years, states have increasingly relied on wildfire waivers to meet their required air quality standards, according to a March report from the Government Accountability Office — even as air quality has declined.

On multiple occasions, local environmental groups have challenged the federal agency’s decisions to sign off on the waivers. In March, a Detroit-based group contested an exceptional event waiver granted by the EPA for poor air quality registered in the city the previous year. State environmental regulators claimed the readings were influenced by distant wildfire smoke.

But in a letter to the EPA, the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center said that the state was instead seeking “to delay and evade utilizing their regulatory responsibility to lower ozone pollution in the Detroit area,” which suffers from disproportionately high asthma rates. The federal agency approved the state’s waiver in May.

Federal environmental regulators are currently considering one measure that environmental justice groups say could help address rapidly declining air quality, including from wildfires — tightening standards for soot and particle pollution. That move is staunchly opposed by the oil and gas, mining, and chemical lobbies.

While there’s no single regulatory solution for wildfires, the eerie haze that recently gripped the skies above huge swaths of the country should serve as a reminder of the urgency of addressing their underlying causes, said the Sierra Club’s Narayan.

“This is why it’s critical that the EPA regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act — that’s what the act was meant to do,” he said. “We hear industry complaining about the cost of greenhouse gas reductions, but this should be a reminder that the costs of doing something are a lot lower than the costs of doing nothing.”

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3M reaches $10.3 billion settlement over contamination of water systems with ‘forever chemicals’

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. (AP) — Chemical manufacturer 3M Co. will pay at least $10.3 billion to settle lawsuits over contamination of many U.S. public drinking water systems with potentially harmful compounds used in firefighting foam and a host of consumer products, the company said Thursday.

https://apnews.com/article/pfas-forever-chemicals-3m-drinking-water-81775af23d6aeae63533796b1a1d2cdb?

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The Right’s Desperate Push to Tank ESG and Avoid Disclosing Climate Risks

Pro-business politicians embraced the idea of so-called green investing — until the SEC suggested companies should report their full emissions.

https://theintercept.com/2023/07/02/esg-investing-sec-climate/?

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EPA Approved a Fuel Ingredient Even Though It Could Cause Cancer in Virtually Every Person Exposed Over a Lifetime

An EPA document shows that a new Chevron fuel ingredient has a lifetime cancer risk more than 1 million times higher than what the agency usually finds acceptable — even greater than another Chevron fuel’s sky-high risk disclosed earlier this year.

https://www.propublica.org/article/epa-approved-chevron-fuel-ingredient-cancer-risk-plastics-biofuel?

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EPA slashes federally protected waters by more than half after Supreme Court ruling

The Environmental Protection Agency and US Army on Tuesday released a new rule that slashes federally protected water by more than half, following a Supreme Court decision in May that rolled back protections for US wetlands.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/29/politics/epa-waters-of-the-united-states-rule-climate/index.html?

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🔎 Axios investigates: Chemicals stored all over U.S.

Photo illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios. Photo: E. Jason Wambsgans/Chicago Tribune via Getty Images

Thousands of facilities that house large quantities of hazardous chemicals are scattered in communities across the U.S. Many Americans don't know they're there, Axios data visualization journalist Thomas Oide writes. Why it matters: Accidents at these facilities have seriously injured — and killed — people who work there. 🧮 By the numbers: As of July, roughly 12,000 facilities with hazardous chemicals on site were registered with the EPA, according to public records obtained and released by the Data Liberation Project. Since 2003, facilities have reported nearly 4,000 accidents to the EPA. Explore the project: "At Risk," including an interactive map.

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A Black Community in West Virginia Sues the EPA to Spur Action on Toxic Air Pollution

Institute, one of two majority-Black communities in the state, was left out of a regulatory effort earlier this year to tighten limits on cancer-causing chemicals.

https://www.propublica.org/article/institute-west-virginia-sues-epa-to-spur-action-toxic-air-pollution?

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🚰 Feds plan total lead pipe removal

Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

Most U.S. cities will have to replace their lead water pipes within 10 years under a new EPA proposal unveiled today, Axios' Jacob Knutson writes. Why it matters: The Biden administration is hoping to prevent public health crises like the one that hit Flint, Michigan, where approximately 99,000 residents were exposed to lead. What's happening: The EPA would require utilities to pay for much of the cost of replacing the country's 9.2 million lead pipes. The rule would be the strictest lead regulation in more than three decades and will cost billions of dollars, AP notes. 🚨 Threat level: Lead, even in small amounts, is toxic to people of any age or health status. It's especially dangerous for children. It's been found to damage their brains and nervous systems, affect growth and development, and cause learning problems. Keep reading.

 

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EPA bans asbestos, a deadly carcinogen still in use decades after a partial ban was enacted

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday announced a comprehensive ban on asbestos, a carcinogen that kills tens of thousands of Americans every year but is still used in some chlorine bleach, brake pads and other products.

https://apnews.com/article/epa-asbestos-cancer-brakes-biden-72b0fa8b36adedaff6000034d35c2acd?

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Jury selection begins in Montana trial against Buffett’s railroad company over asbestos deaths

HELENA, Mont. (AP) — Jury selection began Monday in a lawsuit against Warren Buffett’s BNSF Railway over the lung cancer deaths of two people who lived in a small Montana town near the U.S.-Canada border where thousands of people were exposed to asbestos from a vermiculite mine.

https://apnews.com/article/bnsf-railway-libby-asbestos-vermiculite-lawsuit-25783f61a393b3aa3a7286e6aeca4356?