The war on the environment

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And environmental groups

The congressional green scare of 2018, led by House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Rob Bishop (R-UT), sought to impede the work of environmental groups by accusing them of working on behalf of foreign governments against the interests of the U.S. government and military. Whether Bishop will hand off his harassment campaign against prominent environmental groups to the Republican-controlled Senate remains to be seen. But what is certain is that the House Natural Resources Committee, with Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-AZ) in line to take over as chairman, will discontinue using its power to wage a green scare against environmental groups.

Incoming House committee leader to call off ‘witch hunt’ against environmental groups – ThinkProgress

Notched down a bit after the mid-terms..

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For decades, opposition to drilling has left the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge off limits. Now the Trump administration is hurriedly clearing the way for oil exploration.

In the Blink of an Eye, a Hunt for Oil Threatens Pristine Alaska - The New York Times

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Toxic pollution standards save up to 17,000 lives per year, but the EPA wants to change how it measures benefits from these regulations, making them vulnerable to rollbacks. The Environmental Protection Agency proposed yet another weakening of an Obama-era regulation on Friday, this time targeting toxic chemicals from oil and coal-fired power plants. The regulation in question, the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS), was established in 2011. It was the first set of federal rules to limit hazardous pollution from coal-burning and oil-burning plants, targeting chemicals like mercury, a neurotoxin that can lead to tremors, respiratory failure, and death. Coal power plants are the biggest emitters of mercury. According to the EPA’s own projections, these rules save upward of 17,000 lives per year in the United States. The Center for American Progress found that MATS reduced mercury emissions from power plants by 81 percent since going into effect..

EPA wants to change Mercury and Air Toxics Standards for power plants - Vox

The Trump administration is expected to propose maintaining Obama-era restrictions on mercury pollution from power plants, after hearing from electric utilities that already have spent billions of dollars to meet the requirements, Bloomberg reports. But the EPA also likely will propose changes that may make it harder to toughen mercury emissions standards in the future by withdrawing an assertion the requirements are "appropriate and necessary," a legal benchmark under the Clean Air Act. The EPA wants to recalculate the cost and benefits of the mercury rule in a way that shrinks its estimated potential health gains, according to the report, in a change that could prevent the agency from making the mercury pollution requirements more stringent in the future. By disregarding potential health benefits of cutting pollution, the new proposal would conclude that the rule’s costs exceed its benefits, which environmentalists say could preclude the EPA from counting these benefits to justify the cost of toughening requirements in the future.

EPA seen maintaining Obama coal plant rules while undercutting health gains - BlackRock Utility&Infrastructure Trust (NYSE:BUI) | Seeking Alpha

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President Donald Trump may be losing support in at least one county that he won during the 2016 presidential election — and it’s all because of his administration’s anti-environmental agenda.

Dozens of parents of children in Indiana’s Johnson County called for a federal investigation into why a toxic plume of trichloroethylene, or TCE, continues to exist underground due to an old industrial site in the county seat of Franklin and is allowed to contaminate residents’ homes, according to The New York Times. This is in spite of the fact that Trump has long emphasized his disdain for the Environmental Protection Agency, a policy that he emphasized when he hired anti-environmentalists Scott Pruitt and Andrew Wheeler to lead the organization. Trump’s slashing of environmental regulations has even prompted many career EPA employees to resign in protest, with one former employee claiming that to Trump “kids are disposable,” and Trump has suppressed work like his own administration’s climate change report when it contradicts his pro-business agenda.

While the TCE problems in Johnson County precede the Trump administration itself, its anti-environmentalist approach to pollution has stood in the way of matters being effectively addressed. The New York Times report offered a harrowing description of the human consequences of that type of anti-environmentalism:

The children fell ill, one by one, with cancers that few families in this suburban Indianapolis community had ever heard of. An avid swimmer struck down by glioblastoma, which grew a tumor in her brain. Four children with Ewing’s sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. Fifteen children with acute lymphocytic leukemia, including three casesdiagnosed in the past year.

The piece also elaborated on the difference between Trump’s EPA and the agency’s approach to this issue under his predecessor, President Barack Obama.

Declaring TCE “carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure,” the Obama administration had sought to restrict two of its riskiest uses, as a stain remover and as a degreaser, and had marked it for further review, potentially to ban the chemical altogether. It had also moved to strengthen cleanup rules for hundreds of sites nationwide believed to be contaminated.

But at the urging of industry groups, the Trump administration has stalled some of those moves. In 2017 it indefinitely postponed the proposed bans on risky uses, leaving as many as 178,000 workers potentially exposed. It also scaled back a broad review of TCE and other chemicals so that it would exclude from its calculations possible exposure from groundwater and other forms of contamination — the problems present in Franklin.

‘It’s infuriating’: Trump-voting parents turn on the president over lax EPA rules – Alternet.org

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One area in which the administration has delivered:  promoting the interest of the fossil fuels industry. Last Friday provided just the latest example, when – a mere hours before the agency was due to be shuttered  at midnight as a result of the impasse between Trump and Congress – the  Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its intention to weaken coal-fuelled power plant regulations issued in 2011 to reduce mercury emissions.

Another Win for Fossil Fuels: EPA to Weaken Basis for Calculating Mercury and Future Environmental Standards | naked capitalism

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Resisting calls from public health advocates for stricter regulations on toxic chemicals, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is expected to refuse to set limits on the amount of two dangerous chemicals allowed in the nation’s drinking water. Millions of Americans drink water that exceeds the government’s non-enforceable health advisory limit for the two chemicals — perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) — according to studies. The chemicals, which have been linked to cancer, thyroid disease, and weakened childhood immunity, are the best-known members of the family of highly fluorinated compounds known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. These chemicals are typically used in Teflon, Scotch-Guard, and other consumer products, as well as foam used in fire-fighting. But on Monday, Politico reported that Acting EPA Administrator Andrew Wheeler approved a management plan of non-stick chemicals in December that stated the EPA would not set limits on amounts of PFOA and PFOS in drinking water.

Trump’s EPA will not set legal limit on dangerous chemicals in drinking water, report says – ThinkProgress

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Former Secretary of State and 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton ripped the Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) approval of a pesticide that is considered toxic to bees. “Insects are declining worldwide because of pesticide use. This is nuts. We need bees!” Clinton tweeted Friday..

A government report published this month revealed that the EPA granted “emergency exemptions” for various pesticides, including sulfoxaflor, to be used in 2018. The EPA authorized the use of sulfoxaflor on millions of acres of grain and cotton across 18 states. The Center for Biological Diversity slammed the decision, saying the pesticide was “very hghly toxic” to bees.

Clinton hits EPA for approval of pesticide dump: ‘We need bees!’ | TheHill

Bees are already rapidly disappearing and one has to realize they perform indispensible pollination services to agriculture..

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The Environmental Protection Agency recently proposed that regulating hazardous emissions from power plants is not “appropriate and necessary,” reversing Obama-era findings and exposing current emissions standards to legal challenges. To arrive at this conclusion, the agency has invented a new, unnatural way of evaluating regulatory cost that finds no support in the economics literature or in the regulatory practices of prior administrations of either political party. If the agency succeeds using its novel methodology, it will likely deploy the same strange method in other rulemakings, leading to large numbers of premature deaths and other significant adverse health consequences for the American people. 

The specific regulation under threat is the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards, or “MATS,” an Obama-era regulation that limits the emissions of hazardous pollutants like neurotoxic mercury, carcinogenic arsenic, and other toxins from power plants running on fossil fuels. The Clean Air Act’s section 112 gives EPA the authority to regulate hazardous emissions from these plants, so long as the agency determines that such regulation is “appropriate and necessary.” The Supreme Court held in 2015 that, in making this determination, EPA must consider the costs associated with regulation. The court left it to EPA, however, to decide how to consider cost..

EPA is rolling back protections with methodology no respectable economist would endorse | TheHill

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Facing billions of dollars in cleanup costs, the Pentagon is pushing the Trump administration to adopt a weaker standard for groundwater pollution caused by chemicals that have commonly been used at military bases and that contaminate drinking water consumed by millions of Americans. 

The problem is not limited to military bases. An estimated five millionto 10 million people in the country may be drinking water laced with high levels of the chemicals, known as Per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or highly fluorinated chemicals. They include thousands of people who live near military bases in states including Michigan, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts.

PFAS, as the chemicals are most commonly called, are present in a vast array of products, including food packaging, nonstick pans, clothing and furniture. They have been linked in recent years to cancers, immune suppression and other serious health problems. But since the 1970s, the Defense Department has been one of the most frequent users of PFAS. The chemicals are a key ingredient in firefighting foam employed at bases nationwide, with military crews spraying large amounts during training exercises (and on emergency calls) into unlined basins that drain into the soil and then into groundwater.

Pentagon Pushes for Weaker Standards on Chemicals Contaminating Drinking Water - The New York Times

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Climate change garners most of the headlines, but the Trump administration is pushing a much larger and broader pro-pollution agenda whose latest manifestation is a push at the EPA to overturn a long-established scientific consensus that fine particulate pollution (colloquially “soot”) kills people..

Trump EPA appointees want more air pollution — that’s a very bad idea - Vox

Read the article for how they are loosening standards that regulate toxic fine particle pollution and there are also a host of studies mentioned that show just how bad these are.

Another industry lobby that wins out over the health of ordinary people (Drain the swamp! Keep America safe!) and a libertarian fantasy that free markets don't need regulation..

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Remember those disturbingly ubiquitous chemicals that the Environmental Protection Agency can’t bring itself to ban from our drinking water? Per- and polyfluoroalkyl (PFAS) are man-made substances that were once prized for their ability to make surfaces resist heat, oil, stains, grease, and water. Until the United States started to phase them out in 2006, PFAS were used in everything from microwave popcorn bags to fast-food wrappers to water-repellent clothing. One of them, PFOA, made famous by its use in Teflon, has been linked to high cholesterol, ulcerative colitis, thyroid conditions, and testicular and kidney cancers.

For a newly released study, the agency’s own scientists, in tandem with US Geological Survey peers, took samples from 25 drinking water treatment plants (in confidential locations across 24 states) and tested them for PFAS. The result: All of the samples tested positive for the chemicals, though just one exceeded the EPA’s voluntary “health advisory” of 70 parts per trillion for PFOA and PFOS, the most-studied of the chemicals.  All of the samples tested positive for the chemicals. The finding comes on the heels of a draft report released last year by the Department of Health and Human Services concluding that the safety threshold is actually much lower than the EPA’s current standard: 7 parts per trillion for PFOS and 11 parts per trillion for PFOA. An additional three of the samples exceeded those lower standards.  Meanwhile, the EPA isn’t eager to set a “maximum contaminant level” for these persistent chemicals under the Safe Drinking Water Act, which could force utilities to filter out the chemicals.

EPA Scientists: The Toxic Chemicals Our Agency Won’t Regulate Are Definitely in Our Drinking Water – Mother Jones