Poison Spring
Page 24
The plaintiffs, the Center for Biological Diversity and the Pesticide Action Network North America, urged the court to order the EPA to reestablish its “consultation” with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service. This cooperation is required by law, and for good reason: after all, EPA reports the effects of the pesticides it has registered on endangered and threatened species. This exchange of information, done correctly and honestly, would ensure that “EPA’s oversight of pesticides does not jeopardize the continued existence of any endangered or threatened species or result in the destruction or adverse modification of designated critical habitat of these species.”22
Predictably, the pesticide lobby went on the offensive to interfere in the lawsuit, Jeff Miller said. Miller launched a campaign to persuade leaders of environmental groups to cosign a letter to EPA in order to show a “united front against the pesticide lobby.” In the letter to Lisa Jackson, the EPA administrator, Miller repeated his complaint that EPA-approved pesticides threaten both the natural world and the American people.23
EPA-approved pesticides are linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, and other serious health effects in humans, particularly children, the elderly, farm families, and farmworkers, Miller said. Emerging science further indicates that low-level exposures may be transmitted via epigenetic modifications that harm subsequent generations.
“Species are dying off at over 1,000 times the normal background rate; pollinators and other indicator species such as frogs are suffering dramatic declines. Not since the dinosaurs disappeared has our planet seen this kind of species collapse,” Miller wrote. “This historic loss of biodiversity and degradation of human health must be viewed as intimately intertwined: species and biodiversity loss undermine the productivity and resilience of the natural resource base on which we all rely.”24
This is not a light charge; indeed, it cuts to the core of the EPA’s mission. Environmental organizations representing millions of Americans have been telling the EPA that Americans care about the natural world. They don’t want the EPA approving pesticides harming more than two hundred “imperiled species.” In addition, the environmentalists say, the EPA also knows that pesticides are threatening hundreds of endangered species, some of which are facing extinction. Pesticides also endanger some of America’s treasured animals such as the Florida panther, killer whale, California condor, gray wolf, red-cockaded woodpecker, bull trout, and Atlantic salmon.25
Yet once again the EPA—perpetually under pressure from pro-industry members of Congress—chose not to act. And still the chorus of anger rose. “Two billion pounds of pesticides are sold in the United States every year, killing millions of animals and driving hundreds of endangered species closer to extinction,” Kieran Suckling, director of the Center for Biological Diversity, wrote in a September 2011 letter to other environmental groups. “The government is doing nothing to stop it. Paralyzed by political pressure from chemical giants Monsanto, Syngenta and a host of lobbying firms, the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are pointing fingers at each other instead of taking action. Pesticides kill 72 million birds each year, but are especially dangerous to endangered species that have already been reduced to small, struggling populations. In response to our lawsuit, the agency [EPA] began reviewing impacts on endangered species, and even initiated steps towards banning atrazine. Then the massive chemical lobby stepped in. Republicans in Congress threatened both the EPA and the Fish and Wildlife Service. Now both agencies have stopped doing anything at all for fear of angering the chemical industry.”26
Of course, congressional Republicans continued the GOP’s long-standing effort to neuter the EPA or get rid of it altogether. What better way to serve their corporate masters? Former Speaker Newt Gingrich called for “completely abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency,” the League of Conservation Voters complained in March 2011. “Republican leaders in the House took a big step toward making Gingrich’s plan to eliminate the EPA a reality by slashing funding for environmental and public health safeguards. Their call for a 30 percent cut to the EPA budget—the largest cut in 30 years—would jeopardize the water we drink and air we breathe, endangering the health and well-being of all Americans.”
Indeed, in order to meet the legal requirements of the Clean Air Act—and thus prevent the 7,200 annual deaths, 11,000 emergency room visits, and 38,000 acute instances of asthma—EPA sought a new standard for ozone pollution of 65 parts per billion. This was one of Obama’s EPA’s rare high points. New smog rules would mean “the difference between sickness and health—in some cases, life and death—for hundreds of thousands of citizens,” Lisa Jackson, the EPA’s director, wrote in the Los Angeles Times. The link between health and air pollutants—especially neurotoxins like mercury and lead and the danger of soot, nitrogen oxides, and volatile organic poisons—is “irrefutable,” Jackson wrote. She urged Americans to stop Republicans from undermining the EPA and denounced the owners of nearly half of America’s power plants that are still operating without pollution controls such as scrubbers.27
This strategy was nothing new. Electric power companies have been lobbying for decades against public health rules designed to reduce pollution, said Ilan Levin, associate director of the Environmental Integrity Project, a nonprofit organization founded in 2002 by former EPA enforcement lawyers in Washington, D.C.28
As the flap over smog reached a climax, Republicans in the House passed a bill to “scrap” EPA rules. The Republican bill was “a blatant giveaway to polluters that will cost thousands of American lives and hundreds of billions of dollars in preventable health care needs,” Congressman Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) responded.29
Despite the urging of advocates inside his own political constituency, Obama buckled. William Daley, Obama’s chief of staff, and Cass Sunstein, his regulatory czar, sided with the polluters. They feared that the economic power of the regulators—and even worse, the backlash from industry and wealthy donors—would harm Obama’s reelection campaign. With this misplaced calculation—indeed, with this betrayal of public trust—Obama’s promise of new smog standards all but disappeared from view.30
The New York Times opined that the capitulation on smog was evidence of both Obama’s “mediocre” record on environmental enforcement and its all-too-frequent capitulation to the demands of industry. (Two years earlier, the Obama administration—citing worries about terrorism—refused even to reveal the locations of forty-four coal ash dumps containing billions of gallons of toxic sludge. In the same year, Obama torpedoed real progress at the Copenhagen climate conference.)31
There is good reason for industry to fear public scrutiny of power plants, which are responsible for 50 percent of mercury air pollution and 77 percent of acid gas emissions. The EPA claims there are more than sixteen hundred facilities that are “high priority violators” of the Clean Air Act. Some three hundred of these facilities have been violating the law for a decade or more. In 2009, factories reported to EPA that they released into the atmosphere about 600 million pounds of poisons including arsenic, benzene, formaldehyde, and lead.32
In 2011, seeking to lower the amount of carcinogens including mercury, arsenic, chromium, and nickel that power plants dump into the air, the EPA issued the Mercury and Air Toxics Standards (MATS or MACT).
The proposal infuriated Oklahoma Republican senator James Inhofe, a prominent climate change denier and major supporter of the coal, oil, and gas industries. Repeating the usual script, Inhofe claimed the effort to clean up power plants was “specifically designed to kill coal as well as all the good paying jobs that come with it.” Inhofe formed a group of twenty-nine senators—whose names remain secret—determined to repeal the EPA rule and to forbid EPA from issuing additional rules to protect air quality. Senator Inhofe also resisted new rules to regulate soot, the invisible killer particles of smoke, chemicals, and metals coming primarily out of the stacks of factories and diesel trucks. The American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricit
y, a Washington, D.C., lobbying organization for the coal industry, joined Inhofe in describing the EPA standards as part of an “aggressive regulatory agenda” harming the economy.33
The environmental community saw Inhofe’s proposal as potentially disastrous. The EPA standards would save “tens of thousands of lives and avoid hundreds of thousands of asthma attacks,” said John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The American Lung Association described Inhofe’s strategy as “extreme,” reporting that the EPA standards protect millions of lives from toxic air poisons such as mercury, which “damages children’s neurological development and intelligence.” The ALA also affirmed that soot levels currently considered “safe” still cause heart attacks, strokes, and asthma and that new soot standards would “prevent more than 35,000 premature deaths and save $280 billion in health-care costs.”34
Unimpressed with the benefits of cleaner air, Senator Inhofe accused Obama’s EPA of “persistently going to the extreme.” His sentiments were echoed by the coal industry, which described the EPA standards as part of an “aggressive regulatory agenda” harming the economy. Once again, as it has for forty years, the EPA was held up as nothing more than an impediment to industrial growth. And once again, it will be our health, and our environmental integrity, that will suffer. Once again, industry and the political establishment they command have played their most reliable hand: if you can intimidate an administration—even one that has promised change—change will never come.35
Conclusion
Better Living and a Healthier Natural World Through Small Family Farms
In a major report on childhood exposure to toxic chemicals that was released in April 2011, the American Academy of Pediatrics lambasted the country’s “non-evidence-based system for chemical management.” The academy was especially critical of the pathetic Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA), a pro-industry law that hasn’t been updated since 1976. Using the chemical industry’s own estimate of the massive amounts of chemicals used every year in the United States, the academy raised a red flag over the implications of spreading 27 trillion pounds of petrochemicals on the United States every year. This ocean of synthetics does not even include pesticides, pharmaceuticals, fuels, or chemicals used in food production.
“As children grow and mature, their bodies may be especially vulnerable to certain chemical exposures during critical windows of development,” the academy wrote. “Neurologic and endocrine systems have demonstrated particular sensitivity to environmental toxicants at certain stages of growth. These differences in biological susceptibility and exposures in children versus adults support the need for strong consideration of children in chemicals policies. This principle must underpin all chemical-management legislation and regulation.”1
It’s not just the young who are most vulnerable to our toxic legacy. Minorities and the poor have more poisons in their bodies not merely because of the food they eat, but also because of where they live. Their communities have long been the dumping grounds for America’s industrial pollution. For example, West Anniston, Alabama, had the misfortune of being a center for the manufacture of PCBs. West Anniston was also an Army depot for chemical weapons. In 2003, the military began burning its chemical weapons. The people of West Anniston, who are mostly black, pay the price for being surrounded by pollution, many of them dying young from cancer and other diseases.
Bob Herbert, an African American columnist for The New York Times, visited West Anniston and other black communities burdened by dumping. He rightly concluded that placing garbage dumps, oil refineries, and other hazardous manufacturing operations in the midst of black communities was a continuation of the Jim Crow policies that “have existed in one form or another, legally or illegally, since slavery.
“The evidence has been before us for decades that black people, other minorities and some poor whites have been getting sick and enduring horrible deaths from the filth that they breathe, eat, drink and otherwise ingest from the garbage dumps, landfills, incinerators, toxic waste sites, oil refineries, petrochemical plants and other world-class generators of pollution that have been deliberately and relentlessly installed in the neighborhoods where they live, work, worship and go to school,” Herbert wrote. “Government and industry alike have used black and poor neighborhoods as dumping grounds for the vilest and most dangerous of pollutants.”2
The latest crisis at the EPA—and one with disproportionate impact on the country’s young, its poor, and its minorities—concerns the current fever over a procedure for gas drilling known as hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” Once again, giant industries are disregarding or sneaking around the law and ignoring science and the public health. Once again, government regulators are looking the other way. And once again, the public health—and particularly its drinking water—hang in the balance.
As hot as this issue is today, the struggle over fracking goes back decades. And one of its sorriest chapters began at the EPA, with a morally compromised study of drinking water contamination.
The EPA has known since the 1980s that wastes created by drilling for oil and gas are toxic and should not be allowed to flow into rivers or groundwater. Yet to this day, the oil and gas industries have pressured their puppets in Congress to exempt drilling from most environmental laws.
In 1994, the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation sued the EPA for its refusal to regulate the gas drilling industry. Several years later, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals recommended that EPA bring the gas drillers under its control. EPA ignored the court but agreed to look into the potential effects of drilling chemicals on drinking water.3
“Fracking a well” means pointing a cannon at the source of the suspected gas, usually found in stone formations thousands of feet under the ground, often in or near aquifers of drinking water. Huge amounts of water mixed with tons of chemicals and sand blast their way through a downward shaft under tremendous pressure and demolish the stone that encloses the gas. Some of the three hundred compounds used in hydraulic fracturing include diesel fuel, a dangerous mixture of benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, and xylene. Other materials in fracking fluids include acids, formaldehyde, polyacrylamides, chromates, and other potentially toxic or carcinogenic substances.
Rather than reveal these chemical cocktails to a public that will inevitably see the stuff in their rivers (and in their tap water), companies routinely put their fracking chemicals on a list of “trade secrets” and refuse to divulge their names or compositions. And while the EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory used to inform us about what chemicals companies release in our environment, even that basic source of information is dead: the oil and gas industries long ago maneuvered their way out of being subject to this fundamental environmental law.4
Here’s how that travesty came about. The EPA started a fracking study in 2001 and completed it in 2004, during the administration of George W. Bush, a former oilman, and Dick Cheney, whose former company, Halliburton, had pioneered the fracking process. Predictably, the administration’s 2004 study found that injecting toxic fluids into gas wells “poses little or no threat” to drinking water and “does not justify additional study at this time.”5
This finding dismayed Weston Wilson, a scientist who had been with the EPA for thirty years. Wilson, an environmental engineer in the Denver office with long experience with oil and gas drilling, had observed carefully how EPA did its study. He knew the politics of the gas drilling industry, and how tightly those politics were linked to the execution of the EPA study.
Since Wilson’s home state of Colorado had grand fracking ambitions—and since the state’s coal beds producing natural gas are located within drinking water aquifers—Wilson had good reason to worry. He wrote to three Colorado politicians, Senator Wayne Allard, Senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell, and Representative Diana DeGette, and attached a report entitled “EPA Allows Hazardous Fluids to be Injected into Ground Water.”6
The Bush administration’s EPA report, Wilson wrote, was “scient
ifically unsound” and ran afoul of the Safe Water Drinking Act that prohibits the contamination or poisoning of our drinking water. The EPA had not only failed to adequately assess the risks of the toxic fracking fluids, it had used a panel of outside experts who openly favored the drilling industry. Five of the seven members of the study panel “appear to have conflicts of interest and may benefit from EPA’s decision not to conduct further investigation or impose regulatory conditions,” he wrote.
EPA’s failure to regulate the injection of fluids into gas wells “may result in danger to public health and safety,” Wilson continued, noting that fracking “can also create new pathways for methane migration into aquifers containing good quality ground water.”
Beyond the dangers to Colorado residents, Wilson predicted that EPA’s “flawed analysis” would open the floodgates for the gas drilling industry, who no longer had to concern themselves with drinking water contamination. Sure enough, Congress (and Dick Cheney) used the EPA’s 2004 report to shape the Energy Policy Act, which exempted gas drillers from regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act. This public health abomination became known as the Halliburton loophole.7
It didn’t take long for the scientific community to raise the alarm about the dangers of all these chemicals in drinking water supplies. Theo Colborn, a Colorado resident and a nationally recognized expert on the effects of poisons on the human endocrine system, has identified 171 products composed of 245 chemicals used in fracking fluids. Close to 90 percent of the volatile chemicals cause irritation to the skin, eye, sinuses, nose, throat, lungs, and stomach and cause effects on the brain and nervous system ranging from headaches, blackouts, memory loss, confusion, fatigue or exhaustion, and permanent neuropathies, she told a congressional panel in 2007. More than half can cause disorders to the cardiovascular, kidney, reproductive and immune systems.8