Tag: epa

Despite SCOTUS Ruling Limiting Its Authority, EPA Tries To Unilaterally Regulate Carbon Emissions Again

After a bruising defeat at the Supreme Court, the Biden administration is back to crafting regulatory limits on power plant emissions. A forthcoming rule from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would require that carbon-producing coal and gas power plants slash their greenhouse gas emissions by 2040, reports The New York Times.

These emissions limits would be so strict that coal plants likely have to adopt carbon capture technology to meet them while gas plants would have to switch to burning carbon-free hydrogen gas, say administration officials to the Times.

The yet-to-be-made-public rule is currently being finalized by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget.

Since coming into office, President Joe Biden has been working on a rule to limit greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. This has been a liberal priority going back to the Obama administration, which tried and failed to get Congress to enact an emissions cap-and-trade scheme in 2009.

Undeterred, in 2015, Obama’s EPA implemented very similar regulations to those that were found in the 2009 legislation, claiming that the Clean Air Act had given it the power to regulate carbon emissions all along.

Keep reading

EPA finds radioactive contamination in more areas of West Lake Landfill

Radioactive waste in the West Lake Landfill is more widespread than previously thought, officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Tuesday.

The finding is based on two years of testing at the St. Louis County site, which has held thousands of tons of radioactive waste for decades. An underground “fire” in another area of the landfill threatens to exacerbate the issue, which residents believe is responsible for a host of mysterious illnesses.

Chris Jump, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the site, said the findings don’t change the agency’s planned cleanup strategy or the level of risk the site poses to the surrounding residents. The radioactive waste is still within the footprint of the landfill, she said.

“The site boundaries themselves aren’t expanding, but the area that will need the radioactive protective cover is larger than previously known,” Jump said to a crowd of about 50 Tuesday night at the District 9 Machinists hall in Bridgeton.

The Missouri Independent and MuckRock are partnering to investigate the history of dumping and cleanup efforts of radioactive waste in the St. Louis area.

St. Louis was pivotal to the development of the atomic bomb during World War II, and community members say they’re still suffering. Waste from uranium processing in downtown St. Louis — part of the Manhattan Project — contaminated Coldwater Creek, exposing generations of children who played in the creek and most recently forcing the shutdown of an area elementary school.

Keep reading

EPA Wants To Move Chemical Waste From Ohio Train Crash To Landfill In Another State

Indiana Republican Governor Eric Holcomb denounced a plan from the Environmental Protection Agency to move chemical waste from the train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, to a landfill in the western portion of the Hoosier State.

Local and state authorities previously evacuated all residents within one mile of the February 3 derailment and started a controlled burn of industrial chemicals on the vehicle to decrease the risk of an explosion, which could have sent shrapnel throughout the small Ohio town. Vinyl chloride, a carcinogen used to manufacture PVC, was emitted from five train cars in the form of massive plumes of black smoke visible throughout eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

Officials from the EPA revealed on Monday that contaminated waste from the disaster would be transported to an incinerator in Grafton, Ohio, and a landfill in Roachdale, Indiana, according to a report from Fox 59. The former city is 103 miles from East Palestine, while the latter is 402 miles from the small rust belt community.

Holcomb revealed in a Tuesday press release that he disagrees with the decision to transport chemical waste from the disaster site on the eastern border of Ohio to the far western portion of Indiana, effectively crossing the breadth of both midwestern states.

“There has been a lack of communication with me and other Indiana officials about this decision,” Holcomb said. “After learning third-hand that materials may be transported to our state yesterday, I directed my environmental director to reach out to the agency. The materials should go to the nearest facilities, not moved from the far eastern side of Ohio to the far western side of Indiana.”

Holcomb added that he requested to speak with EPA Administrator Michael Regan about the decision and “what precautions will be taken in the transport and disposition of the materials.”

Norfolk Southern, the company at the center of the derailment, warned the EPA that a number of other volatile chemicals beyond vinyl chloride, including ethylene glycol monobutyl ether and ethylhexyl acrylate, were present at the site. The EPA released the full list of substances only after residents were told they could safely return to their homes.

Keep reading

‘Trust the Government’ EPA Chief Tells Worried East Palestine Residents

The head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) went to the scene of the freight train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, on Thursday and told the community he was from the government and was there to help in the wake of the disaster.

EPA Administrator Michael Regan saw a creek that still reeks of carcinogenic chemicals following the toxic train derailment in the town earlier this month. He sought to reassure skeptical locals the water is fit for drinking and the air safe to breathe in surrounds where just under 5,000 people make their homes near the Pennsylvania state line.

“I’m asking they trust the government. I know that’s hard. We know there’s a lack of trust,” Regan said, according to AP “We’re testing for everything that was on that train.”

Regan’s visit came in the wake of Senator J.D. Vance (R-OH) who discovered what appeared to be residual contamination in the water of a creek in the same area, as Breitbart News reported.

“So I’m here at Leslie Run, and there’s dead worms and dead fish all throughout this water,” Vance said in a video posted to his Twitter account on Thursday. “Something I just discovered is that if you scrape the creek bed, it’s like chemical is coming out of the ground.”

Keep reading

EPA Refuses to Regulate Pesticide-Coated Seeds That Harm Pollinators

Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) denied a legal petition by Center for Food Safety (CFS), Pesticide Action Network of North America and others, demanding that the agency fix its failure to regulate pesticide-coated seeds, which are known to be widely harming bees and other pollinators.

These crop seeds are coated with systemic insecticides known as neonicotinoids, the most widely used insecticides, and have devastating environmental effects.

CFS filed the rulemaking petition in 2017 that would close the loophole, but was forced to take take the agency to court when EPA failed to answer the petition as of late 2021.

Last week’s response is issued pursuant to a court-set deadline.

“We gave EPA a golden chance and a blueprint to fix a problem that has caused significant harm to people, bees, birds, and the environment — and it stubbornly refused,” said Amy van Saun, senior attorney with the Center for Food Safety. “It’s extremely disappointing and we’ll be exploring all possible next steps to protect communities and the environment from the hazard of pesticide-coated seeds, including a lawsuit challenging this decision.”

Crops grown from pesticide-coated seeds, such as corn, soybean and sunflower seeds cover over 150 million acres of U.S. farmland each year.

Neonicotinoids are taken up into the plant’s circulatory system as the plant grows, permeating leaf, pollen, nectar and other plant tissues. Neonicotinoids affect the central nervous system of insects, causing paralysis and death.

Sublethal impacts include impaired navigation and learning. As a result, beneficial insects, valuable pollinators and birds — including threatened and endangered species protected under the Endangered Species Act — are killed or injured.

For songbirds, ingesting just one neonic-coated seed can cause serious harm or death.

Additionally, more than 80% of the pesticide coating can leave the seed, contaminating the air, soil and waterways of surrounding environments. Most notably, clouds of neonicotinoid-laced dust released during planting operations have caused mass die-offs of honeybees and wild native bees.

Keep reading

EPA Ignores Own Science, Plans to Reapprove Deadly Neonicotinoid Pesticides

Recent coverage by The Guardian of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA’s) plan — to extend the registration of several demonstrably harmful neonicotinoid insecticides — compels Beyond Pesticides to identify, once again, the agency’s failures to enact its core mission.

That mission is “to protect human health and the environment,” and to ensure that “national efforts to reduce environmental risks are based on the best available scientific information.”

EPA has undertaken a review of the registration of several members of the neonicotinoid (neonic) family of pesticides and, despite the agency’s own findings of evidence of serious threats to pollinators, aquatic invertebrates, and other wildlife, it issued interim decisions on these neonics in January 2020 that disregard the science on the pesticides’ impacts.

EPA appears to be prepared to finalize these registrations late in 2022; this would, barring further action, extend the use of these harmful compounds for 15 years.

Neonics are used widely in the U.S., both on crops to kill sucking insects, and as seed treatments with the same goal for the developing plant.

These insecticides are systemic compounds, meaning that once applied, they travel to all parts of a plant through the vascular system, and are then present in pollen, nectar, and guttation droplets.

Non-target organisms — such as bees, butterflies, birds, bats, and other insects — feed and drink from those sources and are thus readily and indiscriminately poisoned.

Keep reading

EPA Knew Fracking Chemicals Were Toxic, But Approved Them Anyway

Between 2012 and 2020, fossil fuel corporations injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas, after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity.

The EPA’s approval in 2011 of three new compounds for use in oil and gas drilling or fracking that can eventually break down into PFAS, also called “forever chemicals,” was not publicized until Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) obtained internal records from the agency through a Freedom of Information Act request, the New York Times reported Monday after reviewing the files.

According to PSR’s new report, “Fracking with ‘Forever Chemicals,’” oil and gas companies including ExxonMobil, Chevron, and others engaged in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have since 2012 pumped toxic chemicals that can form PFAS into more than 1,200 wells in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Texas and Wyoming.

While the Times noted that the newly released documents constitute some of the earliest evidence of the possible presence of PFAS in fracking fluids, PSR’s report warns that “the lack of full disclosure of chemicals used in oil and gas operations raises the potential that PFAS could have been used even more extensively than records indicate, both geographically and in other stages of the oil and gas extraction process, such as drilling, that precede the underground injections known as fracking.”

Keep reading

Biden’s EPA DELETES Inconvenient Data Showing No Man-Made Climate Change

With Joe Biden now at the helm, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has decided to reinstate its Climate Change Indicator (CCI) platform, which is heavily manipulated to support the man-made climate change conspiracy theory.

By “disappearing” inconvenient data that goes against the prevailing narrative of the global warming cult, the EPA is misleading the public through the CCI into believing that the world is in dire straits concerning the condition of the climate.

Anthony Watts from Climate Realism says the EPA under China Joe is “playing fast and loose with climate facts.”

Historical temperature data is being altered or deleted whenever it contradicts the narrative that everything is getting hotter due to global warming.

“EPA has deleted its earlier web page Climate Change Indicators: High and Low Temperature and replaced it with a new one,” Watts explains.

“Previously, they showed the U.S. Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2015 that clearly established the unique drought and heat period of the 1930s.”

As recently as May 1, 2021, the EPA deleted its old page for this data and replaced it with a new one that supports the idea that humans are causing the planet to “warm” by driving gas-powered vehicles and eating meat.

Before the change, there was a figure present on the site showing that the great “dust bowl” of the 1930s brought with it historically hot temperatures that blazed across the Plains, the Upper Midwest, and all throughout the Great Lake States.

Keep reading

Popular flea collar linked to almost 1,700 pet deaths. The EPA has issued no warning.

Rhonda Bomwell had never used a flea and tick collar before. Pierre, her 9-year-old Papillon service dog, was mostly an indoor animal.

Still, her veterinarian recommended she purchase one, so Bomwell went to the pet store near her home in Somerset, New Jersey, and selected Bayer’s Seresto collar. 

A day later, on June 2, 2020, Pierre had a seizure, collapsing while Bomwell was making dinner. Lying on his back, the dog stopped breathing and his eyes rolled back. 

Bomwell tried giving him CPR. Then she called the police. An officer helped her lift the dog into her car, and she rushed him to the hospital. Pierre died before he could receive medical treatment. Bomwell didn’t think to take off Pierre’s collar.

“I just didn’t put it together,” she said.

Bomwell isn’t alone. Seresto, one of the most popular flea and tick collars in the country, has been linked to hundreds of pet deaths, tens of thousands of injured animals and hundreds of harmed humans, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency documents show.

Yet the EPA has done nothing to inform the public of the risks.

Seresto, developed by Bayer and now sold by Elanco, works by releasing small amounts of pesticide onto the animal for months at a time. The pesticide is supposed to kill fleas, ticks and other pests but be safe for cats and dogs. 

Keep reading

Biden Names As “Climate Czar” Former EPA Chief Blamed For Flint Water Crisis

At the time of the Flint water crisis, where lead from aging pipes leached into the city’s water system after it changed its water source, Chaffetz was the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which held hearings on the issue.

Chaffetz wasn’t the only one to object. “The people of Michigan won’t soon forget Gina McCarthy’s mishandling of and failure to adequately respond to the Flint water crisis as EPA administrator,” U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, a Tipton Republican and a former member of the committee who took part in the Flint hearings,  told the Free Press Wednesday morning. “That ineptness alone is reason enough to disqualify her from a senior role, but her push for higher energy taxes and heavy-handed government regulations is also concerning for consumers.”

Democrats also chimed in: Rep. Dan Kildee, a Democrat from Flint Township who is a supporter of Biden’s, issued a statement Wednesday afternoon, noting deep doubts about the choice. While thanking Biden for taking climate change so seriously, Kildee – who was a sharp critic of both the state’s and federal government’s roles in causing the Flint water crisis –  said he’d heard from several Flint residents who “expressed their concerns to me about this appointment and I have relayed their concerns to (Biden’s transition team).”

“While the position of White House climate coordinator does not require confirmation by Congress, we must never forget the failures of the Flint water crisis,” said Kildee, who led efforts to require faster public notifications of high levels of lead in water systems and to approve funding to replace lead water pipes in the wake of the crisis. “All levels of government, including the state of Michigan and the Environmental Protection Agency, failed Flint families.”

Keep reading