More than 30,200 fires have been detected by satellites in the country from January to March, reported Reuters. Brazil’s Inpe research agency said it is the most for the period since records began in 1999.
The number includes fires in Venezuela’s grasslands, forests and the Amazon.
“Venezuela’s dry season typically extends from December to March with heavy rains returning in April and May. The country’s fire season generally follows the same pattern, with the number of fires observed by satellites tending to rise in January, peak in March, and drop in May,” NASA Earth Observatory said. “And so it went for the 2024 burning season, with one key difference. In the preceding months, unusually warm and dry weather, potentially a consequence of global warming and shiftingcirculation and rainfall patterns associated with the ongoing El Niño, parched the country’s landscapes and primed them to burn.”
Land is frequently cleared for agriculture through the use of human-made fires, but researchers said South America’s low rainfall and high temperatures — in addition to an absence of prevention planning — have been causing the fires to spread out of control, Reuters reported.
“Everything is indicating we’re going to see other events of catastrophic fires — megafires that are huge in size and height,” said Manoela Machado, a University of Oxford fire researcher, as reported by Reuters.
The most severe fires in the region usually happen during August and September along the Brazilian Amazon’s southeast edge, where agricultural deforestation is the most intense.
“NASA’s MODIS (Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer) sensor detected a record-breaking number of fires in Venezuela in the early part of the year,” NASA Earth Observatory said. “Fire counts in January 2024 and February 2024 were above 9,000 — higher than any other January or February since the beginning of the MODIS record in the early 2000s. In March 2024, the sensor detected more than 11,000 fires; the only other March that the sensor detected more was in 2003.”
According to Venezuela’s national park service, during Easter weekend, approximately 400 firefighters battled a significant fire that currently threatens Henri Pittier National Park — an oceanfront reserve that contains unique cloud forests, Reuters reported.
Further south, NASA data tracked 5,690 active fires in Venezuela’s Amazon as of late March — half the total number burning in all of the Amazon’s nine countries.
Just 10 to 25 percent of normal rainfall levels have fallen in the past 30 to 90 days in Venezuela and Brazil’s Roraima state, according to Michael Coe, tropics program director at Woodwell Climate Research Center, as reported by Reuters.
José Rafael Lozada, a retired professor and forestry engineer at Venezuela’s Universidad de Los Andes, said the region is caught in a “vicious cycle” with climate-change fueled hot and dry conditions worsening fires, which then release greenhouse gases that make climate change worse.
“People burn the same [amount of fires], but the drought is more extreme. The vegetation is drier, the rains are scarce and we see the consequences: a small burn turns into a fire of great magnitude,” Lozada said, as Reuters reported.
Utility regulator the Virginia State Corporation Commission has approved more than a dozen new solar projects in the state with 764 megawatts (MW) of total electricity capacity — enough power for nearly 200,000 homes during peak output, a press release from Dominion Energy said.
The projects include four solar facilities with 329 MW of capacity that Dominion Energy will own or acquire, as well as an additional 435 MW provided by independently owned solar projects, reported Reuters.
“These projects deliver on our promise of reliable, affordable and increasingly clean energy for our customers,” said Dominion Energy Virginia President Ed Baine in the press release. “Through our investments in offshore wind, battery storage and solar, Virginia continues to make progress on its clean energy transition.”
Once the solar projects are approved, the utility said Dominion Energy will have solar projects with more than 4,600 MW in the state and capacity to power more than 1.1 million homes during peak times, Reuters reported.
The solar projects were originally proposed in October of last year, as Dominion sought to take advantage of the Inflation Reduction Act’s billions of dollars in direct payments and tax credits for renewable energy, reported Reuters.
Dominion’s solar fleet is the second largest in the United States, the press release said. The new projects will create more than 1,600 jobs while generating economic benefits of more than $570 million for the state.
Roughly six million energy customers in 15 states use natural gas or power from Dominion Energy, which has its headquarters in Richmond, Virginia.
Completion of the new solar projects is expected by 2026, with local and state permits required before construction can begin.
The projects are predicted to add roughly $1.54 to the average monthly bill of a residential customer. Right now, Dominion Energy’s rates are 31 percent lower than the average for the Mid-Atlantic and 12 percent lower than the national average.
According to the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), as of the fourth quarter of 2023, Virginia had a total of 4,841 MW of solar installed, with 6.56 percent of the state’s total electricity generation coming from solar. The state ranked 11th in the country for total solar capacity with enough to power 585,088 homes.
Virginia had invested $5.7 billion in solar, and the number of solar companies in the state was 208, providing 4,753 solar jobs. In the past decade, solar prices in Virginia have gone down 47 percent.
“[A]fter a coordinated lobbying effort by clean energy advocates, environmental organizations and many other stakeholders, Virginia passed the Clean Economy Act, which will create up to 29,000 solar jobs while providing enormous market opportunities for both distributed generation and utility scale solar,” SEIA said. “SEIA remains active in industry discussions about how to implement [Virginia Clean Economy Act] and guidance around Virginia’s new zero-carbon generation and energy storage requirements.”
A series of research articles published in the scientific journal The Gerontologist collectively outline several risks that climate change poses for aging well.
The journal’s special issue, titled “Climate Change and Aging,” presents multiple links between climate change and human health, particularly for aging adults.
In one of the forum articles included in the special issue, “A Framework for Assessing the Effects of Climate Change on Dementia Risk and Burden,” researchers noted the risk of worsening Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias (ADRD) because of climate change.
The study’s authors showed multiple ways that climate change could directly and indirectly impact people with ADRD, such as how extreme heat and wildfires can impact healthcare infrastructure, housing, community programming and biological processes. They also noted how climate action could improve health outcomes and the aging experience.
“Because the same fossil fuels that are causing climate havoc are also spewing harmful air pollution that harms older people disproportionately, a transition away from these polluting energy sources towards cleaner, healthier options (such as solar power and wind energy) can deliver benefits for our health and the climate,” wrote Dr. Vijay Limaye, co-author of the study and director of Applied Research Initiatives, Science Office & International, for the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). “But because of the scale of climate pollution that we’ve already added to the Earth’s atmosphere, we must also better prepare our communities for the climate hazards that we will continue to face in future years.”
One of the research articles included in the special issue further examined climate impacts on people with dementia, particularly in terms of disaster preparedness for the people living with dementia and their caregivers, highlighting a need for more resources for caregivers to reduce the stress of disaster preparedness for aging populations.
Another forum article, “Age-Friendly and Climate Resilient Communities: A Grey–Green Alliance,” noted that existing frameworks to address livability and wellness for aging populations typically don’t incorporate climate resilience. So the study authors wrote a framework to complement the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Network of Age-Friendly Cities and Communities with an emphasis on sustainability.
In one of the research articles, “Population Aging and Heat Exposure in the 21st Century: Which U.S. Regions Are at Greatest Risk and Why?” researchers identified areas of the U.S. where older adults faced the highest risk of extreme heat, including New England, the upper Midwest and rural mountain regions.
Similarly, another research article included in the special issue examined vulnerabilities to extreme heat in Portland, Oregon, and found one area of the city in particular that was the most vulnerable to extreme heat also included a high number of older adults and had the highest concentration of housing with age and income restrictions.
Additional studies in the special issue examined states’ climate adaptation plans and how they address aging populations, emotional well-being for people of different ages who have experienced stress related to hurricanes, and a series of interviews between climate activists ages 16 to 76, which revealed compassion across generations rather than blaming or criticizing.
“Our world is experiencing significant alterations and challenges due to climate change,” the special issue authors concluded. “This Special Issue of The Gerontologist clarifies that the seismic changes wrought by climate change will similarly alter how we age and study the aging process.”
In early March, a small group of Democratic senators from the Rust Belt sent President Joe Biden an urgent letter. They began by extolling the benefits of two of the Biden administration’s biggest achievements, the bipartisan infrastructure law and the Inflation Reduction Act, calling them “historic investments in our nation’s infrastructure” that will ring in a brighter future for American manufacturing. But there was something, they cautioned, that threatened to hamper this progress: the Environmental Protection Agency’s planned regulations for integrated iron and steel mills, proposed last July and nearing a court-ordered deadline.
“We are concerned that the EPA’s proposed integrated steel rules will do what foreign competitors have thus far been unable to do: deter and diminish continued American investment in improving our steel industry,” wrote the five senators, among them Joe Manchin of West Virginia and John Fetterman of Pennsylvania. They claimed the regulations would cost companies billions, enough to force widespread layoffs, despite the EPA’s estimate of $7.1 million in costs for the two companies, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs, that own all 10 of the country’s steel mills.
Shortly after the senators sent off the letter, the EPA unveiled its final rule, the first time the agency has ever attempted to cut emissions from leaks and equipment malfunctions at steel mills. The EPA expects the new regulations will cut particle pollution by 473 tons every year. But the final rule is weaker than the one it proposed in 2023. Whereas the agency had originally planned to slash steel mills’ toxic emissions by 79 tons per year, a 15 percent decrease overall, the final version is expected to cut emissions by 64 tons each year. The EPA also dropped a proposed limit on the thickness of the smoke emanating from mills’ doors and roof vents.
Jim Pew, a senior attorney at Earthjustice who has litigated multiple lawsuits against the agency for its failure to curb steel mill pollution, told Grist that the regulations will have “real benefits” for the people living in the shadows of the country’s most polluting steel mills, but lamented the safeguards that were removed.
“It’s a small step in the right direction,” he said, noting that the EPA had furnished the final rule with a standard to regulate a type of incinerator used by some highly polluting mills. “The steel companies mounted a real disinformation campaign about the cost of the rule that I think put pressure on EPA to take out some provisions that would have been beneficial.”
Senator John Fetterman has a quick exchange with Senator Joe Manchin in June 2023. Ricky Carioti / The Washington Post via Getty Images
The new rule gives the country’s steel companies two years to update their facilities with the requisite emission reduction equipment and workplace standards. In an email, an EPA spokesperson said the agency had “carefully considered the stakeholder feedback and made data-driven modifications in the final rule that provide needed flexibility, while also providing health protections for surrounding communities.”
The senators’ letter represents a rare occasion of congressional involvement in the EPA’s rulemaking process, a yearslong endeavor that requires extensive data collection and engineering expertise. The agency’s air pollution regulations, while undergirded by science and riddled with industrial jargon, have major consequences for communities that host the country’s industrial infrastructure, determining the quantities of toxic chemicals that companies can emit — and that residents can inhale.
Steel production is a highly polluting enterprise involving heating coal above 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit to produce a product known as coke, which is then combined with iron ore in a blast furnace and melted down into liquid steel. The broiling heat releases a slew of toxic heavy metals such as lead and arsenic, as well as fine particulate matter that can accumulate in the lungs after prolonged exposure. Numerousstudies have linked pollution from steel mills to impaired heart and lung function.
Ninety percent of the steel industry’s emissions originate from four mills that dot the rim of Lake Michigan near the border between Illinois and Indiana. Once bustling hubs for manufacturing, towns like Gary, Indiana, sank into decline over the latter half of the 20th century when manufacturing jobs were shipped overseas. Today, the steel mills that emit black smoke into the air of the area’s overwhelmingly low-income and Black communities are holdouts from this era, symbols of a prosperous past that politicians on both sides of the aisle seem eager to protect.
The first effort by members of Congress to convince the EPA to change its course came last December. A group of eight senators, including Democrat Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota as well as Republicans Mike Braun and Todd Young of Indiana, sent a letter to the EPA’s administrator, Michael Regan, arguing that the agency’s proposed regulations would harm national security by making the domestic steel industry — the “world’s cleanest major producer of steel” — uncompetitive.
“We support reducing harmful air pollution,” they wrote. “We also support rules that are durable, realistic,” and based on the view that the federal government should “improve public health while protecting good-paying jobs and supporting industries essential to our national and economic security. These rules fail to meet those standards.” The senators did not specify which provisions in the proposed rule would have these effects. The letter in March from Manchin and the other Democrats brought even stronger warnings. “If these rules are promulgated as proposed, Cleveland-Cliffs and U.S. Steel may be left with no choice but to prematurely shutter mills, resulting in job losses and irreparable harm to their local communities,” the senators argued.
Lengths of red hot steel in the smelting shop at a factory. Andrey Rudakov / Bloomberg via Getty Images
In its final rule, the EPA estimated that the total costs to the steel industry would total $7.1 million, an amount that would cover the installation of air monitors to measure chromium pollution around the perimeter of facilities and the implementation of new workplace practices to reduce leaks from previously unregulated emission sources. But in a press release supporting the senators’ claim of costs running into the billions, Cleveland-Cliffs CEO Lourenco Goncalves argued that the rule would “put at risk good-paying, middle-class union jobs in the steel industry.” In 2023, U.S. Steel and Cleveland-Cliffs reported sales of $18 billion and $21 billion, respectively.
Pew, the Earthjustice attorney, said concerns that the new rules will wreak havoc across the industry are unfounded. “The cost claims were so shocking to us, because EPA routinely overstates the cost of its rules,” Pew said, citing a study in 2020 from the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. “They’re saying that not only did EPA understate the cost of these rules, but that it understated them by orders of magnitude.”
After taking note of the senators’ efforts to gut the steel mill regulations, Bruce Buckheit, the former director of the EPA’s air enforcement division, decided to send Regan a letter on behalf of Earthjustice in February. He dissected the contents of the new rule, arguing that its impacts would be “straightforward” and meet the minimum pollution reductions required by the federal Clean Air Act. “I’ve seen nothing in the rulemaking record for these proposals that supports the cost claims in the senators’ letter,” he wrote. The total capital expenditures, he concluded, would be minuscule compared with U.S. Steel’s and Cleveland-Cliffs’ revenues.
“I believe it is important to push back against such overblown industry claims, lest that narrative drive public opinion and agency policy,” Buckheit wrote.
Editor’s note: Earthjustice is an advertiser with Grist. Advertisers have no role in Grist’s editorial decisions.
Now 30, Big Wind spent most of their 20s fighting extraction projects. They were at Standing Rock, then, immediately after, traveled east to fight the construction of the Tennessee Gas pipeline. A Northern Arapaho tribal member from the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming, Big Wind learned important financial lessons during those actions: Working collectively in resistance camps means resources are pooled and shared. That’s because climate work, at least at the individual level, doesn’t pay much.
“You’re not really using money inside a camp, even though it’s helping get resources to function,” said Big Wind. “There’s so much possibility, because nobody had to worry about their basic necessities,” they said.
Outside of the camps is where people like Big Wind have to worry.
A member of the 30×30 White House Advisory Committee, and a long-time climate activist, Big Wind spoke in Dubai at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in December and, from a young age, has crowdfunded conservation initiatives on the Wind River Reservation.
“I’m not getting paid to go to these things,” said Big Wind, “by these institutions, by the feds, or by the international community.” Big Wind’s day job with the Wyoming Outdoor Council helps pay for some of these trips, and they continue to rely on crowdfunding to support travel.
The unpaid labor that Big Wind provides to fight climate change is at the heart of a new paper published in Cambridge University Press called “Wages for Earthwork” — “earthwork” being the term to describe labor that takes care of the planet and provides benefits to all. That work should be compensated, argues essay author David Temin, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Michigan.
“If we’re going to think about a just transition to a world without fossil fuels, we need to put a lot of this invisible labor at the center,” Temin said. “A lot of this is obvious to Indigenous communities. Everyone is implicitly benefiting from this.”
The argument may seem quite basic, but the exploitation of unpaid earthwork has far reaching economic dimensions. Take unpaid housework or childcare: labor that maintains society and allows for the economy to continue operating but that is invisible in everything from labor markets to gross domestic products. Because productivity in most economies is a matter of goods and services, unpaid labor — like eldercare or earthwork — lies outside the market.
“The parallel is absolutely apt,” said Erin Hatton, a professor at the University at Buffalo who specializes in gender and labor markets. “Because of our capitalist system, labor outside the home has a measure of respect.”
Earthwork, Hatton says, broadens that definition of home by taking care of the Earth as one would tend to a household where everyone lives. “It’s a home more broadly constructed,” she said.
Whereas unpaid housework and childcare have historically fallen to women, unpaid earthwork typically falls to Indigenous peoples, who are expected to steward land and share traditional ecological knowledge for free, says Micheal Mikulewicz, a professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry. “The argument is they should be grateful that we are actually asking and trying to help, which doesn’t help them put food on the table,” Mikulewicz said.
The federal government does provide applications to grants pointed at tribal nations and organizations. This year, the Biden administration awarded $120 million dollars to 146 Indigenous-led projects for everything from climate-adaptation planning to community-led relocation and habitat restoration. But that doesn’t account for all the labor that has been done without federal funding. Also, grant-funding tends to privilege organizations with the means to pay grant writers, which can leave smaller organizations at a disadvantage.
“We don’t really talk about the amount of work and labor that will be necessary to adapt to climate change,” said Mikulewicz. “Actually making changes in our economy, in our society, in the way our economic system works, or even the way we grow food for that matter. The phases of adaptation are really, really diverse.”
Mikulewicz adds that there are no easy answers to solving these imbalances, but that compensating Indigenous climate labor is a step in the right direction and could open the possibility of broader, more fruitful alliances between environmentalists and labor.
According to Temin, the paper’s author, solutions could range from hourly wages to pressuring non-Indigenous conservation organizations to pick up the tab, but he recognizes that answers are typically dependent on situations with no one-size-fits-all approach to compensation. The funds to help from large conservation organizations are not making it into the hands of local Indigenous communities.
However, Temin said the best way for Indigenous peoples to start seeing real forms of compensation is for governments to strengthen tribal sovereignty and return traditional lands to Indigenous stewardship.
“The most important component is securing land tenure rights and supporting local communities’ efforts to protect themselves and their territories against environmentally damaging extractive development projects and conservation projects that kick them off their own land,” he said.
Big Wind, on the Wind River Reservation, agrees. “I don’t think money is going to solve it. But I also feel like we do have a responsibility to ensure that we are taking care of the people who are working for all of us.”
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is launching an emergency response in Lower Florida Keys waters after reports emerged of smalltooth sawfish displaying abnormal behaviors such as spinning and whirling.
In addition to the abnormal behavior reported by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission (FWC), as of March 24 there were more than 28 deaths of smalltooth sawfish, a press release from NOAA said.
An investigation effort led by the commission — including the collection and analysis of samples — was underway.
“If the opportunity presents itself, this would be the first attempt ever to rescue and rehabilitate smalltooth sawfish from the wild,” said Adam Brame, coordinator of NOAA Fisheries sawfish recovery, as The Guardian reported. “We’re hopeful for positive outcomes from these rescue attempts, and grateful to our partners for their support as we work to protect this endangered species. It’s important to note that active rescue and rehabilitation are not always effective in saving stranded animals. However, it can still give us critical information to learn about the nature of the distress.”
According to FWC, the ongoing compilation of fish necropsy data so far showed no signs of bacterial infection or communicable pathogens. Salinity, dissolved oxygen, pH and temperature were also ruled out as the cause of fish deaths or abnormal behavior.
Smalltooth sawfish live primarily in shallow coastal waters, with one in five species living in tropical estuaries or seas, NOAA Fisheries said.
Once found in waters off the coasts of North Carolina and Texas, smalltooth sawfish are now mostly limited to Florida. In 2003, they became the first ever marine fish to be protected under the federal Endangered Species Act.
“Given the limited population size of smalltooth sawfish, the mortality of at least two dozen sawfish could have an impact on the recovery of this species,” Brame said in the NOAA press release.
Brame stated that a higher number of total mortalities was suspected, however. As of March 24, more than 100 sawfish — large juveniles and adults from seven to 14 feet long — had been impacted by the event.
NOAA planned to rescue the endangered sawfish and bring them to quarantine facilities for observation, with the goal of rehabilitating and releasing them. Agencies offering to house and rehabilitate the fish included Mote Marine Laboratory, Dynastic Marine Associates, Inc. and Ripley’s Aquariums.
“Our goal is to release all rescued sawfish back to the wild once rehabilitated,” Brame said in the press release.
NOAA said it would work with animal care teams, including scientists and veterinarians who would develop specified care guidelines.
A historic new law in Phoenix, Arizona, will provide thousands of outdoor workers in the hottest city in the country with protections from extreme heat.
In a unanimous vote, the Phoenix City Council passed an ordinance requiring that workers have easy access to rest, potable water and shade, as well as training to recognize signs of heat stress, a press release from the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health (National COSH) said. Vehicles with enclosed cabs must also have access to air conditioning.
“People who work outside and in hot indoor environments in Phoenix suffer unacceptably during our deadly summers, with too few protections,” said Katelyn Parady, a Phoenix-based expert on worker health and safety with National COSH, who assisted unions and local workers in advocating for the new extreme heat protection measures, in a press release from National COSH. “This ordinance is a critical first step toward getting workers lifesaving protections and holding employers accountable for safety during heat season. It’s also a model for how local governments can leverage their contracts to protect the workers who keep their communities running from climate change dangers.”
In 2023, there were a record 31 consecutive days of 110-plus degree heat in Phoenix. The city had 340 deaths related to the extreme heat, with 645 in Maricopa County, according to the county health department. Three-quarters of the heat-related fatalities happened outdoors.
In the United States, more than 40 percent of outdoor workers are Hispanic or Black, while making up approximately 32 percent of the population, reported The Guardian.
People of color and low-income workers are the most impacted by the hazards of extreme heat. According to Public Citizen, the risk of Latinx workers dying from heat stress is more than three times higher than that of their peers.
“This heat safety ordinance will change my life,” said Filiberto Lares, who has been delivering food to airplanes for Sky Chefs at the Phoenix Sky Harbor airport for 11 years, as The Guardian reported.
The new ordinance will apply to outdoor laborers who work for city contractors and subcontractors of engineering, construction and airport projects, as well as other city services, the press release said.
“The heat at Sky Harbor Airport is dangerous and all of us who work there know it,” said passenger service agent Cecilia Ortiz, who filed a complaint against her employer last summer over the sweltering conditions, in the press release. “We’re glad the city of Phoenix is stepping up to require that airlines and their contractors give us basic heat protections outdoors and in the jet bridges. Now we need to keep pushing to make sure cabin cleaners, who work inside planes but often with the A/C off, are also protected. And we are going to hold our employers accountable. They must take this ordinance seriously, so we can stay safe at work.”
In addition to the safety requirements required of contractors, they will also have to create and keep a heat safety plan.
“In the summers, when the temperatures reach extremes, the asphalt on the tarmac is even hotter,” said Lares, who is a UNITE HERE Local 11 member in Phoenix, in the press release. “It has felt as though people forget that many of us work in vehicles. Having air conditioning in work trucks, buses, and delivery vans matters just as much as in a building because those vehicles are our workplaces.”
Lori Bays, Phoenix’s deputy manager, said the new rule would apply to roughly 10,000 city contract workers, reported The Guardian.
“Phoenix is recognizing the need to take action to protect the most vulnerable,” said Juan Declet-Barreto, a climate vulnerability researcher with the Union of Concerned Scientists, as The Guardian reported. “With an intense heat island effect, there’s very little vegetation and an unequal distribution of shading and trees that can help lower exposure to temperatures.”
As climate change continues to bring increasingly hotter summers to Phoenix, advocates of the ordinance say broader protections are necessary for all workers, not only those employed by the city’s contractors and subcontractors, the press release said.
“It’s good news that our city council is listening to workers who are in grave danger due to climate change,” Parady said in the press release. “But your body’s ability to cope with extreme heat does not depend on whether you work for a city contractor, directly for the city or for a private employer. We’re going to keep organizing until all workers have strong protection from heat – because everyone works under the same blazing sun.”
The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in the U.S. on March 21 overturned previous orders by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that banned the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, in product packaging by a plastics treatment company, Inhance Technologies.
In December 2023, the EPA issued two orders for Houston-based Inhance Technologies to stop manufacturing PFAS, including PFOA, in its plastics treatment processes. Exposure to PFOA may be linked to higher risks of certain types of cancer, according to the American Cancer Society.
The PFAS are a byproduct from the company’s flourination process, which is used to make plastics more durable and prevent degradation of the products inside the treated containers. The company treats containers designed for products like cleaners and pesticides.
Inhance Technologies sued the EPA one week after receiving the orders, and it stated that if it had to follow the orders and shut down its fluorination process, it would go bankrupt.
The federal appeals court overturned the orders, saying the EPA exceeded its authority by issuing the orders under Section 5 of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). The judges said that Section 5 of the TSCA allowed the EPA to regulate the use of “new” chemicals or chemicals used in “new” ways, and they said they agreed with the argument that EPA overstepped by issuing the orders under Section 5 instead of Section 6, which applies to regulation on all chemicals.
The judges said that Section 5 did not apply to Inhance Technologies’ fluorination process, which has been used for 40 years, Reuters reported.
“The court did not dispute EPA’s underlying decision that this is a danger to human health, what they did was say it’s not a new use, which I think is wrong… but this case isn’t over by any stretch,” said Kyla Bennett, a former EPA official now with the nonprofit Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), as reported by The Guardian.
The EPA told The Guardian it will review the decision from the federal appeals court.
PEER and the Center for Environmental Health (CEH) shared in a press release that they will “pursue that case in addition to any other remedies that are available to abate this significant and unreasonable danger to public health, and will urge the government to do so as well.”
