In the first half of 2023, households in the UK installed a record number of solar panels and heat pumps, according to MCS, the official standards body of the renewable technologies industry.
Installations for the two green energy sources were up 62 percent from the previous year, with an average of more than 17,000 households installing solar panels every month, reported Energy Live News and The Guardian.
Battery technology installations have grown each month, with more than 1,000 batteries installed in UK businesses and homes so far this year.
“In the spring, it was looking like we would have something like 215,000 MCS certified solar installations this year. But that was clearly an underestimate – I would bet on around 250,000 now,” said Gareth Simkins of Solar Energy UK, as The Independent reported. “Installing solar on your roof is one of the best home improvements you can make and more and more people realise the financial and environmental benefits.”
The UK government has a solar capacity target of 70 gigawatts (GW) by 2025. It also wants to install 600,000 heat pumps by 2028.
In the first half of this year, 17,920 heat pumps were installed, thanks to the availability of grants.
One of the biggest obstacles to increasing heat pump installations, according to MCS, is the number of skilled, qualified installers. It said that to meet the goal of 600,000 installations, 50,000 workers would be needed.
MCS said more than 850 new contractors have gotten their certification in 2023, which has already surpassed last year’s total.
“As the cost of energy continues to grow, we are seeing more people turn to renewable technology to generate their own energy and heat at home,” said MCS Chief Executive Ian Rippin, as reported by The Guardian. “We need to continue to push this expansion to meet our shared national ambitions to reach net zero by 2050. More consumers have the confidence to invest in small-scale renewables now than ever, but we have to make that transition even easier.”
Small-scale renewables installations in the UK currently have four GW of capacity, which is nearly twice that of the largest gas power plant in Europe, located near Pembroke, Wales.
“It is essential that the lowest-carbon heat becomes the lowest-cost heat, so that homeowners and landlords can justify the transition away from polluting fossil fuels,” said Bean Beanland, the director of external affairs at the Heat Pump Federation, as The Guardian reported. “If this is coupled to a genuine affordability and future funding package, then households will be able to contribute to climate change mitigation with confidence and at a cost that is fair to all.”
The wind picked up on Maui the night before the fires broke out. By early morning on August 8, gusts were whipping fast enough to topple trees and rip roofs off buildings in the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, on Maui’s west coast. Then came the conflagrations. Fanned by the blistering winds, flames hurtled as fast as one mile per minute as they engulfed Lahaina and other towns in Maui, like Kula, killed at least 96 people, and incinerated homes, businesses, and churches.
As thousands of displaced people take refuge in makeshift shelters and hotels, cadaver dogs and search crews are still trying to determine the true scope of damage from the deadliest wildfires in the United States in more than a century. Photos from Lahaina show harrowing scenes: rows of charred buildings behind the scorched shells of cars, consumed by fire as they sat in traffic; corpses of boats burnt on the water; a historic church reduced to rubble.
“Ultimately all the pictures that you will see will be easy to understand,” said Josh Green, Hawaiʻi’s governor, “because that level of destruction in a fire hurricane — something new to us in this age of global warming — was the ultimate reason so many people perished.”
Wildfires are not new to Hawaiʻi. According to the state’s wildfire management organization, roughly 0.5 percent of its total land catches fire every year, on par with other U.S. states. But conditions — many of them connected to climate change — have evolved to make parts of the state more likely to ignite. The blazes in Maui, for instance, were brought on by a “flash drought,” a major hurricane south of the archipelago, invasive weeds that acted like kindling,and winds that ran as high as 81 mph, according to the governor. There are allegations that Hawaiian Electric’s power lines played a role in the fire, too. The result: a wildfire even deadlier than the Camp Fire that incinerated the town of Paradise, California, killing 85 people, in 2018.
Though it’s too early to say exactly how climate change contributed to Maui’s wildfires, scientists have long been saying that similar disasters, like wildfires in the western United States, should be expected with more frequency and intensity on a warming planet.
Climate change is “leading to these unpredictable or unforeseen combinations that we’re seeing right now and that are fueling this extreme fire weather,” Kelsey Copes-Gerbitz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of British Columbia’s faculty of forestry, told the Associated Press.
This summer, parts of Hawaiʻi experienced a “flash drought,” a rapid drying-out of soil and plants that occurs when hot air sucks moisture out of the ground. The drought left parts of Maui especially dry and ready to combust. Such droughts are likely exacerbated by climate change — although a longer-term trend of declining precipitation, which also contributed to the fires, may not be directly connected to human-caused climate change, a scientist told the Washington Post.
Compounding the drought, a proliferation of grasslands on abandoned plantations made vast fields into fuel for the fires. “There’s all these huge, huge quantities of vegetation and it’s all papery thin and ready to go,” Clay Trauernicht, a wildfire scientist at the University of Hawaiʻi, told Grist. As much as one-quarter of the state is covered by invasive grasses.
Adding to the drought and fields of tinder were exceptionally high winds, running from 60 to 81 miles per hour. Experts have said that the winds were fueled in part by Hurricane Dora, a Category 4 storm that barreled across the Pacific south of Hawaiʻi. Dora created a difference in air pressure across the archipelago that led to unusually fierce winds — the sort that plied roofs from buildings before driving flames across Maui.
As climate change makes hurricanes more intense, not all will make landfall, but they still could help spur deadly disasters. On Maui, where the fires did an estimated $5.6 billion of damage, according to the governor, the death toll is likely to climb for at least 10 more days, Green said. “They will find 10 to 20 people per day probably, until they finish,” he told CBS News. Hundreds of people are still missing.
According to Alain-Ricahrd Donwahi, the president of last year’s United Nations’ COP15 conference on desertification and a former defense minister from the Ivory Coast, it is likely that the planet will experience a major food supply disruption long before temperatures reach the threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
This is due to the effects of the climate crisis, along with inadequate farming practices and water shortages, posing threats to agriculture worldwide.
“Climate change is a pandemic that we need to fight quickly. See how fast the degradation of the climate is going – I think it’s going even faster than we predicted,” Donwahi said, as The Guardian reported. “Everyone is fixated on 1.5C , and it’s a very important target. But actually, some very bad things could happen, in terms of soil degradation, water scarcity and desertification, way before 1.5C.”
Donwahi went on to say that heat waves, intensifying flooding and droughts, as well as increasing temperatures were causing the possibility of food insecurity in many parts of the world.
“We could have an acceleration of negative effects, other than temperature,” Donwahi said, as reported by The Guardian. “When the soil is affected, the yield is affected.”
Donwahi said private investors needed to become involved in agriculture.
“The private sector has an interest in agriculture, and the better usage of the soil. We’re talking about [improving] yields. We’re talking about agroforestry, which is another way the private sector can have a return on investment. We have to be innovative, to find new vehicles for finance,” Donwahi said, as Green Queen reported.
“Climate finance for agrifood systems must increase at least sevenfold from current levels to reach the most conservative estimated needs for the climate transition, which is in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars annually,” CPI reported.
Additionally, less than one percent is directed to climate mitigation such as waste, food loss and low-carbon diets.
According to the first article in the United Nations Academic Impact series “Food Security and Climate Change,” food security is something the world needs to be thinking about now.
“In the next 30 years, food supply and food security will be severely threatened if little or no action is taken to address climate change and the food system’s vulnerability to climate change,” the article said.
In the United Kingdom, about half the food is imported, with a quarter of the imports from the Mediterranean, The Independent reported.
Recent heat waves, droughts, wildfires, intense rain and flooding have all led to crop damage in southern Europe.
“Shortages of salad and other vegetables in UK supermarkets in February this year caused by extremes in southern Spain and north Africa brought home to people just how vulnerable the UK is to the impacts of climate change on our food,” said Gareth Redmond-King, head of the international program at the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit, as reported by The Independent.
Donwahi said desertification is not something humans can ignore, as it affects everything from biodiversity to food security.
“Desertification and drought leads to climate change, leads to loss of biodiversity. And when you have climate change you have droughts, floods, storms,” Donwahi said, as The Guardian reported. “It’s not only the poor countries, everybody is in the same boat [on food security].”
Laurie Harper, director of education for the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School, a K-12 tribal school on the Leech Lake Band Indian Reservation in north-central Minnesota, never thought that a class of chemicals called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, would be an issue for her community. That’s partly because, up until a few months ago, she didn’t even know what PFAS were. “We’re in the middle of the Chippewa National Forest,” she said. “It’s definitely not something I had really clearly considered dealing with out here.”
Late last year, tests conducted by the Environmental Protection Agency revealed that her school’s drinking water wells were contaminated with PFAS. Some of the wells had PFAS levels as high as 160 parts per trillion — 40 times higher than the 4 part-per-trillion threshold the federal government recently proposed as a maximum safe limit.
PFAS, also known as forever chemicals, are a global problem. The chemicals are in millions of products people use on a regular basis, including pizza boxes, seltzer cans, and contact lenses. They’re also a key ingredient in firefighting foams that have been sprayed into the environment at fire stations and military bases for decades. Over time, these persistent chemicals have migrated into drinking water supplies around the globe and, consequently, into people, where they have been shown to weaken immune systems and contribute to long-term illnesses like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer.
After the EPA’s tests came back, Harper, who oversees education for the whole Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe, realized that some 300 students and faculty members at the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School had been consuming PFAS-tainted water for an indeterminate amount of time, perhaps since the school’s founding in 1975. Now, the chemicals are all Harper thinks about, and their presence in the school’s water supply is a constant reminder of a problem with no obvious solution.
“We can’t not provide education,” Harper said. “So how do we deal with this?” Months after discovering the contamination, she’s still looking for answers.
Beyond immediate concerns about how to get students clean water, the situation at the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School raises larger questions for Indigenous nations across the United States: Is Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig the only tribal school with PFAS contamination in its water? And how pervasive are PFAS on tribal lands in general? But data on PFAS contamination on tribal lands is patchy at best. In many parts of the country, there’s no data at all.
“There is very little testing going on in Indian Country to determine the extent of contamination from PFAS to drinking water systems, or even surface waters,” said Elaine Hale Wilson, project manager for the National Tribal Water Council, a tribal advocacy group housed at Northern Arizona University. “At this point, it’s still difficult to gauge the extent of the problem.”
PFAS have been around since the middle of the 20th century, but they’ve only been recognized as a serious health problem in the past decade or so after a lawyer sued DuPont, one of the top U.S. manufacturers of PFAS, for poisoning rural communities in West Virginia. Since then, a growing body of research has shed light on the scope of the PFAS contamination problem in the United States — nearly half the nation’s water supply is laced with the chemicals — and water utilities are finally taking stock of what it will take to remediate the contamination. But for the 547 tribal nations in the U.S., there is nothing resembling a comprehensive assessment of PFAS contamination. Tribal water systems have gone largely untested because many of them are too small to meet the EPA’s PFAS testing parameters.
“We can certainly say that PFAS is an issue for every single person in the United States and its territories, that includes tribal areas,” Kimberly Garrett, a PFAS researcher at Northeastern University whose work has highlighted the lack of PFAS testing on tribes.
The federal government has a responsibility to protect the welfare of all Americans, but it has a legal obligation to tribes. In the 18th century, the government entered into some 400 treaties with Indigenous nations. Tribes reserved specific homelands, or were forcibly moved to places designated by the government, and guaranteed rights like fishing and hunting, as well as peace and protection. Experts say that responsibility to tribes includes protection from contaminants.
“Every treaty that assigns land to tribes impliedly guarantees that land as a homeland for the tribes,” said Matthew Fletcher, a law professor at the University of Michigan and a member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. “Contaminated land is a breach of that treaty land guarantee.”
If PFAS are as widespread on tribal lands as they are in the rest of the U.S., many reservations likely have a public health emergency on their hands. They just don’t know it yet.
An aerial view of of Tract 33 in Cass Lake, Minnesota, home to several of Leech Lake’s Indigenous families.
Jerry Holt / Star Tribune via Getty Images
In some ways, Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig, known as the Bug School, got lucky. In December last year, the Environmental Protection Agency, armed with funding supplied by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed by Congress in 2021, approached Leech Lake leaders to ask if the tribe would like to have its water tested for PFAS. The agency had $2 billion to help small or disadvantaged communities test their water supplies for emerging contaminants. The Bug School qualified as both.
When the tests came back positive, the school immediately started shipping in 5-gallon jugs of drinking water and the cafeteria started using bottled water to prepare meals. The school even paused a community gardening program meant to teach students about the value of fresh foods out of fear that the soil was contaminated.
The school knew that it had a contamination problem on its hands, but believed that the problem would be temporary — the measures it put in place were Band-Aids until a long-term solution was found. Months into the crisis, however, school administrators have yet to figure out a permanent fix. The school still doesn’t know where the contamination is coming from, and the cost of cleaning the chemicals out of its water supply threatens to be prohibitively expensive.
A map of well and septic location sites provided as part of the water quality evaluation of Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School. Courtesy of Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School
PFAS remediation requires equipment, frequent testing, and dedicated personnel who have the capacity to monitor forever chemicals for years. Paying for PFAS cleanup is a tall order in large, affluent communities with the resources to address toxic contaminants. The mid-sized city of Stuar, Florida, discovered PFAS in its water supply in 2016 and, to date, has spent more than $20 million fixing the problem. The PFAS in their water still aren’t entirely gone.
On reservations, figuring out who’s responsible for testing for PFAS and paying for remediation is an impossible puzzle to crack, mainly because no one seems to know where the buck stops.
Federal PFAS testing has largely bypassed tribal public water systems. That’s because tribal systems are smaller, on average, than non-tribal public water systems. Every five years, the EPA tests the nation’s drinking water for “unregulated contaminants” — chemicals and viruses that are not regulated by the agency but pose a potential health threat to the public. The EPA finally included PFAS in its testing for unregulated contaminants in 2012, alongside a list of metals, hormones, and viruses. But it mainly tested systems that serve more than 10,000 people.
A study conducted by Northeastern University found that just 28 percent of the population served by tribal public water systems was covered by that round of PFAS testing, compared to 79 percent of the population served by non-tribal water systems. There were also no PFAS results for approximately 18 percent of the tribal water systems tested by the EPA “due to missing data or lack of sampling for PFAS,” the study said. To make matters more complicated, many Indigenous communities get their water from private wells, which are not monitored by the EPA. A recent study suggests a quarter of rural drinking water, much of which comes from private wells, is contaminated by PFAS.
Data on PFAS in tribal areas, experts emphasized over and over again, is extremely scarce. “We don’t know if PFAS is disproportionately affecting tribal areas,” Garrett said. “We won’t know that until we get more data.”
What limited data exists is outdated. The Environmental Working Group, an advocacy organization that tracks PFAS contamination across the U.S., conducted a rough, preliminary PFAS estimate on tribal lands in 2021 using what data there was available at the time. It showed that there are nearly 3,000 PFAS contamination sites, like garbage dumps, within five-miles of tribal lands. The analysis is almost certainly an underestimate.
The lack of PFAS testing on tribal lands is compounded by the fact that there is no one entity responsible for testing and treating tribal water systems for PFAS. That’s partly due to the fact that PFAS are a relatively new issue, but it also has a lot to do with the lack of centralized monitoring of tribal health in general. For example, American Indian and Alaska Native communities experienced some of the highest COVID-19 infection rates in the United States in 2020. But the siloed nature of tribal, local, state, and federal data collection systems means that no one has a real sense of just how many Indigenous people died in the pandemic, even years after the crisis began.
If history is any indication, Fletcher, the law professor, said, remediating these contaminants will be a game of push and pull between the federal government and tribes. In previous efforts to rid reservations of arsenic and lead contamination, he said, “usually the fights are the tribe insisting that the government do something and the government doing everything it can to avoid any kind of liability or obligation.”
In the 1990s, Rebecca Jim, a Cherokee activist and former teacher who was instrumental in raising awareness about lead poisoning among children in Ottawa County, Oklahoma, had to navigate a complicated patchwork of tribal governments, federal bureaus, and treaties to finally get the government to clean up the Tar Creek Superfund site on the Quapaw Nation — one of the agencies largest Superfunds. It took a decade for Jim and other activists to pressure the EPA into cleaning lead — the legacy of mining for materials used in bullets — out of Ottawa County, and she maintains that the EPA only started paying attention to what was happening in Tar Creek after a local masters student discovered that approximately one-third of children in a town in the county called Picher had lead poisoning.
“There’s always a fight,” Jim said. “It’s all about money and where you’re going to get the money to do the work.”
Jim said that testing for contaminants on tribal lands is generally the responsibility of the Indian Health Service, an agency housed within the National Institutes of Health, or falls to a given tribes’ own environmental protection office. But it becomes the EPA’s problem once the agency designates an area as a Superfund site, like Tar Creek was. Then, the EPA tries to go after the polluters responsible for the mess in the first place. If the agency is successful, Jim explained, there is generally ample funding for cleanup efforts. If a polluter can’t be pinned, it falls on the EPA to fund the cleanup, which is a more laborious and less thorough process because there’s fewer dollars to go around. And if the contamination occurs at a federally-controlled tribal school, like the Bug School, the Bureau of Indian Education is responsible. It’s a veritable maze of jurisdiction — even finding where you are in the maze is a tall order.
Laurie Harper’s efforts to untangle the bureaucratic knot that governs decision-making and testing for contaminants at the Bug School may serve as a lesson to other tribal schools that discover PFAS contamination in their water supplies. In February, two months after the EPA approached the school to offer PFAS testing, the results came back. The agency called the school immediately and said it needed to shut down its water system, an urgent request that caught administrators off guard. “We were still like, what? OK, how long is this going to last? Do we open the water? What do we do with it?” Harper said.
In March, desperate for answers, Harper traveled to Washington, D.C., and met with the director of the Bureau of Indian Education, or BIE, Tony Dearman, who heard her concerns about finding a long-term solution for the school.
What she didn’t find out until later, however, was that the BIE had already conducted its own testing at the Bug School in November 2022, during what Harper and other school administrators had assumed was just the agency’s annual compliance check. “They were already aware that the Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig school had tested high for PFAS,” Harper said. “They didn’t tell the school administration nor did they tell the tribe. They didn’t even tell the EPA.”
A USGS watershed report for the Leech Lake Reservation.
Courtesy of Bug-O-Nay-Ge-Shig School
Unbeknownst to her, the BIE had sent a very short email to the school months earlier, in February, telling them that the bureau had found levels of two types of PFAS — PFOA and PFOS — in the school’s water. When Harper finally tracked down that letter and read it, she was appalled by how vague the language was.
“We have received the PFAS (specifically, Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS)) results from the November 2, 2022 sampling event,” it read. “There were several exceedances of PFOA at Wells 1, 2, 3 and 4 and PFOS detection at Well 3 all were above the State limit for and EPA Health Advisory for PFOA and PFOS, please see attached spreadsheet.” The letter did not define what PFAS were or how dangerous they can be to human health. And it certainly did not make it clear to Bug School administrators that the school was in the midst of a public health crisis. “I’m an educator, not a hydrologist,” Dan McKeon, the school’s superintendent and the primary recipient of the letter. “There was notice of results that exceeded some standards, but no guidance about what that meant or what we should do.”
The BIE concluded the letter by telling the school that it would be conducting a second round of PFAS testing within 30 days to “confirm the analytical results” of its initial tests and then determine next steps, but the bureau didn’t return for testing until April 2023 — more than five months after the initial test, and weeks after Harper’s meeting with director Dearman. BIE, she was told by the bureau’s own leadership, was putting out fires on multiple fronts. “You’re not the only school that’s testing high for PFAS,” she recalls BIE’s supervisory environmental specialist telling her.
In a written response to questions from Grist, a spokesperson for the BIE said the bureau is “committed to providing schools with safe drinking water” that meets federal standards and that it is in the process of collecting water samples from BIE-owned public water systems at 69 schools. The bureau did not respond to questions from Grist about how many tribal schools exceed the EPA’s newly proposed 4-part-per-trillion PFAS limit.
In the past few years, Harper told Grist that two people who worked at the Bug School have died from cancer. Multiple female employees have thyroid issues. Harper knows that these diagnoses could be linked to hereditary, behavioral, or environmental exposures. But the deaths — the most recent, a man who died from testicular cancer just a year ago — have made solving the school’s PFAS situation feel even more urgent. Harper has been meeting with EPA, BIE, BIA, and state agencies to get the problem solved. “I’m so frustrated with how bureaucracy works,” she said. But she’s in the fight for the long haul, whatever it takes. “It’s the long-term solutions we’re interested in, not just the quick fix.”
Harper isn’t working in a vacuum; 2023 has been a breakthrough year for PFAS awareness and remediation nationwide. Earlier this summer, major manufacturers of PFAS, including Dupont and 3M, agreed to multi-billion-dollar settlements with cities and states across the country — the largest PFAS settlements thus far. At the end of July, the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa, a tribe located about 115 miles southeast of the Bug School, filed a companion lawsuit, tied to those earlier settlements, against 3M for the cost of gathering data on PFAS, treating its drinking water supplies, fisheries, and soil for contamination, and monitoring the health of the tribe.
The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, a state agency that monitors environmental quality, has conducted a preliminary investigation into the PFAS contamination at the Bug School after school administrators alerted the agency to the problem, but that probe didn’t reveal what the source was. The agency said it will conduct another, “in-depth investigation involving soil and groundwater sampling” at the Bug school in the fall.
Also at the state level in Minnesota, a bill introduced in the legislature this year would permit Minnesotans who are exposed to toxic chemicals to sue the companies responsible for producing the chemicals and force those companies to pay for the cost of screening for conditions that are caused by exposure. 3M has fought these kinds of laws as they’ve cropped up in state legislatures because a legal right to seek medical monitoring will likely lead to a situation in which the company will have to pay billions of dollars’ worth of medical bills. But Harper is sure she can drum up support for the legislation. “I know I can convince other tribes to get behind a law that would allow medical monitoring in the state of Minnesota,” she said. “This is our land. These are our children. These are our families.”
This story is part of Record High, a Grist series examining extreme heat and its impact on how — and where — we live.
President Joe Biden was unequivocal when asked, during an interview with the Weather Channel last week, if he was “prepared to declare a national emergency with respect to climate change.”
“I’ve already done that,” he answered without hesitation.
But the president has not, in fact, declared a national emergency for climate change, despite claiming that he’s “practically” done so. Activists, several Democratic lawmakers, and climate scientists have in recent weeks renewed calls for Biden to take that very step, an act that would unlock sweeping executive authorities to halt fossil fuel production and ramp up manufacturing of clean energy technologies.
Though such calls have been made since the day Biden took office, the hottest June and July in history has prompted frustration bordering on outrage with his administration’s response to deadly heat and the climate change driving it. Environmental advocates say that although the president acknowledges the climate crisis in his rhetoric, his administration continues to expand fossil fuel production.
“As long as we are producing and exporting these fossil fuels, the planet will continue to cook,” Jean Su, a senior attorney and energy justice director at the Center for Biological Diversity, told Grist.
Su and other environmental lawyers say declaring a climate emergency would be fairly straightforward. Under the National Emergencies Act, Biden could issue a declaration that would activate provisions in existing laws to take drastic measures to address climate change. The president could, for example, halt crude oil exports by reinstating a ban that Congress lifted in 2015. He also could suspend offshore oil and gas drilling in over 11 million acres of federal waters, owing to a clause in those leases that allows the president to suspend operation during a national emergency.
For example, once a climate emergency is declared, Biden could divert billions of dollars from the military toward constructing renewable energy projects. Under the Defense Production Act, a law invoked by the Trump administration to boost the supply of Covid-19 medical supplies, Biden could order businesses to manufacture more clean energy and transportation technologies. He also could extend loan guarantees to industries crucial to decarbonizing the electrical grid and transportation sector, further boosting the supply of renewable power.
Biden would, of course, face considerable blowback. Dan Farber, an environmental law professor at UC Berkeley, told Grist that a climate emergency declaration could prompt legal challenges that might land before a conservative Supreme Court. He noted that in the last few years, the court has struck down broad measures taken by the Biden administration to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic, including a vaccination mandate for large employers and a moratorium on evictions.
“I think that makes it iffy whether the Supreme Court really would allow sweeping use of any of these emergency powers in a climate emergency,” Farber said.
Su noted that while litigation always is a potential response to any policy, the powers invoked by an emergency declaration would be easily defended in court. “We’re not looking at somersaults and breathing creative definitions into words. These are really straightforward statutory language questions,” Su said.
The Supreme Court has never overturned a presidential emergency declaration, but there are hurdles beyond that arena, including backlash from Congress, which might threaten the chances of passing future climate legislation. Voters might balk as well, making any declaration a potentially risky move as Biden seeks re-election next year.
But the biggest obstacle to a climate emergency declaration may be the Biden administration itself. Declaring an emergency — and invoking all its potential authorities — sits in direct opposition to its stance on fossil fuels, which so far has fostered the industry’s growth. It has in just the past year approved new oil drilling in Alaska, supported a booming liquified natural gas export industry along the Gulf Coast, and fast-tracked completion of the Mountain Valley methane pipeline in West Virginia.
“This administration claims to be climate champions, and yet they have constantly approved things like the Mountain Valley Pipeline,” said Roishetta Sibley Ozane, founder and director of the Vessel Project, a mutual aid and environmental justice organization in Louisiana. “If you’re going to be a climate champion, you can no longer be approving new fossil fuel infrastructure.”
Given these challenges, Biden might have an easier time — and provide more immediate relief for communities — by declaring an emergency for heat rather than climate change. He could do so under the Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988. The law authorizes the federal government to provide financial and other forms of assistance to states, tribes, territories, and cities when the president declares a natural disaster or emergency.
While the Stafford Act doesn’t explicitly name heat as a disaster covered under the law, Farber and Su say there’s nothing in the statute that prevents extreme heat from qualifying. Much like declaring a disaster for, say, a hurricane, doing so for heat could enable the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, to provide relief funding for supplies like power generators and emergency responses like medical care or repairing heat-stressed power grids.
But the challenges with declaring heat as a disaster might be more administrative than legal. To receive assistance, cities, tribes, and states need to prove that an emergency exceeds their current funding and resource capacity. It can be difficult to tally up the costs of extreme heat, which is less likely to destroy property and more likely to take a toll on public health and productivity. As heat continues to strain electrical systems and send people to hospitals, however, those costs are only becoming more tangible.
Environmental activists say it’s a reminder that the crisis of extreme heat will only get worse until President Biden takes decisive action.
“We absolutely need emergency funding to deal with people dying on the streets right now,” Su said. “But we also need to deal with the root of the crisis, which is fossil fuels.”
The Biden administration announced its biggest effort yet last week to scrub carbon dioxide out of the air, with more than $1 billion going to two facilities on the Gulf Coast that will use “direct air” carbon capture technology.
Direct air capture, or DAC, is a process which separates carbon from oxygen, and reduces CO2 in the atmosphere. The trapped CO2 can then be safely stored underground, deep in the ocean or converted into useful carbon products like concrete, which would prevent its release back into the air.
Project Cypress will be built in Calcasieu Parish, Louisiana and the South Texas DAC is planned for Kleberg County, Texas. Both sites are designed to capture up to 1 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year initially. Officials said the projects will create over 4,500 jobs for local workers and people formerly employed in the fossil fuel industry.
The process of direct air capture is a great way to mitigate the global warming crisis, said Daniel Sigman, Dusenbury Professor of Geological and Geophysical Sciences at Princeton University.
“This carbon capture and sequestration involves stripping CO2 out of the air and putting it somewhere,” Sigman said. “Carbon capture is something that people become interested in when it’s too late to prevent carbon dioxide emissions. “
However, some scientists think the initiative is a waste of money because DAC requires a significant amount of energy to purify CO2 and store it, making it one of the most expensive and inefficient ways to sequester carbon.
The initiative is being funded through the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law of 2021 and is part of a Department of Energy initiative which aims to build a nationwide network of large-scale carbon removal sites to mitigate the climate crisis.
“Cutting back on our carbon emissions alone won’t reverse the growing impacts of climate change; we also need to remove the CO2 that we’ve already put in the atmosphere—which nearly every climate model makes clear is essential to achieving a net-zero global economy by 2050,” said U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm in a statement.
The funding for the project was noted as the world’s largest-ever investment in engineered carbon removal, with each new hub expected to clear more than 250 times more carbon dioxide from the air than the largest direct air capturing facility currently operating.
Sigman said getting the technology right for something of this magnitude is tricky. With carbon dioxide making up around 420 parts per million of molecules it’s a challenge to come up with chemical means to strip those molecules out of the air, he said.
“Carbon dioxide is throughout our whole atmosphere,” said Sigman. “So we have to think about how much our atmosphere is going to be passing through Texas and Louisiana, we have to think about how much of our atmosphere will be passing through these areas.”
This story was originally published byProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power.
The Environmental Protection Agency approved a component of boat fuel made from discarded plastic that the agency’s own risk formula determined was so hazardous, everyone exposed to the substance continually over a lifetime would be expected to develop cancer. Current and former EPA scientists said that threat level is unheard of. It is a million times higher than what the agency usually considers acceptable for new chemicals and six times worse than the risk of lung cancer from a lifetime of smoking.
Federal law requires the EPA to conduct safety reviews before allowing new chemical products onto the market. If the agency finds that a substance causes unreasonable risk to health or the environment, the EPA is not allowed to approve it without first finding ways to reduce that risk.
But the agency did not do that in this case. Instead, the EPA decided its scientists were overstating the risks and gave Chevron the go-ahead to make the new boat fuel ingredient at its refinery in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Though the substance can poison air and contaminate water, EPA officials mandated no remedies other than requiring workers to wear gloves, records show.
ProPublica and the Guardian in February reported on the risks of other new plastic-based Chevron fuels that were also approved under an EPA program that the agency had touted as a “climate-friendly” way to boost alternatives to petroleum-based fuels. That story was based on an EPA consent order, a legally binding document the agency issues to address risks to health or the environment. In the Chevron consent order, the highest noted risk came from a jet fuel that was expected to create air pollution so toxic that 1 out of 4 people exposed to it over a lifetime could get cancer.
In February, ProPublica and the Guardian asked the EPA for its scientists’ risk assessment, which underpinned the consent order. The agency declined to provide it, so ProPublica requested it under the Freedom of Information Act. The 203-page risk assessment revealed that, for the boat fuel ingredient, there was a far higher risk that was not in the consent order. EPA scientists included figures that made it possible for ProPublica to calculate the lifetime cancer risk from breathing air pollution that comes from a boat engine burning the fuel. That calculation, which was confirmed by the EPA, came out to 1.3 in 1, meaning every person exposed to it over the course of a full lifetime would be expected to get cancer.
Such risks are exceedingly unusual, according to Maria Doa, a scientist who worked at EPA for 30 years and once directed the division that managed the risks posed by chemicals. The EPA division that approves new chemicals usually limits lifetime cancer risk from an air pollutant to 1 additional case of cancer in a million people. That means that if a million people are continuously exposed over a presumed lifetime of 70 years, there would likely be at least one case of cancer on top of those from other risks people already face.
When Doa first saw the 1-in-4 cancer risk for the jet fuel, she thought it must have been a typo. The even higher cancer risk for the boat fuel component left her struggling for words. “I had never seen a 1-in-4 risk before this, let alone a 1.3-in-1,” said Doa. “This is ridiculously high.”
Another serious cancer risk associated with the boat fuel ingredient that was documented in the risk assessment was also missing from the consent order. For every 100 people who ate fish raised in water contaminated with that same product over a lifetime, seven would be expected to develop cancer — a risk that’s 70,000 times what the agency usually considers acceptable.
When asked why it didn’t include those sky-high risks in the consent order, the EPA acknowledged having made a mistake. This information “was inadvertently not included in the consent order,” an agency spokesperson said in an email.
Nevertheless, in response to questions, the agency wrote, “EPA considered the full range of values described in the risk assessment to develop its risk management approach for these” fuels. The statement said that the cancer risk estimates were “extremely unlikely and reported with high uncertainty.” Because it used conservative assumptions when modeling, the EPA said, it had significantly overestimated the cancer risks posed by both the jet fuel and the component of marine fuel. The agency assumed, for instance, that every plane at an airport would be idling on a runway burning an entire tank of fuel, that the cancer-causing components would be present in the exhaust and that residents nearby would breathe that exhaust every day over their lifetime.
In addition, the EPA also said that it determined the risks from the new chemicals were similar to those from fuels that have been made for years, so the agency relied on existing laws rather than calling for additional protections. But the Toxic Substances Control Act requires the EPA to review every new chemical — no matter how similar to existing ones. Most petroleum-based fuels were never assessed under the law because existing chemicals were exempted from review when it passed in 1976. Studies show people living near refineries have elevated cancer rates.
“EPA recognizes that the model it used in its risk assessments was not designed in a way that led to realistic risk estimates for some of the transportation fuel uses,” an agency spokesperson wrote. For weeks, ProPublica asked what a realistic cancer risk estimate for the fuels would be, but the agency did not provide one by the time of publication.
New chemicals are treated differently under federal law than ones that are already being sold. If the agency is unsure of the dangers posed by a new chemical, the law allows the EPA to order tests to clarify the potential health and environmental harms. The agency can also require that companies monitor the air for emissions or reduce the release of pollutants. It can also restrict the use of new products or bar their production altogether. But in this case, the agency didn’t do any of those things.
Six environmental organizations concerned about the risks from the fuels — the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council, Moms Clean Air Force, Toxic-Free Future, Environmental Defense Fund and Beyond Plastics — are challenging the agency’s characterization of the cancer risks. “EPA’s assertion that the assumptions in the risk assessment are overly conservative is not supported,” the groups wrote in a letter sent Wednesday to EPA administrator Michael Regan. The groups accused the agency of failing to protect people from dangers posed by the fuels and urged the EPA to withdraw the consent order approving them.
Chevron has not started making the new fuels, the EPA said.
Separately, the EPA acknowledged that it had mislabeled critical information about the harmful emissions. The consent order said the 1-in-4 lifetime cancer risk referred to “stack air” — a term for pollution released through a smokestack. The cancer burden from smokestack pollution would fall on residents who live near the refinery. And indeed a community group in Pascagoula sued the EPA, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., to invalidate the agency’s approval of the chemicals.
But the agency now says that those numbers in the consent order do not reflect the cancer risk posed by air from refinery smokestacks. When the consent order said stack emissions, the EPA says, it really meant pollution released from the exhaust of the jets and boats powered by these fuels.
“We understand that this may have caused a misunderstanding,” the EPA wrote in its response to ProPublica.
Based on that explanation, the extraordinary cancer burden would fall on people near boats or idling airplanes that use the fuels — not those living near the Chevron refinery in Pascagoula.
Each of the two cancer-causing products is expected to be used at 100 sites, the EPA confirmed. ProPublica asked for the exact locations where the public might encounter them, but Chevron declined to say. The EPA said it didn’t know the locations and didn’t even know whether the marine fuel would be used for a Navy vessel, a cruise ship or a motorboat.
In an email, a Chevron spokesperson referred questions to the EPA and added: “The safety of our employees, contractors and communities are our first priority. We place the highest priority on the health and safety of our workforce and protection of our assets, communities and the environment.”
Doa, the former EPA scientist who worked at the agency for three decades, said she had never known the EPA to misidentify a source of pollution in a consent order. “When I was there, if we said something was stack emissions, we meant that they were stack emissions,” she said.
During multiple email exchanges with ProPublica and the Guardian leading up to the February story, the EPA never said that cancer risks listed as coming from stack emissions were actually from boat and airplane exhaust. The agency did not explain why it initially chose not to tell ProPublica and the Guardian that the EPA had mislabeled the emissions.
The agency faced scrutiny after the February story in ProPublica and the Guardian. In an April letter to EPA administrator Michael Regan, Sen. Jeff Merkley, the Oregon Democrat who chairs the Senate’s subcommittee on environmental justice and chemical safety, said he was troubled by the high cancer risks and the fact that the EPA approved the new chemicals using a program meant to address the climate crisis.
EPA assistant administrator Michal Freedhoff told Merkley in a letter earlier this year that the 1-in-4 cancer risk stemmed from exposure to the exhaust of idling airplanes and the real risk to the residents who live near the Pascagoula refinery was “on the order of one in a hundred thousand,” meaning it would cause one case of cancer in 100,000 people exposed over a lifetime.
Told about the even higher cancer risk from the boat fuel ingredient, Merkley said in an email, “It remains deeply concerning that fossil fuel companies are spinning what is a complicated method of burning plastics, that is actually poisoning communities, as beneficial to the climate. We don’t understand the cancer risks associated with creating or using fuels derived from plastics.”
Merkley said he is “leaving no stone unturned while digging into the full scope of the problem, including looking into EPA’s program.”
He added, “Thanks to the dogged reporting from ProPublica we are getting a better sense of the scale and magnitude of this program that has raised so many concerns.”
The risk assessment makes it clear that cancer is not the only problem. Some of the new fuels pose additional risks to infants, the document said, but the EPA didn’t quantify the effects or do anything to limit those harms, and the agency wouldn’t answer questions about them.
Some of these newly approved toxic chemicals are expected to persist in nature and accumulate in living things, the risk assessment said. That combination is supposed to trigger additional restrictions under EPA policy, including prohibitions on releasing the chemicals into water. Yet the agency lists the risk from eating fish contaminated with several of the compounds, suggesting they are expected to get into water. When asked about this, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the agency’s testing protocols for persistence, bioaccumulation and toxicity are “unsuitable for complex mixtures” and contended that these substances are similar to existing petroleum-based fuels.
The EPA has taken one major step in response to concerns about the plastic-based chemicals. In June, it proposed a rule that would require companies to contact the agency before making any of 18 fuels and related compounds listed in the Chevron consent order. The EPA would then have the option of requiring tests to ensure that the oil used to create the new fuels doesn’t contain unsafe contaminants often found in plastic, including certain flame retardants, heavy metals, dioxins and PFAS. If approved, the rule will require Chevron to undergo such a review before producing the fuels, according to the EPA.
But environmental advocates say that the new information about the plastic-based chemicals has left them convinced that, even without additional contamination, the fuels will pose a grave risk.
“This new information just raises more questions about why they didn’t do this the right way,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at NRDC. “The more that comes out about this, the worse it looks.”
On a rugged stretch of the Gulf Coast in Texas, environmental groups called foul in 2020 when an oil company sought pollution permits to expand its export terminal beside Lavaca Bay.
Led by a coalition of local shrimpers and oystermen, the groups produced an analysis alleging that the company, Max Midstream, underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous permitting process and stricter pollution control requirements.
In its response, Max Midstream did not respond to those allegations. Instead, it cited what it characterized as the “quintessential one-mile test” by Texas’ environmental regulator, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, to claim that the groups and citizens involved had no right to bring forth a challenge because they lived more than one mile from the Seahawk Oil Terminal.
“The well-established Commission precedent has been repeated again and again,” the lawyers wrote. “Based on the quintessential one-mile test relied upon by the Commission for decades, none of the Hearing Requests can be granted.”
But the agency says the one-mile test cited by the company’s lawyers doesn’t exist.
“The Commission has never adopted a one-mile policy,” said TCEQ spokesperson Laura Lopez. “Instead, the Commission applies all factors set out in statute and rules.”
A Citgo refinery fumes behind a home in Hillcrest, Corpus Christi.
Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
Indeed, the test is not codified in Texas law or TCEQ rules. Yet it appears consistently in TCEQ opinions going back at least 13 years as a means to restrict public challenges to air pollution permits. It has beencited repeatedly by industry lawyers anddenounced by environmental advocates.
“This practice is arbitrary and unlawful,” said Erin Gaines, an Austin-based senior attorney with the nonprofit Earthjustice. “TCEQ’s practices prevent people from having a meaningful voice in the permitting process for polluting facilities in their community.”
U.S. law requires that states provide citizens with the opportunity to challenge pollution permits in federal court. The rules regarding who may bring forth challenges are laid out in Article III of the U.S. Constitution, which doesn’t say anything about a distance limit.
Dozens of Texas environmental groups have argued in petitions, now before the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that TCEQ unlawfully restricts access to judicial review, including through the one-mile rule, and litigants in the Max Midstream case have now challenged the use of the one-mile rule in federal court and are awaiting a hearing set for this fall.
The TCEQ, which is responsible for implementing federal pollution laws in Texas, issued its blanket denial that the rule exists despite a list of more than 15 cases compiled by Inside Climate News that centered on the one-mile standard. In some, it was explicitly cited by TCEQ itself, or by industry lawyers. In others, the one-mile standard is depicted on maps produced by the TCEQ. In each case, the distance standard is the main or the only justification offered for granting or denying citizens’ hearing requests.
Last year the nonprofit Earthjustice reviewed 460 requests for air permit hearings between 2016 and 2021. It found that while requests from citizens living within one mile of a facility comprised 12 percent of the requests, they comprised 83 percent of the requests the agency granted; almost all of the remaining 17 percent of granted requests came from people who lived only slightly farther than one mile away.
“TCEQ’s actions speak for themselves,” Gaines said. “TCEQ routinely denies hearing requests from members of the public unless they own property within one mile of a facility.”
The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality central headquarters in Austin, pictured on July 26, 2023
Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
The one-mile standard
Texans who wish to challenge TCEQ permit decisions must file a request with the agency. Its executive director reviews those requests and recommends whether or not the agency’s three commissioners, all appointed by the Republican governor of Texas, should grant them.
To do that, the executive director assesses whether the challengers qualify as “affected persons” with legal standing to bring forth complaints. Texas’ administrative code considers an “affected person” anyone who will be “affected by the application” in a way that is not “common to members of the general public.”
When formulating recommendations, the TCEQ’s Lopez said, the executive director “considers many factors, only one of which relates to the location of the facility.”
However, a review of the agency’s recommendations shows that the distance standard is regularly the only factor used to recommend rejection of hearing requests.
It appears in writing as far back as 2010, when 36 people challenged a permit renewal for a gas processing plant in northeast Texas, mostly complaining about odorous hydrogen sulfide gas coming from the facility’s flares.
“The Executive Director has generally determined that hearing requestors who reside greater than one mile from the facility are not likely to be impacted differently than any other member of the general public,” wrote the executive director at the time, Mark Vickery, who is now a lobbyist for the Texas Association of Manufacturers. “For this permit application, the Executive Director’s staff has determined that no requestors are located within one mile of the proposed facility.”
(The permit renewal in question was not eligible for a hearing anyway, Vikery wrote, because it posed no changes from its original form.)
His recommendation: none of the requestors should be recognized as affected persons. The TCEQ commissioners agreed.
“All requests for a contested case hearing are hereby DENIED,” wrote then-TCEQ Chair Bryan Shaw, who is now a lobbyist for the Texas Oil and Gas Association.
“Rule of thumb“
By 2014, the rule was well known among lawyers for industrial developers. That year, 16 members of the Danevang Lutheran Church in rural Wharton County requested a hearing over plans to build a gas-fired power plant in their tiny town.
In written arguments to the TCEQ, lawyers for the plant developer, Indeck Wharton, wrote, “A key factor the Commission frequently uses as guidance on the distance issue is the one-mile ‘rule of thumb.’”
“While it is not an immutable rule, the Commission frequently uses it as a guide,” the lawyers wrote. “It is not found in any statute, regulation or guidance document. Instead, it is founded in common sense and experience.”
TCEQ’s executive director at the time, Zak Covar, then invoked the one-mile limit.
“Although the church is within one mile of the proposed facility, the request does not claim that any person resides at the church,” Covar wrote before the commissioners denied the church members’ request for a hearing and issued the permit as proposed.
In 2017, the TCEQ received 16 hearing requests — including from local residents, a Texas A&M University chemist and the Bryan Independent School District — over plans by Saint-Gobain Ceramics and Plastic Inc., to build a facility in Bryan.
A 2017 map produced by the TCEQ executive director showing distances of hearing requestors relative to a proposed industrial facility in Bryan, Texas.
Via Inside Climate News
“Because distance from the facility is key to the issue of whether there is a likely impact … the ED has identified an area of approximately one mile from the plant on the provided map,” wrote the executive director at the time, Richard Hyde.
Only Jane Long Intermediate School sat within the one-mile radius. So TCEQ denied 15 hearing requests and granted the school district’s. Later, the school district withdrew its hearing request, citing a settlement agreement with Saint-Gobain, and TCEQ approved the permit application.
Two years later, when Annova LNG applied for permits to build a gas compressor and terminal on the Rio Grande delta, the nearby city of South Padre Island requested a hearing.
“The City stated that it is located more than one mile from the proposed terminal,” wrote the executive director at the time, Toby Baker. “Given the distance of the City from the proposed terminal, the ED recommends that the Commission find that the City is not an affected person.”
The commission agreed. Hearings were denied and a permit was issued.
Also in 2019, 36 residents requested hearings over permits for a concrete plant in Midlothian. The nearest of them, Sarah Ingram, lived 1.2 miles away and expressed concern about the health of her children when protesting the pollution permit.
“As none of the requestors reside within one mile of the plant’s emission point, they are not expected to experience any impacts different than those experienced by the general public,” Baker wrote.
In 2020, the nonprofit Lone Star Legal Aid filed a hearing request on behalf of Port Arthur resident John Beard over a developer’s plans to build an LNG export terminal.
According to the request, Beard regularly spends time on Pleasure Island, an 18-mile long recreational area in Port Arthur that runs as close as 900 feet from the proposed terminal site, in his capacity as the chair of the Pleasure Island Advisory Board.
John Beard pictured in Port Arthur on on July 2, 2018.
Pu Ying Huang/Texas Tribune
In evaluating the request, the TCEQ only considered Beard’s home address, four miles away.
Lone Star Legal Aid filed an 11-page response, claiming “sites like Port Arthur LNG require the commission to consider a larger impact area than merely a mile,” and that “there are no distance restrictions imposed by law on who may be considered an affected person.”
TCEQ referred the question to the State Office of Administrative Hearings, where an administrative law judge agreed with Lone Star Legal Aid, writing, “the Applicant’s own data indicated that operation of the Proposed Facility will result in increased levels of [nitrogen oxides] and [fine particulate matter] at Mr. Beard’s residence.”
The administrative judge declared Beard an “affected person” and ordered a hearing over the pollution permit, which was held in February 2022. A second administrative judge also agreed with some of Lone Star Legal Aid’s complaints and recommended that the TCEQ require Port Arthur LNG to use better pollution control technology that would lower emissions of nitrogen oxides and carbon monoxide from the facility’s eight gas compressor turbines.
Meanwhile, TCEQ has granted hearing requests for requestors who live within a mile. In 2015, a group called Citizens Alliance for Fairness and Progress in Corpus Christi requested a hearing over air pollution permits for a planned modification at a Citgo Refinery, and identified group members living a few blocks from the refinery.
Five years later, the executive director recommended granting the request “because the Alliance identifies as members residents (sic) that reside within one mile of the proposed facility.” Citgo withdrew its application before a hearing was held.
Legal complaints
The country’s landmark environmental laws, the Clean Air and Clean Water acts, require states to provide opportunities for citizens to challenge pollution permits in court, a process known as judicial review, so a judge may evaluate if permits are consistent with federal standards.
Texas law provides such opportunities in its health and safety code, which says: “A person affected by a ruling, order, decision, or other act of the [TCEQ]… may appeal the action by filing a petition in a district court.”
But multiple petitions to the EPA have alleged that Texas courts will only take up pollution permit complaints if the plaintiff has already been through a “contested case hearing” in administrative courts run by the state. Thus, by denying complainants’ requests for contested case hearings, often citing the one-mile standard, the TCEQ controls their access to the courts.
“Participation in the contested case hearing process is a prerequisite to seeking judicial review of a TCEQ permitting decision,” reads one 38-page petition filed with the EPA in 2021 by 22 Texas environmental groups, focused on TCEQ’s water pollution management. “This empowers the TCEQ full discretion to deny any person the right of judicial review.”
Where federal law is concerned, requirements for access to judicial review are laid out in Article III of the U.S. Constitution. When states are charged with enforcing federal law, they may not impose limits beyond what the Constitution says, according to Gaines, the environmental attorney with Earthjustice in Texas.
In another 61-page petition filed last year with the EPA over TCEQ’s air pollution management, 11 Texas environmental groups said the contested case hearing process is absent from the sweeping pollution management plans that Texas, like all states, must submit to the EPA for approval.
That process, the petition says, includes “an arbitrary presumption that only those who own property or live within one mile of a proposed new or modified source are affected persons entitled to participate in a contested case hearing.”
“While not codified anywhere, this ‘rule of thumb’ is used regardless (of) how large the source is, the character of the emissions, the size of a facility’s stacks, or local meteorological conditions,” the petition said.
Max Midstream’s Seahawk oil terminal at the Port of Calhoun County seen on June 7, 2023.
Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
For that petition, an EarthJustice analysis showed that TCEQ granted only 12 percent of hearing requests between 2016 and 2021 — virtually all of them from people who lived within a mile or just slightly further from the applicant’s location.
Early this year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency responded to the 2021 petition and said it was “informally investigating the allegations.”
“If proven to be true, the allegations outlined in the Petition are concerning,” Charles Maguire, the EPA deputy regional administrator, wrote in January.
The EPA can revoke a state’s authority to implement federal environmental law if the state regulator does not meet program requirements, Maguire wrote, including “failure to comply with the public participation requirements.”
A spokesperson for EPA Region 6, Jennah Durant, told Inside Climate News, “Because both petitions are still under review, EPA cannot provide further details at this time.”
Durant declined requests for interviews with Region 6 administrator Earthea Nance and did not respond to questions about why only informal investigations were launched.
“If states start to deviate too much from national expectations about good implementation enforcement, which includes access to judicial review, the EPA can disapprove of the state’s plan,” said Cary Coglianese, director of the Penn Program on Regulation at the University of Pennsylvania. “It’s not a threat that’s used often and it can’t be used lightly.”
Diane Wilson stands in Port Lavaca, across Lavaca Bay from the Formosa Plastics Corp. Plant, pictured on July 23, 2023.
Christopher Baddour/Inside Climate News
The case of Max Midstream
Diane Wilson filed her first hearing request with the TCEQ in 1989. Since then she’s filed over a hundred more, she guesses. Only twice has she been recognized as an affected person, in 1998 and 2015.
“You ask any activist out there, any grassroots person, and they will tell you the same thing about TCEQ,” she said. “They’re in a big love affair with industry.”
Wilson, who leads an organization called San Antonio Bay Estuarine Waterkeeper, filed a challenge with the TCEQ when Max Midstream sought its permit to discharge airborne toxins including “hazardous air pollutants” such as hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, volatile organic compounds and fine particulate matter, all known by the EPA to cause cancer and other serious health impacts.
Her organization, together with the Environmental Integrity Project and Texas Rio Grande Legal Aid, obtained data from Max Midstream’s permit application for the Seahawk Oil Terminal, analyzed it and concluded that the company underrepresented expected emissions in order to avoid a more rigorous review process for larger pollution sources.
That was when lawyers for Max Midstream cited the one-mile rule.
“Based on consistent Commission precedent,” the lawyers wrote. “Only a property owner with an interest within one mile or slightly farther could possibly qualify for a contested case hearing.”
“It’s crazy they say that,” said Wilson, 75, as she sat in a bayside park in Port Lavaca. She pointed across the water to the sprawling Formosa Plastics Corp. plant that stood prominently on the horizon, some seven miles away (farther than Max Midstream). “I have been here and watched releases from that plant come clear across the bay. It’s like a fog come in.”
She submitted to the TCEQ analysis from Ranajit Sahu, a private environmental consultant in California who previously managed air quality programs and has a Ph.D. from the California Institute of Technology. He testified that harmful health impacts from the terminal could extend up to five miles away.
She also pointed to a 2009 study, led by a researcher at Texas A&M University and published in the journal Ecotoxicology, which linked clusters of genetic damage among cows in Calhoun County to industrial emissions up to 15 kilometers (9.3 miles) away. The largest cluster identified was seven kilometers (4.3 miles) from the industrial facilities.
Nevertheless, in a 2022 opinion, Baker, the TCEQ executive director, sided with Max Midstream. Although Wilson had stated that she regularly spent time near the site of the proposed facility, her home was 16 miles away in the town of Seadrift.
Baker wrote: “Given the distance of Ms. Wilson’s residence relative to the location of the terminal, her health and safety would not be impacted in a manner different from the general public. Therefore, the ED recommends that the commission find that Diane Wilson is not an affected person.”
A map produced by the TCEQ executive director in 2022 showing locations of hearing requesters relative to Max Midstream’s Seahawk oil terminal on Lavaca Bay.
Via Inside Climate News
The director used the same reasoning to recommend rejection of hearing requests from five residents in Port Lavaca, about 4 miles across the water from the Seahawk terminal — a complex of huge storage tanks, marine loading docks and a pump station to move oil through a 100-mile pipeline.
They included Mauricio Blanco, a 51-year-old shrimper who said he spends nine hours per day on the water close to the proposed facility, even though he lives six miles away.
Also included: Curtis Miller, 61, owner of Miller’s Seafood, a national wholesaler of shrimp, fish and oysters started by his uncle in the 1960s, with its headquarters on the bayside in Port Lavaca.
In official comments, he told the TCEQ he would be harmed economically by increased air emissions because carbon dioxide from the terminal will contribute to acidification of bay waters, harming the oyster population he depends on.
Baker acknowledged Miller’s economic concerns, but concluded that “based on his location relative to the terminal, Mr. Miller’s health and safety would not be impacted in a manner different from the general public.”
Miller, a stout seaman covered in sunspots, said, “I don’t know what they base that on. I think we could be strongly affected here 4 or 5 miles away.”
From the docks at Port Lavaca, he pointed across the water at the Seahawk Terminal, the tallest feature on the horizon, looming large to the northeast.
Curtis Miller, president of Miller’s Seafood, stands beside his fleet of shrimping boats in Port Lavaca, Texas, on June 7, 2023.
Dylan Baddour/Inside Climate News
“Does that look far away to you?” he said.
Then he pointed at a U.S. flag that was flapping to the southwest, directly from the plant to where he stood.
“Look which way the wind is blowing,” he said. “That’s our prevailing summer wind.”
It issued Max Midstream a permit authorizing 61 different emissions points to release up to eight different air contaminants at a collective rate of hundreds of pounds per hour.
“Emissions from this facility must not cause or contribute to ‘air pollution’ as defined in Texas Health and Safety Code,” the permit said.
In June 2022, Wilson sued the TCEQ in federal court, alleging that it “acted arbitrarily and unreasonably in determining that Plaintiffs did not qualify as affected persons” based solely on distance.
“There are no distance restrictions imposed by law for this type of permit,” reads a legal brief Wilson filed for the case in July 2023.
She claimed TCEQ issued a pollution permit that was not compliant with state and federal law and asked the court to overturn it. A first hearing in the case is set for November.
Jakarta, Indonesia, frequently ranks as one of the most polluted cities in the world, and was recently named the most polluted city on the planet by Swiss air quality technology company IQAir.
Authorities in Indonesia are blaming the air pollution issues in the city of more than 11 million on a combination of vehicle emissions and weather patterns, specifically the current dry season.
For the past few months, residents of Jakarta have been greeted each morning by a combination of gray skies and a blanket of dense smoke, reported The Associated Press.
“In June, July and August, there is invariably an escalation in air pollution in Jakarta due to the dry air,” said senior environment and forestry official Sigit Reliantoro at a press conference, as AFP reported.
Reliantoro said the high pollution levels from June to August were caused by seasonal wind changes.
“I have to wear a mask all the time. Both my body and my face are suffering,” Anggy Violita, a 32-year-old officer worker in Jakarta, told AFP in another report. “Last week my entire family was sick for a week and the doctor told me I should stay indoors.”
Data from the country’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry said transportation produces 44 percent of the air pollution, while 31 percent comes from industry, reported The Associated Press.
Many of the vehicles in Jakarta, particularly motorcycles, are highly polluting and inefficient, and maintenance standards are rarely enforced. Public transportation in the metropolitan area of 30 million is lacking, so heavy traffic produces a constant stream of pollution.
President of Indonesia Joko Widodo, along with six other officials, was charged with neglecting the right of citizens to clean air in 2021. The court ordered that the poor air quality in Jakarta be improved, but health issues related to the city’s air pollution continue to escalate.
“It is increased compared to 2022. And it is almost the same condition we found in 2019 and 2018, before the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Dwi Oktavia, head of disease prevention and control at the Jakarta Health Agency, as Reuters reported. “[W]e should actively be using public transportation and bicycles.”
Indonesia has promised to be carbon neutral by 2050 and to stop the construction of new coal-fired power plants this year, reported AFP. However, one of the largest coal-fired power plants in Southeast Asia, Java’s Suralaya, is being expanded by the Indonesian government.
There are 10 coal-fired plants operating within 100 kilometers of Jakarta, according to Greenpeace Indonesia, and they probably don’t help the city’s pollution issue.
As one solution to Jakarta’s air quality problem, some of the city’s industrial and economic operations are scheduled to be moved to Nusantara, Borneo, which is being planned as the country’s new capital city.
