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In recent months, we’ve learned about the Department of Defense hampering EPA’s chemical risk assessments and slowing the study of health effects from the TCE contaminating Camp Lejeune, North Carolina.
Now, the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton reports that DoD is refusing comply with EPA orders to clean up military bases where chemical contamination poses “imminent and substantial” dangers to public health.
When EPA issues “final orders” to polluters, those that don’t comply can be hauled into court and forced to pay fines of up to $28,000 per day for each violation. When the polluter in question is a government agency, though, the picture changes. Layton explains:
An attorney representing a large group of PFOA-exposed individuals sent a letter to EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson and ATSDR Director Howard Frumkin, urging them not to delay any further the release of hazard information and risk assessments on the contaminant perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA, a.k.a. C8). Mr. Bilott was writing on behalf of residents who live near DuPont’s Washington Works plant near Parkersburg, WV and
“who continue to be exposed to this poison in their residential drinking water on a daily basis.”
Companies have evidently realized that marketing anti-bacterial products to U.S. consumers is a good way to make money, and are pushing a wide array of products that claim to have bacteria-fighting properties. (I’ve seen socks, computer products, toys … and even a handy hook you can use to avoid touching a potentially germ-ridden door handle.) This might seem like a good thing - bacteria cause some pretty nasty diseases, after all - except that they’re using nano-sized silver particles to fight the bacteria, and we don’t know nearly enough about the effects of all the nano-sized particles that are entering our environment as we wash, wear, use, and dispose of the hundreds of nano-containing products now on the market.
In the latest issue of The New Republic, Carole Bass provides an excellent overview the issue and why we should be concerned:
The Chicago Tribune has just reported that Mary Gade, the Bush administration’s top environmental regulator in the Midwest, has been forced to quit her job after months of efforts to get Dow Chemicals to clean up dioxin contamination around its Michigan headquarters. The Tribune’s Michael Hawthorne explains:
On the heels of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ report on political interference with EPA scientists, the Government Accountability Office reports that the White House Office of Management and Budget is taking a major and non-transparent role in EPA toxic chemical assessments.
At issue is the agency’s Integrated Risk Information System (IRIS), which contains EPA’s scientific position on the potential human health effects of chemicals. There are 540 chemicals in the system now, but the process of adding them has slowed in recent years, and now there’s a backlog of 70 chemicals. This slowdown has serious consequences, because IRIS assessments inform federal environmental standards and many environmental protection programs at the local, state, and even international level. NRDC’s Jennifer Sass notes that the IRIS database received an average of roughly 600 requests a day this month.
The GAO cites multiple reasons for the slowdown, including the growing complexity and scope of risk assessments, but the “interagency review process” requested and managed by the OMB is at the top of the list of problems. In this process, agencies that might be affected by the assessments get a chance to provide comments and questions to EPA. The GAO explains why OMB instituted this policy in the first place:
The Union of Concerned Scientists has released another disturbing report about political interference with government science. For Interference at the EPA, they surveyed EPA scientists from all of the agency’s scientific program offices and 10 regional offices, and from more than a dozen research laboratories, to learn about the extent and type of political interference with EPA science. Like UCS’s previous investigations on the Food and Drug Administration, Fish and Wildlife Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and federal climate scientists, this one found significant administration manipulation of science that is supposed to serve our health and environment.
I’m sure none of our regular readers will be surprised to hear that 889 scientists (60% of the 1,586 who completed surveys) personally experienced at least one incident of political interference during the past five years, or that 516 scientists knew of “many or some” cases in which EPA political appointees inappropriately involved themselves in scientific decisions. The survey did turn up a few things that were less predictable, though – and the report is well worth reading in any case, because it’s an excellent compilation of what ought to be going wrong at EPA, where the problems are, and how to fix them.
One year ago yesterday, the Supreme Court ruled that EPA must formally declare whether greenhouse gases could harm human health, and if they find that they do, regulate automobile greenhouse-gas emissions. Last week, EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson revealed the Bush administration’s response to the Court’s requirement: they’re going to drag their feet some more, using the excuse of more information-gathering.
Eighteen states, led by Massachusetts, have responded by filing a petition in federal court, asking the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington to order the EPA to make its determination about greenhouse gases’ harm to human health within the next 60 days. Beth Daley and Stephanie Ebbert of the Boston Globe explain the states’ position:
In a welcome contrast to the disappointing ozone rule the agency announced last week, EPA has issued tougher air-pollution standards for diesel locomotives and marine engines. When fully implemented in 2030, the new standards will reduce particulate matter pollution by 90% and nitrogen oxide emissions by 80%. The new standards only cover ships traveling on inland waterways and between U.S. ports – which means that LA and Long Beach residents will still be breathing lots of pollution from international cargo ships – but EPA estimates that its benefits will still be substantial:
EPA has set the limit for pollution-forming ozone in the air to 75 ppb, despite the unanimous advice of the Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee to set it between 60-70 ppb (more here on the health effects of ozone). This is hardly a surprise, given the Bush Administration’s record. But in this case, it’s apparently not enough to make a single standard insufficiently protective; administration officials have decided to take on the rulemaking requirements of the Clean Air Act. The Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin explains:
In the largest Superfund cleanup settlement ever, W.R. Grace has agreed to pay $250 million to cover government investigation and cleanup costs associated with the asbestos-laden ore the company mined in Libby, Montana.
EPA has already spent roughly $168 million removing asbestos-contaminated soils and other dangerous materials, EPA Emergency Coordinator Paul Peronard told the Missoulian. He estimates that it will take another $175 million to get to the point where cleanup efforts are considered a success – which doesn’t mean that the town will be entirely clean. EPA cleanup efforts started in 2000, and the agency filed suit against W.R. Grace in 2001 to recover costs. The company was already facing thousands of asbestos-related lawsuits, and filed for bankruptcy.
Andrew Schneider, who first drew national attention to Libby’s plight in a series of Seattle P-I articles, points out that W.R. Grace still faces a criminal trial:
We’ve written before about the problems with conflicts of interest on EPA scientific advisory panels. In particular, we think scientists working for product defense firms, whose money comes from clients seeking to avoid regulation of their products, ought to be barred from such panels. Now, a group is raising concerns about bias on an EPA panel reviewing the brominated flame retardant deca – but the charge comes from an industry group that’s concerned about the state-government scientist chairing the panel, and the EPA has acceded quickly to their wishes.
The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco has ruled that California’s regulation of pollution from ships using its port is pre-empted by the Clean Air Act, and thus requires a waiver from the EPA. This is bad news for the state, since the last time it requested a waiver from EPA, the agency delayed for a long time and then denied the request – against the advice of its legal and scientific staff.
As the recent problems with tainted food, drugs, toys, and other consumer products have made clear, our regulatory system has a lot of holes in it. Part of the problem is the current reluctance of agency appointees to do anything that might burden the industries in question, but that’s not the whole story. It’s also the case that the laws we rely on to protect us from dangerous products simply aren’t strong enough.
The Lowell Center for Sustainable Production (at the University of Massachusetts Lowell) has just issued two reports that pinpoint the policy problems we’re facing and offer suggestions for how to fix them.
The Presumption of Safety: Limits of Federal Policies on Toxic Substances in Consumer Products identifies these four limitations in the current regulatory system:
Forbes has created a “Misery Measure” to rank the country’s 150 biggest metro areas, and I wasn’t surprised to see Detroit awarded the title of Most Miserable City. What did surprise me, though, was one of the factors Forbes considered: number of Superfund sites. Kudos to them for acknowledging that hazardous waste has a way of interfering with residents’ happiness.
The article doesn’t go into detail about Superfund misery; for that, we can look at an investigation by the Center for Public Integrity, which discovered that site cleanups are dragging, companies are forking over less to clean up the messes they made, and many hazardous sites are going without much-needed work. The Center’s Joaquin Sampson elaborates:
When the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) introduced its Program Assessment Rating Tool (PART) in 2003, it had what sounded like a worthwhile goal: get federal agencies to evaluate how well they do their jobs, in order to assure that taxpayer money is used efficiently. Like so much that comes out of the Bush White House, though, PART consumes too much agency time to produce something of questionable utility.
An “ineffective” rating can have serious adverse consequences for agencies and programs, so when the Environmental Protection Agency had particular difficulty demonstrating that it met PART’s definition of efficiency, it asked the National Research Council for guidance. I’m sure none of our readers will be surprised to hear that the NRC determined that the PART’s one-size-fits-all approach to measuring agency progress is itself not very efficient or useful.
By Les Leopold
If you need a quick snooze, read a US Government Accountability Office report with its carefully parsed prose. But lost in the holiday rush was a December GAO report that could keep you awake as it bashes the Bush administration’s effort to water down the community Right to Know regulations that provide us with potentially life-saving information about the use, storage and release of toxic substances. These regulations require that companies make detailed reports which form the Toxics Release Inventory – an accessible public database on the quantity of toxic chemicals on site and how much has been released into the air, land and water.
The rule changes have the smell of freshly minted money. Industry saves as the paperwork declines. More protection from histrionic public peeping toms is also welcomed by these secretive corporations The GAO estimates the new rules permits “3,500 facilities to no longer report detailed information about their toxic chemical releases and waste management practices.” Of the 90,000 Toxic Release Inventory reports now filed, 22,000 could no longer be available to the public. Although the EPA claimed the rules would impact reporting on less than one percent of total toxic releases nationwide, the GAO warned that it “masked the disproportionately large impact the rule would have on individual communities across the country.” But really, should anybody care about these arcane fine points?
Remember how EPA library closures and record purges were threatening public access to important environmental information? Now Congress is requiring the agency to restore library services, reports Katherine Boyle of Greenwire:
U.S. EPA must craft plans to reopen regional libraries shuttered from a Bush administration cost-cutting effort under a provision in the agency’s fiscal 2008 budget.
Congress allocated nearly $3 million for restoring library services and requires the agency to report its progress to lawmakers within three months.
At issue are EPA libraries that were closed in Chicago, Dallas, Kansas City and Washington and those in Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle whose staffing and operating hours were trimmed.
Why are these libraries so important? Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility explains:
EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson has denied California’s petition to limit greenhouse gas emissions from cars and trucks—against the advice of technical and legal staff, reports the Washington Post’s Juliet Eilperin. Governor Schwarzenegger says his state will sue over the decision, and EPA lawyers and staff predict California will win that suit (just as states have won previous related suits).
Johnson claims that California’s proposed tailpipe emissions standards aren’t necessary, anyway, because the Energy Bill that’s just been approved will boost fuel economy standards to a comparable level. (He neglected to mention that California’s standard requires quicker automaker action and continued improvements over time.) Just like the automakers, Johnson stresses that the federal legislation is better because it protects us all from that terrifying fate: having a patchwork of state standards. Whew – good thing we escaped that one! I’m sure everyone agrees it’s worth the price of rising sea levels, parched crops, and more climate-change-related death and disease.
David Roberts at Gristmill points out that Johnson is being both deceptive and hypocritical here. Read the rest of this entry »
If you live near a facility that releases between 500 and 2,000 pounds of a toxic chemical each year, you may be about to lose your access to important information about what you and your neighbors are potentially exposed to. That’s because EPA has changed its Toxics Release Inventory reporting requirements, raising the level at which facilities have to start detailed reporting on the release of designated chemicals from 500 pounds to 2,000. (More on the TRI and why it’s important here.) Thanks to the new rule, more than 3,500 facilities will be able to skip filing more than 22,000 TRI reports.
A report released yesterday by the Government Accountability Office (PDF) tells us that the change is a blow to EPA programs, the IRS, state governments, researchers, and local advocacy groups that rely on TRI data. It also tells us that the EPA skipped some important steps in the usual process in order to meet a commitment to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
There are times when it makes sense to rush a rule process and skip some of the usual steps – for instance, when exposure to a dangerous chemical is destroying workers’ lungs, and delay will mean that more workers will be hurt. What was the urgent reason for rushing this rule to completion?
At last week’s annual meeting of the American Public Health Association (APHA), the organization adopted more than a dozen new policy resolutions which will guide its work into the future. Included among them was a call for “Congress to fundamentally restructure the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 (TSCA)” so that more attention is paid to the toxic and ecotoxic properties of chemicals in commerce.
Today is Blog Action Day, when bloggers around the world post about environmental topics. It seems like a good time to take a look at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which has been in the news lately.
Late last month, as Carol Leonnig reported in the Washington Post, EPA issued new national water regulations that it said will help reduce lead in drinking water, keep utilities honest in testing for lead and warn the public when water poses a health risk.
That sounds good, right? EPA is doing its job to keep our air and water healthy and clean. It’s too bad that other recent news items paint a far bleaker picture of the agency’s work on pollutants.
Last week, the U.S. EPA issued a new regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) to help reduce the amount of lead contained in consumers’ tap water. The new rule amends a 1991 EPA’s “Lead and Copper Rule” by requiring improved monitoring and replacement of lead-service lines, and providing more complete information to consumers (by water utilities) so they receive more timely and useful information about lead contamination in their drinking water.
By Liz Borkowski
Here in the U.S., people seem to like the idea of our government ensuring that we’ve got clean air, clean water, and healthy workplaces, and that our exposure to toxic substances is limited. However, we also keep electing politicians who make it hard for federal agencies to ensure these things.
We’ve written before about problems at OSHA, where workers suffer from preventable harm while officials emphasize voluntary compliance at the expense of standard-setting, and at FDA, where a rush to review new drug applications leaves post-market drug safety under-resourced. While presidential appointees heading these agencies deserve a share of the blame (a hefty share, in the case of OSHA’s Edwin Foulke), the legislation governing agency activities often erects hurdles that can slow progress to a crawl. A new report from Environmental Defense shows how this is happening at EPA with toxic chemical legislation.
By Myra L. Karstadt, Ph.D
On June 13, a team of which I was part received EPA’s highest award: The Administrator’s Gold Medal for Exceptional Service. According to the citation, the award was given to us “For successful conclusion of the largest administrative penalty action in history which will significantly improve reporting of TSCA toxic chemical risk information.”
The DuPont case, which I worked on from mid-2003 (the beginning of the investigation that resulted in the litigation) until I left EPA at the end of May 2005, was based in greatest part on the company’s violation of reporting regulations under section 8(e) of the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). TSCA covers the production and distribution of commercial and industrial chemicals, and its goal is “to ensure that chemicals sold and used in the United States do not pose an unreasonable risk to human health and the environment.” Section 8(e) requires U.S. chemical manufacturers, importers, processors and distributors to notify EPA within 30 days of “new, unpublished information on their chemicals that may lead to a conclusion of substantial risk to human health or to the environment.” EPA determined that DuPont repeatedly failed to notify the agency about substantial risk of injury to human health or the environment that DuPont obtained about PFOA, a chemical involved in producing DuPont’s Teflon®, from as early as 1981 and as recently as 2004.
You’d think that a statutory section that resulted in “the largest administrative penalty action in history” would have a good deal of staff and resources devoted to it, and would be enforced with vigor with regard to violators other than DuPont. Sounds logical, but if that’s what you’re thinking, you would be wrong.
A couple of weeks ago, EPA proposed a new National Ambient Air Quality Standard for ozone (0.07 – 0.075 ppb) that was lower than the current limit (0.08 ppb) but not as protective as the limit many experts suggested (0.06). The agency also announced that it would be taking comments on alternative standards from 0.06 – 0.08 ppb. (Read this post on the announcement for more.) On Wednesday at 10am, this proposed revision will be the subject of a hearing held by the Senate Environment & Public Works Committee’s Clean Air & Nuclear Safety Subcommittee.
While we’re waiting to hear EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson give Senators more details about EPA’s ozone proposal, it’s worth checking out an editorial from a journal of the American Thoracic Society that gives the best one-page summary I’ve seen of the relevant science and the dangerous politics involved. (Via the American Lung Association’s Clean Air Standards page.)
Remember back in May, when public health advocates sounded the alarm about the fact that EPA’s short list of nominees for its Science Advisory Board asbestos panel included scientists associated with product defense firms? As David Michaels explained, these firms are hired by corporations and trade associations to minimize government regulation, and scientists associated with them have a fundamental conflict of interest that should preclude their participation in EPA’s science advisory panels.
Now a similar problem is arising with another SAB panel: the particulate matter review panel of SAB’s Clean Air Scientific Advisory Committee, which will “review EPA’s technical and policy assessments that form the basis for updating the national ambient air quality standards (NAAQS) for particulate matter.” The EPA has released the short list of nominees, and Merrill Goozner at GoozNews explains what’s wrong with it:
By Liz Borkowski
In a commentary in the latest issue of JAMA, Sheldon Krimsky (a member of the planning committee for the Project on Scientific Knowledge and Public Policy, and a contributor to this blog) and Tania Simoncelli examine the EPA’s guidelines for testing pesticides on humans and find that the agency is making “a fundamental shift in moral thinking – and a striking departure from the moral codes that have provided the guidance for human experiments.”
The public (that’s you) have until May 24 to comments on EPA’s list of nominees for its Science Advisory Board panel on asbestos. David Michaels has weighed in on this issue and is submitting his comments today to EPA. Another organization providing input is the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Writing on behalf of NRDC, senior scientist Jennifer Sass writes:
On the whole, industry-employed scientists and scientists working for industry-supported research institutions tend to downplay the effects of toxic chemicals. …Here, many, if not most of the industry nominees developed their asbestos publication record in the last five years, becoming “instant experts” in the service of their corporate clients. The nominees are unfit to provide EPA with robust independent scientific advice.
A complete list of the nominees appears here.
by Revere, cross-posted at Effect Measure
The Bush Administration hates science. Science is reality-based and some truths are politically inconvenient. But there are things that can be done. Like this:
By David Michaels
In a move that recognizes the post-election climate change in Washington, the EPA has told two Democratic Senators that it is revising plans to roll-back the reporting requirements of the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI). In a post yesterday, I wrote about TRI as an important (and cost-effective) example of “Regulation by Shaming” or “Democracy by Disclosure.”
Juliet Eilperin of the Washington Post obtained the letter EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson sent to New Jersey Democratic senators Frank Lautenberg and Robert Menendez in which he announced his plans. According to Eilperin, one of the nation’s best environmental reporters, this change
highlights how the political climate has shifted since the Democrats won control of the House and Senate. The administration is not likely to bend on its top environmental priorities, such as climate change, but it may make concessions on other fronts.
