EPA

4,000 Barrels Of Oil Spill From Louisiana Pipeline

October 20, 2014 Craig Sims, www.ktbs.com Educate! Energy, Environment, EPA, Oil Spill, Safety, usa

MOORINGSPORT, La. (KTBS) - Raw oil is coating around a four mile section of Tete Bayou in Caddo Parish after a major spill Monday, around 8 AM. It happened just southwest of Mooringsport. Three families have been displaced because of the environmental disaster. The burst oil pipe belongs to Sunoco Logistics, which says the exact cause of the spill is still under investigation. Sunoco faces a long cleanup. The company estimates for now that around 4,000 thousand barrels worth of oil poured from the pipe, which carries oil from Texas to Ohio. At a press conference Saturday, it was announced around 1,900 barrels have already been cleaned up so far. Louisiana State Police say the three families were not forced out but asked to leave because of the oil's fumes.

EPA Head Challenged To Drink Water From Fracking Wells

October 14, 2014 Cetology, www.cetology.com Resist! Energy, Environment, EPA, Fracking, Water

If you’ve watched Josh Fox’s blockbuster frack-umentary Gasland, you’re familiar with Dimock, Pennsylvania, the town fracked within an inch of its life by Cabot Oil & Gas. In 2012, the Environmental Protection Agency shut down its investigation into water contamination in Dimock due to fracking, concluding that the water was safe to drink. Yet last year the LA Times and DeSmogBlog revealed that the EPA had covered up findings showing that fracking wells in Dimock caused “methane to migrate up to aquifers to unprecedented levels.” A whistleblower at the EPA subsequently alleged that the studies were dropped for political reasons.

Louisianans Ask For Protections From Big Oil

August 29, 2014 Jessica Hodge, www.earthjustice.org Create! EPA, Louisiana, Oil, Texas

Twenty-four residents representing eight Louisiana communities traveled to Galena Park, Texas, on August 5, 2014 in support of a refinery rule recently proposed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that will force petroleum refineries to reduce toxic air emissions. The Deep South Center for Environmental Justice in partnership with Advocates for Environmental Human Rights organized a group of community residents who have suffered both physical and psychological health problems from toxic chemical exposure due to emissions from nearby refineries in their community. There are currently 142 petroleum refineries in the United States. Exposure to toxic air pollutant emissions can cause upper respiratory problems and can increase the risk of developing cancer. Louisiana residents had an opportunity to testify at the public hearing to urge EPA to move forward with stricter refinery emissions standards to control toxic air emissions being released in their communities. Dorothy Felix, president of Mossville Environmental Action Network (MEAN) in Mossville, LA, testified that there are already 14 large industrial plants in her community and Sasol, a gas to liquid plant, wants to build another facility in her community. She said, “In fact, a section of Mossville is being relocated due to ground water contamination.” Residents in her community were tested for dioxin exposure and test results revealed that some Mossville residents had three times the national average of dioxin in their blood levels. Ms. Felix appealed to the EPA to protect them, saying: “You are the agency in place that has the power to protect fenceline communities.We want you to strongly enforce regulations so that we human beings in the current and future generations can have a healthy and safe environment to live in.”

EPA Non-Responsive On Texas Air Pollution

July 25, 2014 Lisa Song and Jim Morris, www.insideclimatenews.org Organize! EPA, Journalism, pollution, Texas

For more than a year, InsideClimate News and the Center for Public Integrity have been reporting on air pollution caused by the fracking boom in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas. Despite hundreds of complaints from residents, many of them about noxious air emissions, we discovered that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution and rarely fines companies for breaking emission laws. On our 11 trips to Texas we encountered many residents who asked what seemed to be a reasonable question: If a state regulatory agency—in this case the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality—isn't doing much to curb the industry's air pollution, why isn't the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepping in? The EPA, after all, is ultimately responsible for enforcing the federal Clean Air Act. In February, after we published our first stories on the Eagle Ford, we began trying to answer that question by seeking on-the-record interviews with EPA officials in Washington, D.C., and Texas. Five months later, no such interviews have been granted. Instead, EPA press officers have told us to put our questions in writing, an increasingly common response from federal agencies under the Obama administration. The process usually goes like this: A journalist calls the press office to schedule an interview but instead is told to submit written questions. Once these are in, a press officer gets answers from scientists or other officials and then crafts a written response. In most cases, nobody involved in the process—not even the EPA press officers—will agree to be quoted by name.

Green Groups Endorse Empty EPA Carbon Emissions Regulation

June 18, 2014 Ken Ward, www.truth-out.org Educate! Barack Obama, Climate Change, Environment, EPA, Fossil Fuels

For environmentalists, it turns out, climate truth is not merely inconvenient, it is incomprehensible. How else to explain the fawning response of major green groups to President Obama's cynical carbon emissions scheme? The Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) proposed coal plant emissions regulations are a trifecta of terrible: near to useless as emissions policy, effective in distracting attention from the administration's overarching pro-fossil fuel plan, and a tragic obfuscation of the latest, deadly climate science reports. The facts are not in dispute. Climate is in free fall, with recent definitive evidence that the first major geophysical system (the West Antarctic ice shelf) has passed its tipping point, guaranteeing 10 feet of sea level rise and providing irrefutable evidence that the entire, fragile system which has permitted civilization to develop is collapsing. The internationally agreed objective of limiting global temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius is clearly way off base and all climate policy and strategy based on that target, which assumes a timeframe allowing for incremental response, is miscalculated.

How Agribusiness Infiltrated The EPA

June 10, 2014 Kamil Ahsan, www.alternet.org Educate! Corporatism, Corruption, EPA, Food and Agriculture

Earlier this year, in an exposé in The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv detailed the story of Syngenta, an agribusiness firm that was sued by the community water systems of six states in a class-action lawsuit over the firm’s herbicide atrazine. Atrazine is the second most commonly used herbicide in the US and is used on more than 50% of all corn crops. It is one of Syngenta’s most profitable chemicals with sales at over $300 million a year. Banned in the EU, atrazine remains on the market in the US despite scores of scientific publications demonstrating its role in abnormal sexual development. Almost insoluble in water, atrazine contaminates drinking water supplies at 30 times the concentration demonstrated to cause severe sexual abnormalities in animal models. Recently unsealed court documents from the lawsuit have disclosed how Syngenta launched a multimillion-dollar campaign to disrepute and suppress scientific research, and influence the US Environmental Protection Agency to prevent a ban on atrazine.

Will Fracking Companies Finally Be Required To Tell Chemicals They Use?

May 12, 2014 Benjamin Goad, www.thehill.com Educate! EPA, Fracking

The Environmental Protection Agency is taking the first steps toward regulations that could require companies to disclose chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing or “fracking” operations. The EPA issued an advance notice of proposed rule-making Friday in response to a petition filed in 2011 by the environmental group Earthjustice and more than 100 other green organizations pressing for mandatory testing and reporting rules. The groups have raised concerns over various chemicals used during the fracking process, which involves pumping water, sand and chemicals underground in order to fracture rock and unlock trapped oil and gas. The EPA, still in the early stages of the process, said it had made no decision whether to issue regulations, call for voluntary disclosure or some combination of the two. Rather, the agency stressed in a notice filed with the Office of Management and Budget that it is merely putting out a call for feedback from those involved and interested parties and “is not committing to a specific rulemaking outcome.” “EPA anticipates that States, industry, public interest groups, and members of the public will be participants in the process,” the agency said. “The stakeholder process will bring stakeholders together to discuss the information needs and help EPA to ensure any reporting burdens and costs are minimized, ensuring information already available is considered in order to avoid duplication of efforts.”

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