How controversial is it to want to make examples out of bad actors? If you're a judge or a prosecutor, you're often applauded for going after repeat offenders in a way that will send a very strong signal to others who might be doing the same thing or contemplating it. But if you're an EPA Regional Administrator gong after environmental criminals? Then you're a power-hungry red-eyed socialist devil out to destroy American capitalism. So it goes in the latest attempt by industry to smear Dr. Al Armendariz, one of the most knowledgable Regional Administrators in the country and a real burr under the oil and gas industry's saddle. Apparently someone on Oklahoma Senator Jim Inhofe's staff was dumping old video when they came across a short presentation by Dr. Armendariz in 2010 where he explains how he makes use of the limited enforcement capabilities and resources he has at his disposal. His solution? Take the worst actors violating the law and make an example out of them so dissuade others. Here's what he said, "In terms of manpower, you're right. I am limited in the number of enforcement staff I've got. I've got about 150 people to do enforcement. I've got five states. So we're limited in terms of where we can go and what we can do. But as I said oil and gas is an enforcement priority. I was in a meeting once and I gave an analogy to my staff about my philosophy of enforcement. It's probably a little crude and maybe not appropriate, but I'll tell you what I said. The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They’d go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they’d find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years. And so you make examples out of people who are in this case not compliant with the law. Find people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them, and there is a deterrent effect there. And, companies that are smart see that, they don’t want to play that game, and they decide at that point that it’s time to clean up. And, that won’t happen unless you have somebody out there making examples of people. So you go out, you look at an industry, you find people violating the law, you go aggressively after them. And we do have some pretty effective enforcement tools. Compliance can get very high, very, very quickly. That’s what these companies respond to is both their public image but also financial pressure. So you put some financial pressure on a company, you get other people in that industry to clean up very quickly."  That was in 2010. But because the industry thinks it has some political momentum coming out of the recent Range Resources settlement, the good Senator from Fossil fuels digs up this two-year old piece of video, takes it out of context and proclaims it a brand new reason to fire Dr. Armendariz. Then their flunkies in the media like this Forbes columnist or Glenn Hunter at D Magazine this morning, repeat the line verbatim without necessarily filling you in on the date of the speech, the context of the answer, or the exact full-length quote in hopes of ginning up some kind of Astroturf controversy that results in Armendariz having to resign. Not going to happen.  But it does show the desperation and great lengths the industry will go to in order to oust Armendariz, someone who knows them well and is trying to keep them honest in their own backyard. Remind EPA head honcho Lisa Jackson how valuable it is to have someone like Dr. Armendariz running Region 6 - e-mail her at jackson.lisap@epa.gov
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Frisco Unleaded, the local citizens group sponsored by Downwinders, along with four other national and state environmental groups, have petitioned the EPA to reconsider the new National Ambient Air Quality Standard (NAAQS) for lead that's driving the nation's lead smelters to enclose their facilities and lower their emissions by this coming fall. And they're using our old friends at EarthJustice for their lawyers. In their petition filed today, the groups, including the national Sierra Club, California Communities Against Toxics, Missouri Coalition for the Environment, and the national Resource Defense Council, told EPA that it erred in relying on a standard that aims only for an "adequate margin," when the official regulatory goal is supposed to be an "ample margin of safety" to protect public health from lead. Now maybe that sounds like so much bureaucratic nit-picking to you at first, but what it turns out to mean is that the EPA didn't consider the health effects of breathing lead on those people already living around lead smelters that emit lots of lead into the air. Hard to believe, and as it turns out, the EPA usually does assess harms from all kinds of exposure pathways. It just didn't do it for lead. It settled for a number that seems very strict - ten times lower than the old standard, when in fact, there was lots of evidence that the number should have been much lower, and that the technology to achieve it was already in use. According to the petition, "EPA reduced emissions no more than needed to assure that a source in the Secondary Lead Smelting source category would not alone emit to the extent that the ambient air concentration of lead would exceed 0.15 μg/m3. EPA did not assess each type of risk caused by lead emissions – including chronic inhalation and multipathway risk and other potential risks – independently from its assessment on the NAAQS, and it thus has failed to show how it considered the full impact of secondary lead smelters’ emissions on public health." One of the most important points made on behalf of Frisco residents was that the new standard wasn't written to be protective of people who've lived where there's been decades of lead smelter fallout. "EPA’s reliance on the NAAQS has failed to appropriately take into account the ongoing impact of historic air emissions on the most-exposed people near secondary lead smelters, and has not assessed or explained how the NAAQS could provide ‚acceptable‛ protection in view of this history. The affected communities near sources in this source category have experienced persistent, bioaccumulative toxic air emissions for years, in the form of lead, cadmium, arsenic, and other hazardous air pollutants (HAPs)." Specifically, the petition cites Frisco has an exceptional community, "For affected communities like Frisco, TX that have experienced years of past exposure, which in turn have increased current health risk, smaller amounts of additional emissions are even more likely to cause greater harm."   If you look at the other groups that filed today's petition, they're all well-established. Frisco Unleaded isn't even a year old yet, and it's already taking on the EPA. As organizational parents, we couldn't be more proud.   Read More

After 21 years, four Presidents, countless political battles and lots of pollution, the EPA finally released its health reassessment of Dioxin this past Friday. Like so many environmental decisions from this Administration, the report splits important hairs. While confirming that ultra-low exposures (we're talking 1 millionth of a gram or less) to Dioxin can cause damage to a person's immune and reproductive systems, cause skin rashes and liver damage, EPA says that levels of exposure for most Americans have declined so much over the last two decades that there should be no significant risk. To at least one expert, that was an      "very odd statement." Arnold Schecter of University of Texas School of Public Health, noted that EPA's assurances really didn't jibe "because some people are more highly exposed than average and some groups, such as fetuses and nursing babies, are more sensitive to the effects." What other populations are more highly exposed to Dioxin? People who live downwind of facilities where its emitted - power plants, cement plants, and lead smelters, to name a few. DFW residents live downwind from all three. Exide's lead smelter in Frisco was the 9th largest dioxin polluter in Texas in 2009, releasing more of the poison than industrial facilities many times its size. While most exposures come through eating or drinking animal products that contain dioxin because the animals themselves were contaminated and store it in their fat, breathing in dioxins directly is also a pathway of exposure when you live near a place that burns hazardous wastes, smelts metals, or deals with a lot of chlorinated materials. Like millions of DFW residents. While there was a lot of disappointment by environmentalists at the lack of follow-through on the report, the food industry is sweating bullets over its conclusions. Last year, food industry groups wrote the EPA, stating that  most Americans could “easily exceed the daily [0.7 picogram limit] after consuming a single meal or heavy snack." Now they're afraid safer food advocates will use the report to push for new restrictions on how much of one of the most poisonous substances ever discovered can be included in their food products. Indeed. How unreasonable to expect less human-made poison dreck in your food. No release date for the part of the reassessment dealing with cancer risks.   Read More

For years now insiders in DC have known that one of the most effective ways to kill new environmental regulatory initiatives is to park it at the White House's Office of Management and Budget. At OMB such things are subject to an additional gauntlet of industry-friendly cost-benefit analysis before they can be approved. It's known as the place where rules go to die. It's most prominent victim in the Obama Administration has been the new federal ozone standard that got nixed last year. In 2010, however, EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson sent a list of widely used chemicals for review to the OMB as part of an ambitious effort to create an inventory of "Chemicals of Concern." The idea was to overhaul the antiquated way the government regulates, or rather doesn't regulate, the sea of commercial toxic chemicals we swim in everyday. Usually, a OMB review will take 90 to 120 days. We're at Day 639 and counting on this one. That's how you know this rule is in deeply injected do-do. Then there's this: out of the nine meetings about this rule that OMB has hosted, 6 of them have been with industry, one with environmental groups supporting the rules, and one with two Democratic Senators sponsoring legislation on the same topic. Although the exact names on Jackson's list have not been released, it's believed to "include Bisphenol A, found in many plastic products and believed to interfere with the hormone system; a group of eight phthalates, found in many plastics and cosmetics and believed to alter development of the male reproductive system; and certain polybrominated diphenyl ethers, used as flame retardants in many products and believed to cause thyroid problems and hamper brain development." Now, it sounds like these rules would implement new controls or ban their production. Nope. Instead, "the rule itself would do little more than alert the public that the EPA believes certain chemicals may pose health risks and is trying to gather more information. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce complained that the regulation would amount to “blacklisting” of these substances, which could lead to “market disruptions and litigation.”  Oh no, not market disruptions and litigation. Then please, you're right, by all means don't stop lining our soup cans with chemicals that can do weird things to our man and lady parts. Meanwhile, EPA's legal authority for doing this very kind of review isn't in question. Under what's known as the Toxic Substances Control Act, passed in 1976, it has the right. It just never exercised it because of the push back from industry. 80,000 chemicals in the marketplace. Only a handful ever comprehensively examined for their effects on human health. But don't worry, OMB has your back.    Read More

Dioxin is the name given to a group of long-lasting, very potent toxic chemicals. It's the poison that contaminated Vietnam and Vietnam veterans as Agent Orange, as well as Love Canal, New York and Times Beach, Missouri as buried chemical waste. It's so toxic, emissions are measured in grams, not pounds or tons. Today, dioxin isn't manufactured. It's a by-product of facilities that use or burn chlorinated materials. Maybe you think dioxin isn't your problem since you don't live near a industrial polluter. Think again. DFW is full of dioxin sources. Cement plants are a huge source. Most of North Texas' six million residents live downwind form three of them in Midlothian. Lead smelters are also a large source. We've got one of those in Frisco. Wastewater treatment facilities - every city has one. Moreover, dioxins are very mobile and travel very long distances where they bio-accumulate in living things, like people and the things people eat, like cows, and the things that cows make, like cheese and milk. As a result, nearly every American has some dioxin in them already. In 1985, an EPA report concluded that Dioxin caused cancer at low levels of exposure. In fact, the agency’s estimate of the cancer risk to humans from dioxin exposure was by far the highest defined for any chemical by any government agency anywhere in the world at the time. An official reassessment was supposed to codify Dioxin's dangers and pave the way for increased regulations that would limit exposure. But believe it or not, that official reassessment, begun in 1994, still hasn't seen the light of day because of industry pressure. Now the folks at the Center for Health, Environment and Justice have begun a petition campaign aimed at EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson that they hope will finally get things moving. They're looking for signatures from everybody, not just groups or their leaders, so swing by and sign-on. And if you want more information on what dioxin is, why it's so harmful and what industries produce it, check out the CHEJ's dioxin resource page.   Read More

Reuters has the run down on the plethora of new EPA clean air rules coming down in the next year or so, including resolution of the cross-state regs, vehicle efficiency, fracking emissions, Greenhouse Gases, and Coal Ash rules. We know there's been a lot of justifiable disappointment with this Administration, but please look at this agenda and try to imagine that any part of it would be coming from an EPA run by any of the current GOP presidential candidates. It's pretty much impossible.   Read More

This is not a story that will ever make national headlines. It hardly even got a respectably-sized article in the town where it's taking place. But for beat-down citizen-soldiers of the air wars looking for proof that their own local battles can affect national policy, it's a tale worth telling. Yesterday, the Department of Justice and EPA announced a settlement agreement with a multinational cement company called ESSROC. Among other things, the agreement calls for the pilot testing of advanced Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) pollution control technology at ESSROC's two obsolete wet kilns in Logansport, Indiana. Wet kilns like the three at Ash Grove's Midlothian plant. It will be the first demonstration of this remarkable technology on wet kilns anywhere in the world. Last year, DOJ reached a similar agreement with LaFarge Cement that's requiring a pilot test of SCR on a dry kiln in Illinois. Those results are due by July, 2013. The results from the wet kilns in Indiana will be due by May, 2015. This will be about the time the DFW area is trying to assemble a new clean air plan to reach the just-announced ozone standard of 75 parts per billion. We'll have pilot tests of SCR on both types of kilns in Midlothian, and Downwinders will be using those tests to advocate finally requiring SCR on all Midlothian cement kilns. In use in European cement kilns for a decade, SCR - basically a huge industrial size version of the catalytic converter every US car has - has been proven to reduce emissions of smog-forming Nitrogen Oxides by 90% or more, while also reducing Particulate Matter pollution, metals, and dioxins. It's considered the gold standard of kiln control technology. When it does end up in Midlothian, SCR will be coming back to the kilns and people that are responsible for its import into the US. That's because Downwinders was the first citizens group in the country to began advocating the use of SCR in cement kilns - way back in the year 2000, as part of a DFW anti-smog plan. Impossible the state and cement companies said. Too expensive. Not technically feasible. We didn't win, but we kept up with information about the technology. A couple of years later, our modest assistance to a group of citizens fighting a proposed Holcim cement plant right on the banks of the Hudson in New York gave us access to their hired engineering expertise, which had done its own technical review of SCR in Europe. We took that information and made it a basis for a demand in our own settlement with EPA and TCEQ over the failed 2000 DFW air plan to do an independent review of SCR for application to the Midlothian kilns. That 2006 study is still the only study of its kind in the nation. Much to TCEQ's lasting chagrin, that report confirmed that SCR was technically and economically feasible for application on the Midlothian cement plants. TCEQ has done its best to run away from that report every since, even having its staff perjure themsleves in state legislature testimony about its conclusions, but it got published and distributed nationwide. Other states and engineers read it, and are still using it. During this same time Downwinders, with the help of funding acquired through yet another settlement, hired its first ever technical expert, a young engineer from SMU named Al Armendariz. One of his jobs was to review the SCR report we'd generated and collect more data on the track record of the technology in Europe. By the end of his stint, he was somewhat of an expert on cement control technology, especially SCR. And then he went to go to work as the Regional Administrator of EPA. As it happens, EPA was in the middle of a national enforcement initiative involving the entire US cement industry. Many of the violations that were found revolved around illegal and excessive emissions of Nitrogen Oxides. Downwinders pressed for SCR pilot tests as part of these agreements. In January, 2010 EPA and DOJ announced the LaFarge settlement requiring a first-ever US pilot test of SCR. In discussions with EPA Midwestern staff afterwards, it was clear that the TCEQ report and Downwinders's efforts were well-known and provided the technical evidence to help drive the settlement talks toward including an SCR provision. Yesterday' announcement of a new round of SCR pilot-testing indicates that influence is still being felt.....Did we need luck? Absolutely. Did we make our own luck? Absolutely. We were opportunistic as hell. We advanced the cause at every turn. We fit square pegs into round holes. Unrelated developments got pulled into relationships that built on previous steps because we saw a path that nobody else did. We slowly built the technical and political scaffolding we needed. And these last two years have seen the fruits of that strategy. What began as a demand for a specific control measure for a local DFW clean air plan has now brought the entire US cement industry to the brink of using a control technology that could bring massive reductions in pollution nationwide. This is a story about the un-sexy, un-Erin Brockovich way of grinding out incremental social change with small groups of very persistent people. And it's the way progress is made most of the time. Want to change the world? Start in your own backyard.   Read More

"Shelved ozone standard would have had modest impact on business, politics"  The Center on Public Integrity follows-up and wonders what all the fuss was about.   Read More