If Scott Pruitt wants to spend his professional career as little more than a cabana boy to polluters, that’s his business. Until. He wants to be in charge of the US Environmental Protection Agency, whose mission it is to regulate and, where necessary, punish those same polluters. There, Pruitt’s joy…
How long after the discovery of chemical contamination in groundwater should the government be checking to see if those chemicals have turned into a gas (“vapor”), and migrated upward to intrude into the breathing space of homes? They shouldn’t wait a quarter of a century, that’s for sure. News just…
The US Consumer Products Safety Commission (CPSC) continues to provide very valuable information about consumer products which are recalled for the threats they pose to the health of their users, and perhaps others. For example, CPSC reports that, over just the last two weeks, tens of thousands of products have…
All landfills produce gas. The decomposition of the garbage dumped there sets off a chemical process that produces potentially many different kinds of gasses. If you live near a landfill-particularly near an older or still operating landfill-you should be concerned about whether the landfill’s gasses are negatively affecting your family’s…
Over these last few days since President Trump pulled the US out of the Paris climate accord, he and his aides-most prominently, EPA chief Scott Pruitt-have been unwilling to answer a simple question: “Does the President think that climate change is a hoax?” However, for as important as this question…
One of the surest topics on which to get agreement is that we should punish the filing of “frivolous” lawsuits. There are legitimate debates to be had over the definition of “frivolous”, who decides what is “frivolous”, and what the punishment (usually called a “sanction”) should be. For years, and…
I strongly believe that there is. As a lawyer who has represented many thousands of families victimized by contamination of their air and water, I see the same things happening over and over again: ·Poor, inner-city minorities are disproportionately the victims of these environmental problems. To a far greater degree…
Your average second-grader knows that 1,300 is not the same as 50,000…..and that 400 is not the same as 7,000. But the man who heads the US EPA evidently does not know this. EPA chief Scott Pruitt was all over the airwaves the last few days, defending the United States’…
It’s such a compelling story: A 10-years-in-the-making plan to pour $1 billion into the redevelopment of Jordan Downs, a once-dangerous, crime-ridden public housing project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, that had been the stage for nationally-televised riots in the 1960s. The idea is to convert what had been…
President Trump’s decision to abandon America’s commitment to the Paris Climate Change Accord is just the latest horrible environmental decision that he has made. Here are just some of the others: Trump named as head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, a lackey for the petroleum industry who has spent his…