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 in providing total, unbridled servitude to polluters has no place.
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 broke out of Bellaire, Ohio that the EPA will soon be testing to see if perchloroethylene (PCE), known to be in area groundwater since the 1990s, is intruding in vapor form into overlying homes and businesses. PCE belongs to a family of chemicals known as VOC’s– “volatile organic compounds”–precisely because they convert to gas so readily. PCE, TCE (trichloroethylene), DCE (dichloroethylene) and VC (vinyl chloride) are among the VOC’s which were used by factories beginning more than 100 years ago as industrial cleaners (“degreasers”), and then often recklessly dumped, spilled or buried, and left to bleed down through the soil and into groundwater supplies. PCE was notoriously used and dumped by dry cleaners, which seems to have been the problem in Bellaire.
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 been recalled. Do you have any of these in your home or office?
·Arctic Cat Snowmobiles (impact hazard)
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 safety.
The focus of this blog is landfill gas migrating below the surface. If not properly collected and treated, it can migrate away from the landfill via underground pipes, or the local soil composition (geology), if it is porous enough to allow the migration. Why is this underground gas migration a problem? Because these migrating underground gasses can be explosive, if trapped in confined spaces, such as a manhole, or the utility room, crawl space, or basement of a nearby home. Methane is the gas to be concerned with here. It has been known to travel as far away from a landfill as a quarter mile or more, even almost three-quarters of a mile in one landfill case in which I represented the local affected families.
If you are concerned about whether your landfill’s methane gas may be migrating to your neighborhood, please use this “Landfill Gas Explosion Hazard Checklist”, provided by the Agency for Toxic Substances Disease Registry (ATSDR), to help you figure out whether there is a legitimate concern, and, if so, what to do about it. https://www.atsdr.cdc.gov/hac/landfill/html/ch3.html
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 is, it is unnecessary. Why? Because we already know the answer. And the answer is that Trump and Pruitt do not believe in global warming. In fact, it’s even worse than that. These guys do not believe in science. They do not accept that science has any role to play in environmental decision-making.
We know this because their contempt for science has been at the root of every decision they have made: from pulling out of the Paris deal; to insisting that the EPA’s budget be slashed by a third; to firing EPA scientists and pulling scientific information off the EPA’s website; to wanting to cut almost half the resources currently being used to clean up the country’s most dangerously contaminated (“Superfund”) sites; to putting back on the market a pesticide already proven (by EPA scientists, no less) to damage children’s brains.
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 for very good reason, there has been wide agreement that it’s best to leave these decisions to the judge on the case. Because he/she is in the best position to know whether a lawsuit is so lacking in merit (so “frivolous”) that it does not deserve to be in a courtroom, and if so, what the sanction should be for the party and/or lawyer who filed it.
As a lawyer who mostly files (rather than defends) lawsuits, I completely agree with the sanctioning of those who bring frivolous cases to court. Why? Because they not only bring discredit to my profession, but they occupy the taxpayer-funded resources of the court with cases that don’t deserve them, thereby making those resources unavailable (or less available) for those cases that do deserve them.
And I also agree that it must be the judge on the case who decides what is “frivolous”, whether there should be a sanction, and, if so, and what the sanction should be. This does not work perfectly, of course-nothing does-but I don’t believe there can be any responsible doubt that the judge is in the best position to make these decisions. That judge is in the best position, for example, to decide whether the lawsuit stretching the legal precedent is just a meritless money grab by an unscrupulous lawyer–who should be sanctioned– or a good faith effort by the lawyer to try to expand the law to help the powerless in society. In which case, no sanction should be imposed. Because some of the most important legal cases in our history started out with good faith efforts like this.
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 than their percentage of the population, poor minorities live near the factories, landfills, and traffic that belch filth into their environment. And they don’t have the resources to move away from it to protect themselves.
·Sometimes, the pollution comes to these poor, minority citizens….in the sense that a city will be much more willing to, say, permit a power plant to operate near poor minorities than permit it to be located in a middle-class neighborhood, or, God forbid, an upper-class neighborhood. And other times, the poor minorities come to the pollution….because it’s just cheaper to find a home or apartment there. But, regardless of whether poor minorities come to the pollution or vice versa, the two often wind up as “neighbors”.
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’ backing out of the Paris climate change accord by saying that the decision was necessary to support coal industry job creation. As statistical evidence to support this, Pruitt claimed:
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 700 badly scarred public housing units into a beautiful, mixed-income neighborhood of 1,400 units, shops, and park space. A real monument to progress and understanding.
But as the re-development was being launched, a plume of TCE contamination was discovered under the development, threatening, according to the Physicians for Social Responsibility, the health of children and pregnant mothers who would live there.
Now what? A billion dollars is on the line.
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:
These decisions reveal a level of ignorance and cruelty that was unthinkable until Trump came along. Environmental protection is a moral issue, above all else. Because, while in a general sense all of us are the victims of pollution, and of the wars over a lack of water and food that rampaging climate change is already provoking, the truth is that those most acutely threatened are the poor, the politically powerless, and, especially, their children. They are the ones who get sick and die, or have shortened life spans, or must live (if they are so lucky to live at all) with starvation, debilitating cancers and chronic respiratory disease…..because decisions such as Trump’s announce that these human beings are not deserving of the same standard of environmental protection as everyone else.
Trump’s decisions are immoral. Because they are made by our elected leader–and because the rest of the world understandably believes that he speaks for Americans–these decisions declare that, as a country, America is abandoning those who suffer most from pollution, and are least able to defend themselves against it.
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