Summary & principles of this rational approach to living in harmony on earth

Website for the Economy for the Common Good is www.ecogood.org

Economy for the Common Good (ECG) is a global social movement that advocates an alternative economic model, which is beneficial to people, the planet and future generations.

The common good economy puts the common good, cooperation and community in the foreground. Human dignity, solidarity, ecological sustainability, social justice and democratic participation are also described as values of the common good economy.

The movement behind the model started off in Austria, Bavaria and South Tyrol in 2010 and quickly spread to many countries throughout the EU. It now has active groups in Africa, Latin America, North America and Asia. As of 2021, the movement consists of over 11,000 supporters, 180 local chapters and 35 associations.

Christian Felber coined the term “Gemeinwohl-Ökonomie” (Economy for the Common Good) in a best-selling book, published in 2010. According to Felber, it makes much more sense for companies to create a so-called “common good balance sheet” than a financial balance sheet. The common good balance sheet is a value-based measurement tool and reporting method for businesses, individuals, communities, and institutions, which shows the extent to which a company abides by values like human dignity, solidarity and economic sustainability.

More than 2,000 organizations, mainly companies, but also schools, universities, municipalities, and cities, support the concept of the Economy for the Common Good. A few hundred have used the Common Good Balance sheet as a means to do their “non-financial” reporting. These include Sparda-Bank Munich, the Rhomberg Group and Vaude Outdoor. Worldwide nearly 60 municipalities are actively involved in spreading the idea.

The ECG movement sees itself in a historical tradition from Aristotle to Adam Smith and refers to the fundamental values of democratic constitutions.

Overview ~ The model has five underlying goals:

1. Reuniting the economy with the fundamental values guiding society in general. Encouraging business decisions that promote human rights, justice, and sustainability.

2. Transitioning to an economic system that defines serving the “common good” as its principal goal. The business community and all other economic actors should live up to the universal values set down in constitutions across the globe. These include dignity, social justice, sustainability, and democracy. These do not include profit maximization and market domination.

3. Shifting to a business system that measures success according to the values outlined above. A business is successful and reaps the benefits of its success not when it makes more and more profits, but when it does its best to serve the public good.

4. Setting the cornerstones of the legal framework for the economy democratically, in processes which result in concrete recommendations for reforming and reevaluating national constitutions and international treaties.

5. Closing the gaps between feeling and thinking, technology and nature, economy and ethics, science and spirituality.

The Economy for the Common Good calls for reevaluating economic relations by, for example, putting limits on financial speculation and encouraging companies to produce socially-responsible products.

{The above description is from Wikipedia, which deserves your support at $3.00 per month or $36.00 per year. DGN}

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YOUTUBE VIDEO of CHRISTIAN FELBER’s TEDx TALK on “ECG”

VIDEO ~ https://youtu.be/dsO-b0_r-5Y

The president of plastics at Brightmark stands amid 900 tons of waste plastic in Indiana. Their purpose is to turn plastic waste into diesel fuel, naphtha and wax.

From an Article by James Bruggers, Inside Climate News, September 11, 2022

ASHLEY, Indiana—The bales, bundles and bins of plastic waste are stacked 10 feet high in a shiny new warehouse that rises from a grassy field near a town known for its bright yellow smiley-face water tower.

Jay Schabel exudes the same happy optimism. He’s president of the plastics division of Brightmark Energy, a San Francisco-based company vying to be on the leading edge of a yet-to-be-proven new industry—chemical recycling of plastic.

Walking in the warehouse among 900 tons of a mix of crushed plastic waste in late July, Schabel talked about how he has worked 14 years to get to this point: Bringing experimental technology to the precipice of what he anticipates will be a global, commercial success. He hopes it will also take a bite out of the plastic waste that’s choking the planet.

“When I saw the technology, I said this is the sort of thing I can get out of bed and work on to change the world,” said Schabel, an electrical engineer. “My job is to set it up and get it running,” he said of the $260 million, 120,000 square foot building and adjacent chemical operations. “Then perpetuate it around the world.”

But the company, which broke ground in Ashley in 2019, has struggled to get the plant operating on a commercial basis, where as many as 80 employees would process 100,000 tons of plastic waste each year in a round-the-clock operation.

Schabel said that was to change in August, with its first planned commercial shipment of fuel to its main customer, global energy giant BP. But a company spokesman said in mid-August that the date for the first commercial shipment had been pushed back to September, with “full-scale operation…extending through the end of the year and into 2023.”

Even with that new timetable, the plant, located along Interstate 69 in the northeast corner of Indiana, Brightmark faces ongoing economic, political and — environmental critics and some scientists say — technical headwinds. Its business model must contend with plastics that were never designed to be recycled. U.S. recycling policies are dysfunctional, and most plastics end up in landfills and incinerators, or on streets and waterways as litter.

Environmental organizations with their powerful allies in Congress are fighting against chemical recycling and the technology found in this plant, known as pyrolysis, in particular, because they see it as the perpetuation of climate-damaging fossil fuels. “The problem with pyrolysis is we should not be producing more fossil fuels,” said Judith Enck, a former regional director of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the founder and executive director of Beyond Plastics, an environmental group. “We need to be going in the opposite direction. Using plastic waste as a feedstock for fossil fuels is doubling the damage to the environment because there are very negative environmental impacts from the production, disposal and use of plastics.”

The global plastics crisis is well documented with annual plastic production soaring from 20 million metric tons to 400 million metric tons over the last five decades. Nearly all are made from fossil fuels and much is designed to resist biodegradation and can last in the environment for hundreds of years, increasingly as microscopic bits that are ubiquitous and have invaded the human body.

The amount of plastic discharged into the ocean could reach up to 53 million metric tons per year by 2030, or roughly half of the total weight of fish caught from the ocean annually, according to a December report by a committee of scientists with the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine.

The U.S. produces the most plastic waste in the world, nearly 300 pounds per person in a year, the report found. But only a small percentage, less than 6 percent, of plastics used by consumers in the U.S. actually get recycled, a recent analysis of EPA data by Beyond Plastics and the Last Beach Cleanup found.

What does get recycled, such as soda bottles, typically goes through a mechanical process involving sorting, grinding, cleaning, melting and remolding, often into other products. But there are limits to the kinds of plastics that are acceptable for mechanical recycling and how many times these plastics can be re-used in this way.

Chemical recycling, called advanced recycling by the chemical industry— which touts it as almost a Holy Grail of solutions—seeks to turn the harder-to-recycle kinds of plastic waste back into plastics’ basic chemical building blocks. Pyrolysis is among the chemical recycling technologies getting the most attention, with industry representatives saying pyrolysis can turn mixtures of plastic waste into new plastic, fuel or chemicals for making everything from detergents to cars to clothing.

With these plastic wastes, such as grocery bags, cups, lids, containers and films, the industry claims, pyrolysis heats them at high temperatures in a vessel, with little or no oxygen and sometimes with a chemical catalyst, to create synthetic gases, a synthetic fuel called pyrolysis oil, and a carbon char waste product. It’s a process that’s been around for centuries, used for making tar from timber for wooden ships in the 1600s, for example, or coke from coal for steelmaking in the last century.

Brightmark describes its plant as the “largest-scale pyrolysis facility in the world.” It is designed to take plastic waste hauled in from municipal and industrial sources. The waste is cleaned, chopped up and pressed into small pellets, then fed into pyrolysis tanks and heated by burning natural gas. The synthetic gas created by the pyrolysis process is then mixed with the natural gas to generate temperatures between 800 degrees and 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit, Schabel said.

“We flush the molecules out and condense them,” Schabel said, describing what the high heat does to the plastic waste. “We are hitting them with a thermal hammer to break them into pieces. They want to come back together but we control how they come back together.”

The char is sent to a landfill as non-hazardous waste, he said, and the pyrolysis oil goes to a small-scale refinery behind the warehouse, where it’s separated into low-sulfur diesel fuel, flammable liquid naphtha, and wax for industrial uses or candles. “We call this a hyper-local oil well,” Schabel said on the tour. But a lot of what comes into the plant gets lost in the process.

In a document Brightmark filed in December with the EPA, the company acknowledged that just 20 percent of the plant’s output is its primary product — what it described as fuels. Most of the rest, 70 percent, is the synthetic gas that the company said is combusted with natural gas to generate heat, with 20 percent of that syngas burned away in a flare. The rest is the char, according to the filing.

The company now disputes its own numbers, with a spokeswoman saying company officials are working to get them corrected to reflect a larger percentage of output as diesel fuel or naphtha. But the EPA filing plays into one of the sharpest criticisms of pyrolysis — that it’s not really plastics recycling at all.

With pyrolysis, “what you make is what I would call, and I grew up in New Jersey, so forgive me, a dog’s breakfast of compounds,” said University of Pittsburgh Professor Eric Beckman, a chemical engineer with a Ph.D. in polymer science. “It’s like everything you can think of, gases, liquids, solids,” he said.

If plastic waste could be turned only into naphtha, a bonafide building block for plastics, a company could operate what Beckman called a closed loop, and circular system for plastics that could be considered recycling, he said. But that is not what pyrolysis does.

“And this is where it gets controversial,” Beckman said, adding: “because you have people doing this who are saying, ‘We’re recycling it.’ No, you’re not. You’re burning it.” And any time that fossil fuels are being burned, he said, they are emitting greenhouse gas and air pollutants.

Jan Dell, a chemical engineer who has worked as a consultant to the oil and gas industry and now runs The Last Beach Cleanup, a nonprofit that fights plastic waste, agreed. “The fact that pyrolysis operations have to burn so much of the material to get to the high temperatures is a fundamental flaw,” she said.

>>> To be continued tomorrow …….

US Clean Water Act contains many sections

From an Article by John McFerrin, WV Highlands Conservancy Voice, July 2022

States, including West Virginia, have gained more control over the issuance of permits under the federal Clean Water Act.

Under the federal and state Clean Water Acts, anybody who wants to undertake a wide variety of activities which have an impact upon water must have a permit. These include discharging water into a stream, filling a stream, or crossing a stream or a wetland. Most recently this requirement has meant that both the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline have been required to have permits for pipeline construction.

These permits are issued by federal agencies. Under the law as it historically existed, even when federal agencies issue permit decisions, states still had a role. Under Section 401 of the federal Clean Water Act, federal agencies could not authorize projects in a state unless that state certifies (called a 401 Certification) that the project will not violate state water quality standards.

Our most recent experiences with this are the Mountain Valley Pipeline and the Atlantic Coast Pipeline. With those two pipelines, or any other project where federal agencies issue water permits, West Virginia could have stopped the project by refusing the 401 Certification. If it did not want to refuse the 401 Certification outright, it could have conditioned its approval on the pipeline developers taking certain steps to protect water quality.

The reason for this requirement of state certification were explained during the original debates on the federal Clean Water Act. Senator Muskie explained on the floor when what is now §401 was first proposed: “No polluter will be able to hide behind a Federal license or permit as an excuse for a violation of water quality standard[s]. No polluter will be able to make major investments in facilities under a Federal license or permit without providing assurance that the facility will comply with water quality standards. No State water pollution control agency will be confronted with a fait accompli by an industry that has built a plant without consideration of water quality requirements.”

In the spring of 2020, the United States Environmental Protection Agency issued a new rule dramatically reducing the authority that states have to refuse certification or demand conditions on permits. This was in response to complaints about other states imposing too many conditions upon pipeline construction or refusing certifications altogether. For the reasons mentioned below, there were no complaints about West Virginia authorities.

Now the United States Environmental Protection Agency has changed the rule back to what it was historically. The states once again have the authority to review federal permits and certify that a project will not cause a violation of water quality standards. If a project needs conditions to protect state waters, states can demand those conditions.

Does West Virginia really care?

If recent experience is any guide, regaining this authority will not make any difference to West Virginia. Both the Atlantic Coast Pipeline and the Mountain Valley Pipeline had to have permits to cross streams and wetlands in West Virginia. Through the 401 Certification process, West Virginia could have prevented the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission from finally approving the pipeline as well as the United States Army Corps of Engineers from approving the stream crossings, etc. that the pipeline will entail until we had assurance that West Virginia’s water would not be damaged. West Virginia had the opportunity to either stop the project entirely or, more likely, place conditions upon it that would make it less damaging to West Virginia waters.

Instead of reviewing the projects and either rejecting them or placing conditions upon them, West Virginia waived its right to do so. For the details, see the stories in the December, 2017, and January, 2018, issues of The Highlands Voice.

While the restoration of authority might make a difference in some states, it is not clear that it will make any difference in West Virginia. When the West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection had the authority before, it did not use it. There is nothing to indicate that having it back will make any difference. The current West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has no interest in using the right which the Clean Water Act grants it anyway.

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The West Virginia Highlands Conservancy is a non-profit corporation which has been recognized as a tax exempt organization by the Internal Revenue Service. Its bylaws describe its purpose:

The purposes of the Conservancy shall be to promote, encourage, and work for the conservation — including both preservation and wise use — and appreciation of the natural resources of West Virginia and the Nation, and especially of the Highlands Region of West Virginia, for the cultural, social, educational, physical, health, spiritual, and economic benefit of present and future generations of West Virginians and Americans.

We are now in another age of extinction (click to enlarge)

From an Article Translated by Johanna Thompson, German DW.com, June 21, 2022

Talks are currently underway in Kenya on a new international treaty to tackle dramatic species loss. What exactly is at stake? Here’s what you need to know.

Of the estimated 8 million animal, fungi and plant species on our planet, only a fraction have been scientifically documented, according to the international biodiversity council IPBES. Yet according to scientists, the world may lose nearly 1 million species by 2030, with one species already becoming extinct every 10 minutes. This is catastrophic, because a world that lacks diversity is a dangerous place for all species, including humans.

Later this year, at the second phase of the 15th UN Biodiversity Conference in Montreal, Canada almost 200 countries hope to agree on a new international framework for the protection of biodiversity. The agreement text is being prepared this week in Nairobi, Kenya.

Will the global community succeed in halting the extinction crisis? Here’s what you need to know. Two-thirds of all crops rely on natural pollinators such as insects!

What is biodiversity — and what does it mean to lose it?

A recent report from the Leibniz Research Network for Biodiversity stressed how the great variety of species on our planet’s is essential to just about every aspect of human life. “Whether it is the air we breathe, clean drinking water, food or clothing, fuel, building materials or medications — our life, our health, our nutrition and well-being all depend on the great diversity of resources that nature provides us with,” it stated.

More than two-thirds of all crops worldwide rely upon natural pollinators such as insects. Without them, our food supply is likely to become less secure. Yet a third of all insect species worldwide are already facing extinction.

Losing biodiversity could also spell disaster for the medical sector, as many pharmaceuticals — including close to 70% of cancer treatments — are derived from nature.

“The knowledge of 3.5 billion years of natural evolution is stored in biological diversity,” said Klement Tockner, director of Senckenberg Society for Nature Research, a group based in Frankfurt, Germany. “The progressive decline of our ecological capital poses the greatest threat to all of humanity — because once it’s lost, it’s lost forever.”

Reasons for insect loss, why are so many species going extinct?

The answer is human beings. As Earth Overshoot Day illustrates, every year we consume more of our planet’s resources than can be replenished.

Industrial agriculture, deforestation, overfishing, pollution, the spread of invasive species and soil sealing to make way for infrastructure are all contributing to an extinction rate that’s now 1,000 times higher than it would be without humans around.

Is losing a few species really such a big deal?

Throughout Earth’s history, species have lived, thrived and ultimately died out. But never before has so much biodiversity disappeared in such a short space of time. And certainly not due to another species. The use of chemicals in agriculture is one of the causes of species extinction.

According to the German Federal Agency for Civic Education, between 1970 and 2014, the global population of vertebrates declined by 60%, while in South and Central America, that figure is almost 90%. The number of species living in freshwater environments decreased by 83% during the same period.

Johannes Vogel, director of the Berlin Museum of Natural History, said losses within a single genus can have repercussions through the entire ecosystem — including on humans.

“Frogs are currently dying out worldwide because of a fungus spreading due to climate change,” he said. “Frogs eat a lot of mosquito larvae for example, so there will be more mosquitoes in the future — and mosquitoes cause more deaths globally than any other organism.” In the absence of mosquito-eating frogs, mosquitoes are spreading, and with them diseases.

How humans threaten entire ecosystems has become very significant.

Ecosystems are the interaction of different species that depend on one another for survival and their environment. Healthy ecosystems can withstand a certain amount of damage to an individual part and recover. “But the more we reduce the number of species, the more susceptible a system becomes to disturbance,” explained Andrea Perino of the German Center for Integrative Biodiversity Research at the University of Halle-Jena-Leipzig.

The Amazon rainforest, for example, has been reduced so drastically to make way for agriculture and mining that what’s left is also less able to regenerate, according to a recent study. It’s a dangerous feedback loop that could ultimately lead to this entire ecosystem being lost.

Why is conserving biodiversity so difficult?

As early as 1992, the UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro adopted the international Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). Under the convention, signatory countries committed to promoting sustainable economies that operate within our planet’s ecological limits. Further conferences and agreements followed. But so far, hardly any of the aims set out three decades ago have been achieved.

The 1.5 Celsius target is both a clear political target and a catchphrase. Perino said the problem is all individual nations had to set their own conservation targets, but many of these have amounted to nothing more than declarations of intent. Particularly in industrialized nations, very few effective measures have been implemented.

Tools to assess progress toward CBD targets have also been lacking. “It is often not at all clear whether protective measures are achieving anything at all,” Perino said. “We urgently need comprehensive monitoring of any changes.”

Why do we talk about the climate more than nature?

“While we can agree to work toward the 1.5 degrees Celsius target on the climate crisis — the fight against the crisis of nature is much more complex,” said Nicola Uhde, biodiversity policy expert at German environmental NGO BUND. “It cannot easily be reduced to a buzzword or standard.”

“Awareness of the value of nature often only emerges with its loss,” she added. Unlike floods, droughts or melting glaciers, dying frogs rarely make the headlines. Yet the climate and biodiversity crises are intertwined.

Rising temperatures and changing climatic conditions are driving some species to extinction. And as forests are cleared and wetlands drained, not only do the species they support vanish, essential carbon sinks are also lost, which in turn increases global warming. This is why both crises need to be tackled together, said Tockner: “Renaturation, such as the rewetting of peatlands, not only helps biodiversity, but also the climate.”

Renaturation shows the climate and biodiversity crises can be tackled together! But, what are the sticking points at COP15?

In the preliminary negotiations for the UN Biodiversity Conference coming up in Canada, signatories — now around 200 states — have said they intend to place 30% of global land and sea under protection by 2030.

Perino said this sounds good, but it is unclear what is meant by protection. “After all, there are both strong and weak categories of protection. And nature often finds its way back into balance not through protection, but through renaturation,” said Perino.

It’s also unclear how this 30% of the surface of the Earth is to be spread between countries. BUND is demanding that each country should apply the rule domestically. “This is important so that all existing ecosystems are covered in the process; that is, not just tundras or the Antarctic, but also tropical rainforests, Central Europe’s red beech forests, the mangroves or coral reefs,” said Uhde.

Financing protection measures is another sticking point in the negotiations. In the wealthiest countries, very few primary natural habitats have survived industrialization, while many economically weaker countries still have far more biodiversity. To better protect it, poorer nations are calling for rich countries to increase financial aid for conservation from $160 billion (€152 billion) to $700 billion (€667 billion) by 2030.

There is so much more to the “climate crisis” than public opinion, but here it is ...

From the Article of BeyondKona, Hawaii, June 25, 2022

At the end of the first full Supreme Court term with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. in place, liberal Justice Stephen G. Breyer said he was amazed — and not in a particularly good way — what President George W. Bush’s nominees to the bench had accomplished in such little time.

“It is not often that so few have so quickly changed so much,” Breyer said in June 2007.

But that was nothing compared to this week as three Trump-appointed justices, joined their other Republican-majority court justices in firing off two significant decisions in rapid succession. First, a Second Amendment gun rights ruling which flies in the face of rising public concerns over escalating national gun violence now targeting the most innocent of society; children. The Court majority’s second decision was another political win and a shock to many women, a second coming to others in the form of the most significant social ruling in modern times; overturning protections granted women by Roe v. Wade for the nearly 50 years which guaranteed a woman’s fundamental right to health care and abortion.

As significant as these two recent court decisions represent, what’s ahead for this GOP-controlled court will soon affect every American regardless of their sex, race, income, or political party — an environmental climate case now being decided by the Supreme Court. As in the case of the legal dismemberment of Roe v. Wade, this case is the product of a coordinated multiyear strategy led by Republican Attorneys General.

Within days, the Republican majority on the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision that could severely limit the federal government’s authority to reduce carbon dioxide from power plants — pollution found to dangerously heat the planet’s climate.

Fossil Fuel Polluters Retaliate

On the front lines of this emerging battle is the case of West Virginia v. EPA, is the result of a coordinated, multi-decade strategy led by Republican Attorneys General, conservative legal activists, and their funders with ties to the oil and coal industries.

The polluter attack strategy is fairly straight forward; use the judicial system to rewrite environmental laws, weakening the executive branch’s ability to tackle global warming.

Coming up through the federal courts are more and more climate cases and headed to Supreme Court, some featuring novel legal arguments, each carefully selected for its potential to block the government’s ability to regulate industries and businesses that produce greenhouse gases. These legal strategies are becoming more and more sophisticated with time and money.

The plaintiffs seek to hem in what they call the “administrative state”, the E.P.A. and other federal agencies who set rules and enforce regulations that affect industrial sectors responsible for the majority of environmental crimes and offenses in which newer regulations are designed to rein in, e.g., global warming emissions, toxic air and water pollution violations, etc.

Congress has barely addressed the issue of climate change. Instead, for decades it has delegated authority to the EPA and other agencies because it lacks the political will, and equally important, the expertise possessed by the specialists who write complicated rules and regulations and who can respond quickly to changing science – a long standing practice now embedded in today’s Capitol Hill gridlock.

Follow the Money, Big Time

The Federalist Society is one of many money sources engaged in attacks on Federal environmental and climate protections. The Society is funded by the likes of Koch Industries, which has long fought and funded climate action roadblocks; the Sarah Scaife Foundation, created by the heirs to the Mellon oil, aluminum and banking fortune; and Chevron, the oil giant and plaintiff in the case that created the so-called “Chevron defense”. After a 1984 Supreme Court ruling, that doctrine holds that courts must defer to reasonable interpretations of ambiguous statutes by federal agencies on the theory that agencies have more expertise than judges and are more accountable to voters. “Judges are not experts in the field and are not part of either political branch of the government,” Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in his opinion for a unanimous court ruling.

The forthcoming case; West Virginia v. E.P.A., No. 20–1530 on the court docket, is notable for the tangle of connections between the plaintiffs and the Supreme Court justices who will decide their case.

The Republican plaintiffs share many of the same donors behind efforts to nominate and confirm five of the Republicans on the bench — John G. Roberts, Samuel A. Alito Jr., Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett.

“It’s a pincer move,” said Lisa Graves, executive director of the progressive watchdog group True North Research and a former senior Justice Department official. “They are teeing up the attorneys to bring the litigation before the same judges that they handpicked.”

The pattern is repeated in other climate cases filed by the Republican AG’s now advancing through the lower courts: The plaintiffs are supported by the same network of conservative donors who helped former President Donald J. Trump place more than 200 federal judges, many now in position to rule on the climate cases in the coming year.

At least two of the cases feature an unusual approach that demonstrates the aggressive nature of the legal campaign. In those suits, the plaintiffs are challenging regulations or policies that don’t yet exist. They seek to pre-empt efforts by President Biden to deliver on his promise to pivot the country away from fossil fuels, while at the same time aiming to prevent a future president from trying anything similar.

The Stakes for Climate Cases ~ Limitations on action in the United States against global warming could doom global efforts to avert the worst climate disruptions.

Victory for the plaintiffs in these cases would mean:

>>> the federal government could not restrict tailpipe emissions because of vehicles’ impact on climate, even though transportation is the country’s largest source of greenhouse gases.
>>> the government also would not be able to force electric utilities to replace fossil fuel-fired power plants (the second-largest source of planet warming pollution), with wind and solar power, and
>>> executive branch could no longer consider the economic costs of climate change when evaluating whether to approve a new oil pipeline or similar project or environmental rule.

Those limitations on climate action in the United States, which has pumped more planet-warming gases into the atmosphere than any other nation, would quite likely doom the world’s goal of cutting enough emissions to keep the planet from heating up more than an average of 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with the preindustrial age.

A temperature rise greater than 1.5 degrees Celsius is the threshold beyond which scientists say the likelihood of catastrophic hurricanes, drought, heat waves and wildfires significantly increases. The Earth has already warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius.

“If the Supreme Court uses this as an opportunity to really squash E.P.A.’s ability to regulate on Climate Change, it will seriously impede U.S. progress toward solving the problem,” said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University.

But many conservatives say the decision violates the separation of powers by allowing executive branch officials rather than judges to say what the law is. Associate Justice Gorsuch wrote that Chevron allowed “executive bureaucracies to swallow huge amounts of core judicial and legislative power.” In other words, elected judges and politicians are more qualified than scientists and agency experts to determine public harm when it comes to climate change and other environmental impacts.

Volunteer scientist Yuri Gorby with portable air monitor

From an Article by Addrew Shawn, Verve Times, May 26, 2022

Some residents of Belmont County in eastern Ohio have long suffered from headaches, fatigue, nausea and burning sensations in their throats and noses. They suspected these symptoms were the result of air pollution from fracking facilities that dominate the area, but regulators dismissed and downplayed their concerns.

With the technical assistance of volunteer scientists at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, MIT and the American Geophysical Union’s Thriving Earth Exchange, local advocacy groups set up their own network of low-cost sensors. They found that the region’s three EPA sensors were not providing an accurate picture: The sensors revealed concerning levels of air pollution, and correlations between local spikes and health impacts. The results are published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

Nestled in an Appalachian valley, Belmont has been booming with new infrastructure to extract and process natural gas. Fracking is known to emit pollutants including particulate matter and volatile organic compounds such as benzene, toluene and ethylbenzene, which have been linked to respiratory and cardiovascular health problems. Lung and bronchus cancer have become the leading cause of cancer deaths in Ohio. A 2017 Yale Public Health analysis confirmed the need for additional monitoring and regulation for chemicals associated with unconventional oil and gas development.

Concerned about the fumes in certain areas of the community and the lack of information and transparency, two activist groups, Concerned Ohio River Residents and the Freshwater Accountability Project, wanted to set up a high-density monitoring network. After submitting their proposal to the Thriving Earth Exchange, which enables collaborations between community groups and volunteer scientists, they were paired with Garima Raheja, a Ph.D. candidate who studies air pollution at Lamont-Doherty.

“We realized that the Thriving Earth Exchange program would give us valuable aid to validate the complaints we often receive from those living near pollution sources in a way that would provide credible and actionable data to improve air quality in the region,” said Lea Harper, managing director of Freshwater Accountability Project.

With advice from Raheja and other scientists, the community members bought 60 low-cost sensors to monitor particulate matter and volatile organic compounds in the air. Then they identified areas of highest concern, and recruited residents to install and maintain the sensors in backyards, churches and schools in those areas.

The new study presents the first two years of data from the sensor network. The team found that many sites frequently experienced days when air pollution exceeded levels recommended by the World Health Organization. For example, in the city of Martins Ferry, where a sensor took measurements for 336 days, it measured unsafe levels of air pollution on 50 of those days.

“It is kind of wild,” said Raheja, “considering that it’s generally a clean area. I think any number of days above WHO guidelines is really concerning for an area like this.” She sees a clear link to the area’s fossil fuel development. “If there wasn’t fracking in this area, there would be no reason for bad air pollution. It’s not an urban area. There’s not a lot of cars or rush hour or anything like that which usually causes air pollution.”

The study compares the daily averages collected from the citizen sensors with the EPA’s three nearby sensors. The correlation between the two was low—less than 55 percent. “It just goes to show that the EPA monitors might be getting broad trends correctly, like annual or seasonal amounts,” said Raheja. “But in terms of daily averages, which is what affects human health, the EPA sensors are not always capturing the heterogeneous exposure that people in this area experience.”

That’s because the EPA sensors are too few and too widely spaced to capture a detailed picture of the air pollution levels, she said. EPA relies on high-grade monitors that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece, which helps explain why the network is so sparse. In contrast, the citizen scientists’ sensors cost only a few hundred dollars each, so they were able to set up a denser network.

In another aspect of the study, residents picked up air pollution spikes on their monitors and wanted to know where they came from. So the volunteer scientists helped to model local wind patterns to key in on which fracking facilities could be responsible for spikes in specific sensors on specific days.

“There are a lot of different sources in the area, and sometimes community activists have to pick which battles to fight first,” said Raheja. So far, residents say they are particularly concerned about the area’s Williams Compressor Station and the Dominion Compressor Station.

The data have allowed community leaders to submit targeted public records requests about these operations and their compliance with air quality standards, the paper notes. Information from the air quality sensors also has helped residents know when to close their windows, wear masks or update indoor air purification systems.

Community members also saw correlations between air pollution spikes and their headaches and nausea. For example, some noticed bad smells and more severe symptoms in mid December 2020. At the same time, the air pollution data shows several spikes in emissions.

The paper quotes community member Kevin Young: “Before, [there] was no one to help us. None of the Ohio regulators would come to witness the extreme air pollution events that made my wife and me very sick.” He added, “Now that we have data to substantiate the harmful amounts of the air pollutants, it seems the regulators are taking us more seriously.”

The paper notes that the data offered a shared language that community members could use to articulate their complaints to the EPA, Ohio Department of Natural Resources, and the Ohio Department of Health. Regulators are starting to take notice; local activist Jill Hunkler was invited to testify in April 2021 before the U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee on the Environment.

The scientists and community groups hope to continue working together. They are currently applying for grants to scale up their sensor network, and networking with other concerned community groups, some as far away as Louisiana’s infamous Cancer Alley, who want to learn more about how to get started on similar programs.

“Community-led science and community activism, especially when working with academic scientists, can be really powerful in terms of doing what regulatory agencies cannot do,” said Raheja.

More information:
Garima Raheja et al, Community-based participatory research for low-cost air pollution monitoring in the wake of unconventional oil and gas development in the Ohio River Valley: Empowering impacted residents through community science, Environmental Research Letters (2022). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/ac6ad6

SCOTUS heard this GHG case 2/28/22

From PRX at the University of Massachusetts, Boston this is Living on Earth.

CURWOOD: I’m Steve Curwood. Congress has yet to enact comprehensive climate legislation, so if the Biden administration wants to set America on track for net zero carbon emissions by 2050 it will have to rely on executive orders and regulations. According to a landmark ruling by the US Supreme Court in 2007 CO2 is an air pollutant that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate. But so far EPA efforts to actually curb the large amounts of global warming gases from power plants have gotten snarled in litigation. And just the other day a more conservative Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that could tie the hands of the EPA, even though those rules don’t even exist. Joining me now to discuss is Pat Parenteau, Professor at the Vermont Law School and former EPA Regional Counsel. Welcome back to Living on Earth, Pat!
>>> PARENTEAU: Thanks, Steve, good to be with you.

CURWOOD: So, Pat, I’m confused. Conservatives have said for a long time that judges shouldn’t be activists. But to what extent is this so-called conservative Supreme Court changing along those lines?
>>> PARENTEAU: Oh, right. I mean, they’re reaching out for cases that in the past, the Supreme Court would never take. The big case on the calendar of the Supreme Court this year, the West Virginia versus EPA case involving regulation of greenhouse gases from power plants, for example, there is no rule on the books right now regulating these emissions. So the Supreme Court has taken review of an abstract question of what is EPA’s authority to regulate these plants before the Biden administration has even adopted a rule! It’s the very definition of an activist court.

CURWOOD: So West Virginia v. the Environmental Protection Agency, has been called by some as the biggest climate change case in a decade. What makes it such a big deal?
>>> PARENTEAU: Well, it certainly is since Massachusetts v. EPA. This decision, could you know, not only limit EPA’s authority under the Clean Air Act. But one of the doctrines is something called the major question doctrine. It’s a rule that the court and the conservative members would view as kind of a new assertion of authority that an agency hasn’t previously used under a provision of a law like the Clean Air Act, that’s been on the books since 1970. But it’s never been used for anything as big as climate, of course, because we weren’t thinking about climate change in 1970, we should have been, but we weren’t. And this doctrine is so malleable, that you know, you can apply it to any environmental rule. I mean, most environmental rules, because they’re addressing big problems — air quality, water quality, loss of wetlands, loss of endangered species — they’re dealing with really big problems that do have large economic and social consequences. Some of those consequences are negative from the standpoint of if we don’t deal with the problems they’re gonna create, you know, economic harm, and other kinds of harm. And if we do deal with them, it’s going to cost money to deal with them. But if we don’t deal with them sooner rather than later, the cost could be much greater, and so on. The problem is when the court applies the major question doctrine, guess what? The result is almost every single time, in fact, all the cases that I’m aware of is the agency regulation is struck down. It’s a deregulatory doctrine. It’s used when the court believes the agency has exceeded its authority, and is gonna strike down the rule and require that Congress explicitly authorize the specific action that the agencies want to take. And that’s just a recipe for disaster, frankly, for environmental law. We have to be much more adaptive than that.

CURWOOD: This case that we’re talking about is called West Virginia v. the EPA. What’s the backstory of this case, and explain in some detail the EPA regulation that it’s talking about.
>>> PARENTEAU: After the Massachusetts v. EPA decision, EPA under the Obama administration adopted rules to regulate power plants under the Clean Air Act. And the plan that EPA came up with was a very flexible, sort of menu of options. Option one was make these plants run more efficiently and burn less coal or less gas. The second step of the Obama plan was use your ability to use more reliance on, on gas and certainly more reliance on wind and solar, use the flexibility the grid gives you to rely more on cleaner sources of energy. And then number three, put more investment in new renewable sources of energy and gradually bring more green energy onto the grid over time. That’s the Clean Power Plan. Now, that plan never took effect. The Supreme Court stayed it, even before the lower courts had ruled on whether it was lawful or not. And the Supreme Court in a unprecedented action, another activist step by the five conservatives that were on the court at that time, when Justice Scalia was there — this was his last vote before he passed away shortly thereafter. So the Clean Power Plan never took effect.

The Trump rule came on, they repealed the Obama plan. They replaced it with something called the Affordable Clean Energy (ACE) plan, which wouldn’t have done very much at all to reduce emissions. The estimate was maybe it would reduce it by 1%. And it would rely strictly on efficiency measures, none of these other strategies of relying more on gas or bringing more green energy on, onto the grid. And not even allowing trading, emissions trading, the cap and trade approach. That ACE rule was struck down by the DC Circuit. And that decision by the DC Circuit is technically the one that has is now being, quote, “reviewed” by the Supreme Court. But the important point here is, there is no rule on the books. The ACE rule is not on the books. The Obama Clean Power Plan is not on the books. There’s no rule today, nobody’s required to do anything right now. And yet, the Supreme Court has said, we’re gonna to review whether the Clean Air Act gives EPA the authority to do all of the things that it might like to do to find ways to reduce these emissions in the most cost effective way possible.

CURWOOD: So I’m scratching my head about another thing involving this case, Pat, and that is that many constituents of the electric power industry have supported this approach. So why did West Virginia sue on this rule that doesn’t actually exist? And why did the high court take it up?
>>> PARENTEAU: I have to say, West Virginia has led the charge from day one against EPA’s authority. I mean, West Virginia, was even arguing EPA had no authority whatsoever to regulate emissions from coal fired power plants. And obviously, West Virginia is a major coal state, you get that. But it’s frankly more ideological than that. All of the challengers to the Clean Power Plan, and that have appealed to the Supreme Court, they all resent EPA giving them directions on how to transition the energy source. They’re not taking any actions on their own. They could be doing that, but they’re not. But they’re also not supporting what EPA is trying to do. So there’s no other way to describe this than that. It is a political fight. And it’s about states versus EPA, and who’s in charge, and so forth. And it’s not rational.

CURWOOD: So Pat, how do you read the justices? How do you think this is going to be decided based on what you heard during the oral arguments at the Supreme Court the other day?
>>> PARENTEAU: So it was a very active bench. The argument went well over the time that was allotted, almost all the justices participated. And the government, through the Solicitor General, made a very strong argument that the court really didn’t have jurisdiction over the case at all, partly because there’s no rule on the books to review. But even more importantly, because there was no injury to the petitioners: the states and some of the coal industry that were co-petitioners. And that’s because there’s no rule on the books, nobody has to do anything at this point. What they’re arguing, the petitioners, is, well, we can’t trust the Biden administration when they say they’re not going to revive the Clean Power Plan. They might. They just might do that. So because they might do that the case should stay alive. That’s a really weak, pitiful, frankly, argument. I mean, an environmental group making an argument like that would be tossed out on their ear. But this court, my first prediction is, they’re not going to dismiss the case. They’re not going to stay their hand the way they should and wait for EPA’s rule. They’re going to issue a decision. What’s the decision going to be? There’s several possibilities. For sure, I think, they’re going to say a lot of bad things about the Clean Power Plan. Justice Kavanaugh, when he was on the DC Circuit, heard arguments challenging the Clean Power Plan, and he showed his cards very clearly. He would use the major question doctrine to strike down the Clean Power Plan if in fact it was presented to the court. So we can be sure the court is going to be very negative about EPA’s authority to require shift to renewable energy, wind or solar or anything else. The real question for me is, are they going to buy into this argument that EPA can only regulate inside the fence line? What it means is, you can only regulate at individual sources. I’m not sure what the court’s going to do on that. Kavanaugh, you know, was asking a lot of hard questions about whether that made sense. The government, the Solicitor General, who was terrific, she pointed to the fact that the Clean Power Plan, not only was it never in effect, the goals of the Clean Power Plan have already been exceeded. The industry itself, because of the major transformations underway in the energy sector, have already exceeded the 30% reduction in emissions that the Clean Power Plan had established. So, you know, she made an incredibly powerful argument, I heard, that this major question doctrine, which a lot of us are really concerned about, really doesn’t apply here. She just might be able to get Justice Roberts, maybe Justice Barrett, even, and who knows, maybe even Justice Kavanaugh, at least to agree that the major question doctrine doesn’t oust EPA of authority to shape a rule. Maybe a rule that doesn’t require transition to renewable energy, but maybe a rule that at least allows things like emissions trading and averaging, which would still accomplish a lot of reduction.

CURWOOD: Pat Parenteau is a Professor of Environmental Law at the Vermont Law School and former EPA Regional Council. Pat, thanks so much today for our discussion.

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See Also: The Supreme Court Case That Could Upend Efforts to Protect the Environment Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker Magazine, January 10, 2022

The potential ramifications of West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency are profound. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case involving an Obama-era power-plant rule that’s no longer in effect, and never really was. The Court has agreed to hear so many high-profile cases this term, on subjects ranging from abortion to gun rights to vaccine mandates, that this one — West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency — has received relatively little attention beyond legal circles. But its potential ramifications are profound. At a minimum, the Court’s ruling on the case is likely to make it difficult for the Biden Administration to curtail greenhouse-gas emissions. The ruling could also go much further and hobble the Administration’s efforts to protect the environment and public health.

West Virginia v. E.P.A. “could well become one of the most significant environmental law cases of all time,” Jonathan H. Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and a prominent conservative commentator, wrote on the legal blog the Volokh Conspiracy. Or, as Ian Millhiser put it, for Vox, “West Virginia is a monster of a case.”

Joe Biden is upfront with appointees and intentions

From an Article by Dino Grandoni and Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post, January 15, 2021

President-elect Joe Biden added more than a half-dozen climate staffers to his White House team Thursday, drawing from the ranks of green groups, environmental justice advocates and former Democratic administration officials to grow an inner circle that will help him try to slash the nation’s greenhouse gas emissions.

The new hires include David J. Hayes, who served as Interior deputy secretary under Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama; Cecilia Martinez, a prominent environmental justice advocate based in Minneapolis who advised the transition team; and Stef Feldman, a top Biden campaign aide who helped craft his climate plan. They will work with several incoming Cabinet officials new to Biden’s orbit, including North Carolina environmental regulator Michael S. Regan, picked to run the Environmental Protection Agency, and Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), set to serve as interior secretary.

The incoming White House team — which also includes former secretary of state John F. Kerry and former EPA administrator Gina McCarthy, along with Obama administration veterans in the National Security Council and the White House Counsel’s Office — represents the most robust climate-focused group assembled in the West Wing.

“These qualified, diverse and experienced appointees share the president and vice president-elect’s view that there is no greater challenge facing our country and our world than climate change,” the transition team said in a statement. “From marshaling every part of our government, working directly with communities, and harnessing the forces of science these appointees will be instrumental in utilizing all the tools at the incoming administration’s disposal to address climate change head on.”

Biden, set to take office in less than a week, will try to execute a far-reaching strategy to embed climate action across government agencies and in legislation on Capitol Hill. He has also pledged to address the disproportionate pollution burden carried by poor and minority neighborhoods.

In a recent interview, John Podesta, who helped spearhead Obama’s second-term climate agenda as senior counselor to the president, noted that Biden has assembled more expertise on the subject than any of his predecessors. Podesta said, the president-elect is building out the White House staff on both the international and domestic sides. “It shows how central climate change is to Biden’s foreign and security policy, just as it is to his domestic and economic policy,” he said.

Biden wants to ban all new drilling on public lands and waters. There are multiple reasons why that will be hard to do.

Martinez will play a major role in tackling pollution disparities as senior director for environmental justice at the White House Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ).

In an interview in July, Martinez said addressing the acute impact poor and minority neighborhoods often face from pollution needs to be “a central focus of CEQ.”

The Biden administration’s initiative on environmental justice “needs to really have some teeth to it so that the different federal agencies not only develop their plans and collaborate, but there is accountability,” she added.

David J. Hayes, a former deputy secretary of the Interior under the Obama administration, will be Biden’s special assistant for climate policy.

Martinez is a newcomer to Washington but the new lineup includes some longtime bureaucratic veterans such as Hayes, who will serve as special assistant to the president for climate policy. Hayes spearheaded Interior’s renewable energy development plans and its efforts to address climate change impacts in the Arctic under Obama, before joining the New York School of Law’s State Energy and Environmental Impact Center. From that perch, he helped organize several legal challenges by Democratic attorneys general to the Trump administration’s deregulatory agenda.

Maggie Thomas, a former climate adviser to two of Biden’s former rivals for the presidency, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Washington Gov. Jay Inslee (D), will serve as chief of staff in the Office of Domestic Climate Policy.

Thomas helped found a green group, Evergreen Action, which pushed Democrats to adopt pieces of Inslee’s comprehensive climate plan and lent policy chops to the burgeoning youth climate movement.

Feldman, a longtime Biden aide who started as his policy intern when he was vice president and rose to become his 2020 campaign’s policy director, will serve as deputy assistant to Biden.

During the presidential race, she helped get the buy-in of young climate activists, union leaders, environmental justice advocates and former Democratic rivals when writing Biden’s proposal to eliminate carbon pollution from the electric sector by 2035 and to spend $2 trillion over four years to boost clean energy.

Jeff Marootian, who directs the D.C. Department of Transportation, will also join the White House and help oversee future hires as special assistant to the president for climate and science agency personnel.
In recent days, Biden has also announced the return to the White House of two Obama-era officials who worked on energy and climate issues: Melanie Nakagawa, a former aide to Kerry at the State Department, and Megan Ceronsky, a former special assistant and associate counsel to Obama.

§ — Subscribe to the Washington Post for more and updated reporting.

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See also: UN urges nations to scale up climate change adaptation to avoid major economic loss, Emma Newburger, CNBC News, January 14, 2021

Enough is Enough! Tell WVDEP: Don’t Allow More Toxins in WV’s Water

From the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, May 5, 2020

Right now, in the midst of a public health crisis, the WVDEP is proposing to allow even more dangerous toxins in our water. Act Now! Tell WVDEP to respect your water and your health, don’t allow more toxins in West Virginia’s water!

WVDEP’s proposal is related to a critical portion of West Virginia’s water quality standards called human health criteria. Human health criteria determines how much of a dangerous toxin can be in our water before it harms our health.

West Virginia’s current human health criteria is based on data that is nearly 40-years old and citizen advocates have long fought for more protective criteria. Sadly, WVDEP’s proposal exposes us to higher amounts of certain toxic chemicals and known carcinogens. It also leaves out updated protections for several toxins the EPA has recommended WV to adopt since 2015.

Enough is enough! Demand WVDEP respect your water and your health, tell them not to allow more toxins in West Virginia’s water.

You Can Act Now, You Should Act Now, You Need to Act Now

It’s hard to believe that WVDEP is even considering such a proposal at a time when public health is a global priority. Rather than heeding the advice of public health experts, like Dr. McCawley, WVDEP’s proposal enables chemical manufacturers to release more toxic pollution into our waters. Speak up for clean water and public health! Tell WVDEP not to allow more toxins in our water!

You can submit comments on the proposed rule through May 19.

West Virginia Rivers Coalition
3501 MacCorkle Ave SE #129
Charleston, West Virginia 25304

304-637-7201 | wvrivers@wvrivers.org

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See also: New EPA Navigable Waters Rule Challenged in Court

From the Allegheny Blue Ridge Alliance, ABRA Update # 275, May 7, 2020

A group of conservation organizations on April 29 filed a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of South Carolina, Charleston District, challenging the Trump Administration’s Navigable Waters Protection Rule, which was published as a final rule on April 21. The rule would redefine what wetlands and streams qualify for protection under the Clean Water Act. It is estimated that half of the nation’s wetlands and nearly 1/5th of its streams would lose Clean Water Act protection. The rule, which was jointly issued by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, is to become effective June 22, 2020.

The suit was filed by the Southern Environmental law Center (SELC) on behalf of a coalition of conservation groups that includes the James River Association, an ABRA member. A similar lawsuit challenging the new law was filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by another coalition of conservation organizations that includes the Natural Resources Defense Council, also an ABRA member.

The lawsuit contends that the agencies’ wholesale stripping of protections was an unlawful departure from decades of bipartisan practice. Among other things, the agencies failed to explain or evaluate the impact of their actions on the nation’s water quality or give Americans a meaningful opportunity to comment on the elimination of scientifically based protections for streams and wetlands. The suit further argues that the challenged rule ignores the intent of the Clean Water Act, which a bipartisan Congress passed in 1972 because state-by-state efforts to clean the nation’s waters failed.

A copy of the SELC filing with the court is available here. A SELC press release is here.

Union of Concerned Scientists Report 2019

From the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), Common Dreams, January 28, 2019

WASHINGTON – New research shows that the administration has interfered with or sidelined science in 80 separate incidents over the past two years, demonstrating a pattern of hostility to evidence—and posing a serious threat to public health and the environment.

These abuses are detailed in the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) report “The State of Science in the Trump Era: Damage Done, Lessons Learned, and a Path to Progress.” On President Donald Trump’s watch, scientific agencies have been hollowed out, and at the leadership level, fewer than half of 83 critical science positions have been filled.

In numerous agencies, less data is being collected and decision-making processes have been changed to exclude scientific advice. The administration has delayed, suppressed or cancelled at least 14 important studies over the past two years. And the number of environmental impact statements filed has been cut in half, denying the public vital information and opportunities to comment on public projects.

“The administration is trying to accomplish its goals by pushing science out of the process,” said Jacob Carter, a UCS research scientist and the lead author of the report. “After two years, it’s clear that this administration values neither the work of federal scientists nor the health and safety of the public. Science is being silenced, in a truly unprecedented way—and we’re all paying the cost.”

The pattern is pervasive across multiple agencies, touching issues as wide-ranging as immigration, taxes and LGBQT rights. President Trump’s appointees to the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior stand out for their glaring conflicts of interest and their hostility to the science-based mission of their agencies. Climate science and studies on the public health impacts of pollution have been especially targeted—demonstrating the administration’s commitment to helping politically powerful industries at the expense of the public good.

“The administration’s rollbacks of public protections without scientific justification are really damaging,” said Gretchen Goldman, research director for the Center for Science and Democracy at UCS. “But there’s even more potential harm from the actions they’ve taken to limit how future administrations can use science in policymaking. The Trump administration is restricting the kinds of science agencies can consider, rigging the rules for analyzing policies, gutting advisory boards and pushing federal scientists out of public service. That damage could be long-lasting.”

The good news is that there are proven paths to constrain these abuses. “The State of Science in the Trump Era” identifies some success stories that point the way forward. Scientists, science advocates and community groups have been able to use the courts, the public comment process, and Congress to put a check on the administration. Through sustained public pressure, the science community and its supporters have turned back some nominees and stalled several potentially damaging policies. Further, the new Congress has a chance to step up and perform its constitutional duty of holding the administration accountable.

“For the first time in two years, we could see some meaningful checks and balances in Washington,” said Carter. “This is how it’s supposed to work—Congress should press the administration to stop undermining science and do its job of protecting the public. And the science community can play a meaningful role if scientists step up and get engaged as constituents. There’s a lot of damage to undo, but we have a roadmap to get there.”

In the report, UCS researchers lay out an action plan for Congress. These recommendations include passing new laws to protect scientific integrity and reduce conflicts of interest; holding oversight hearings to investigate anti-science actions and the harms they cause; and protecting the role of science in laws like the Clean Air Act and Endangered Species Act that are under attack.

“President Trump’s political appointees have taken a wrecking ball to science, which we all depend on,” said UCS President Ken Kimmell. “But the science community is more engaged than ever to fight back. Supporters of science, public health and environmental justice will be watching to make sure science works for all of us — in the Trump era and beyond.”

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