Toxic Substances
New This Thanksgiving: Toxic Turkey
Losing the farm to PFAS, or losing PFAS on the farm?
As Americans gather to celebrate the harvest’s bounty, there are few revelations about our food supply more distressing than the 2024 news that sewage-derived fertilizer has contaminated millions of acres of U.S. cropland with toxic PFAS chemicals. Marketed as “biosolids” that enhance soil productivity, the voluminous outputs from wastewater treatment plants have poisoned productive lands …
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CONTINUE READINGNo More ‘House of Horrors’ Thanks to These New Laws
Several California laws prohibiting dangerous chemicals from household products go into effect on or after January 1, 2025.
Halloween is the one time when we welcome ghouls, ghosts, and goblins coming to our homes (and, if your neighborhood is anything like mine, a variety of tiny superheroes). This season, however, the Legislature is dealing with a different kind of house of horrors: dangerous chemicals in everyday products that affect millions of Californians’ health. …
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CONTINUE READINGSix Sleeper Proposals in Project 2025
Project 2025 isn’t just its headline proposals. It’s a thorough, detailed attack on environmental protection.
Project 2025’s proposals involve reduced protection for endangered species, eliminating energy efficiency rules, blocking new transmission lines, changing electricity regulation to favor fossil fuels, weakening air pollution rules, and encouraging sale of gas guzzlers. There’s some pious talk about protecting the environment, but every proposal calls for weakening environmental protections.
CONTINUE READINGThe Ten Most Important U.S. Environmental Laws
Some of the choices may surprise you.
What are America’s most important environmental laws? Some are familiar, such as the federal air and water pollution laws, and the Endangered Species Act. But there are other people rarely hear about — even in environmental law courses — but have done a lot to protect the environment.
CONTINUE READINGEverywhere and Forever All at Once: PFAS and the Failures of Chemicals Regulation
Environmental law helped create a world awash in toxic chemicals. It’s time to think about how regulation can operate as a form of green industrial policy for chemicals.
This post was originally published on the Law & Political Economy Blog as “How Environmental Law Created a World Awash in Toxic Chemicals.” Earlier this spring, the Biden administration finalized two important rules targeting a small subset of so-called forever chemicals: one establishing drinking water standards for six such chemicals and the other designating two …
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CONTINUE READINGIt’s High Time to Ban “Monster Fracking” in California
Fracking consumes enormous amounts of water, pollutes aquifers & is contrary to our climate goals
Recently, the New York Times published an important and disturbing expose’ titled, “‘Monster Fracks’ Are Getting Far Bigger. And Far Thirstier.” The Times article focuses on the alarming intersection of three current environmental crises–water supply shortages, groundwater contamination, and excessive greenhouse gas emission levels–that threaten California and other states across the nation. Fracking (the shorthand …
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CONTINUE READINGSpewing Out Mercury
These three power plants cause a big share of America’s mercury pollution.
In Ireland, poor people used to burn peat from fuel. Barely a step ahead of that, some American power plants burn semi-fossilized peat (lignite) to run their generators. It turns out that those power plants produce about a third of all the toxic mercury emissions of the entire industry. Even more remarkably, about half of …
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CONTINUE READINGHow Garden-Variety Air Pollution Regulation Promotes Environmental Justice
Cleaning up our nation’s air benefits the disadvantaged most of all.
Evidence is mounting that air pollution regulation is an effective way of reducing health disparities between disadvantaged communities and the population as a whole. The basic reason is simple: Air pollution is the biggest environmental threat to poor communities and communities of color. As the American Lung Association has said: “The burden of air pollution …
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CONTINUE READINGDeregulation, Normal Accidents, and the Airborne Toxic Event
What can we learn from the East Palestine train wreck?
Source: Wikimedia Commons The East Palestine train derailment is the story that won’t go away. Images of enraged residents shouting at company executives and government officials about the inadequacy of the response remind us all that across our vast industrial economy accidents of one sort or another are always waiting to happen while private firms …
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CONTINUE READINGSt. Valentine’s Other Assignment
Along with lovers, couples, and marriage, he has a more environmental domain.
St. Valentine is associated with love and romance. He is also the patron saint of beekeepers. It’s unclear why. Maybe it’s the association of honey with happiness and affection, especially in the age before chocolate reached Europe. Or maybe it’s because of the “birds and the bees” as models for explaining sex to children. Whatever …
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