#EPA

[mysharona1987]

[reasonsforhope]

Article | Paywall-Free

"The Environmental Protection Agency finalized a rule Tuesday [October 8, 2024] requiring water utilities to replace all lead pipes within a decade, a move aimed at eliminating a toxic threat that continues to affect tens of thousands of American children each year.

The move, which also tightens the amount of lead allowed in the nation’s drinking water, comes nearly 40 years after Congress determined that lead pipes posed a serious risk to public health and banned them in new construction.

Research has shown that lead, a toxic contaminant that seeps from pipes into the drinking water supply, can cause irreversible developmental delays, difficulty learning and behavioral problems among children. In adults, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, lead exposure can cause increased blood pressure, heart disease, decreased kidney function and cancer.

But replacing the lead pipes that deliver water to millions of U.S. homes will cost tens of billions of dollars, and the push to eradicate them only gathered momentum after a water crisis in Flint, Mich., a decade ago exposed the extent to which children remain vulnerable to lead poisoning through tap water...

The groundbreaking regulation, called the Lead and Copper Rule Improvements, will establish a national inventory of lead service lines and require that utilities take more aggressive action to remove lead pipes on homeowners’ private property. It also lowers the level of lead contamination that will trigger government enforcement from 15 parts per billion (ppb) to 10 ppb.

The rule also establishes the first-ever national requirement to test for lead in schools that rely on water from public utilities. It mandates thatwater systems screen all elementary and child-care facilities, where those who are the most vulnerable to lead’s effects — young children — are enrolled, and that they offer testing to middle and high schools.

The White House estimates that more than 9 million homes across the country are still supplied by lead pipelines, which are the leading source of lead contamination through drinking water. The EPA has projected that replacing all of them could cost at least $45 billion.

Lead pipes were initially installed in cities decades ago because they were cheaper and more malleable, but the heavy metal can wear down and corrode over time. President Joe Biden has made replacing them one of his top environmental priorities, securing $15 billion to give states over five years through the bipartisan infrastructure law and vowing to rid the country of lead pipes by 2031. The administration has spent $9 billion so far — enough to replace up to 1.7 million lead pipes, the administration said.

On Tuesday, the administration said it was providing an additional $2.6 billion in funding for pipe replacement. Over 367,000 lead pipes have been replaced nationwide since Biden took office, according to White House officials, affecting nearly 1 million people...

Environmental advocates said that former president Donald Trump, who issued much more modest revisions to the lead and copper rule just days before Biden took office, would have a hard time reversing the new standards.

Erik Olson, the senior strategic director for health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that the Safe Drinking Water Act has provisions prohibiting weakening the health protections of existing standards...

Olson added that the rule “represents a major victory for public health” and will protect millions of people “whose health is threatened every time they fill a glass from the kitchen sink contaminated by lead.”

“While the rule is imperfect and we still have more to do, this is by far the biggest step towards eliminating lead in tap water in over three decades,” he said."

-via The Washington Post, October 8, 2024

[empireofthestates]

What You Need to Know about Project 2025

The GOP's Radical Plans for America's Future

graphics from @/pinballwizardess on tiktok

[theonion]

Responding to a dramatic increase in cases of starry-eyed gazing and spontaneous poetry, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a general health warning Tuesday for hazardous levels of atmospheric romance across the entire North American continent.

“Early indications of romantic exposure include a flushing of the skin around the face, neck, and chest, accelerated heartbeat, rapid eyelash batting, and sighs,” EPA administrator Steven Johnson said at a morning press conference. “Left untreated, the ailment progresses rapidly, leading to aimless strolls, floral purchases, and a form of acute and regressive aphasia in which the victim’s speech degenerates into that of a young child.”

According to Johnson, teens, recently married couples, and people who have not yet had all of the hope drained out of them by bitter life experience are at the greatest risk.

Full Story

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The most remarkable thing about antitrust (that no one talks about)

I'm on a 20+ city book tour for my new novel PICKS AND SHOVELS. Catch me in PITTSBURGH on May 15 at WHITE WHALE BOOKS, and in PDX on Jun 20 at BARNES AND NOBLE. More tour dates here.

It's hard to remember now, but for more than three years under Biden, it was possible to read the headlines every morning and feel excited that your government was taking big, decisive action to tame the corporate behemoths that rip you off, maim you on the job, and undermine our democracy.

The antitrust surge under Biden was and is a truly remarkable thing: a sustained, organized, effective government policy that supported the interests of the majority of people against the interests of a tiny cohort of ultra-wealthy wreckers and looters. According to political scientists, that antitrust surge should have been impossible. In 2014, a pair of political scientists from Northwestern and Princeton published their landmark study, "Testing Theories of American Politics: Elites, Interest Groups, and Average Citizens":

https://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

The paper analyzes 1,779 US policy fights from 1981 to 2002, and conclude that the US only does things that regular people want if those are also things that rich people want:

Ordinary citizens… get the policies they favor, but only because those policies happen also to be preferred by the economically-elite citizens who wield the actual influence.

When ordinary people want something that rich people don't want, ordinary people lose. Even when 80% of us want something, we only get our way 43% of the time. This is antidemocratic in the most fundamental sense: rich minorities get their way at the expense of working people, nearly all the time.

And then there's antitrust. Ordinary people don't like having their wages stolen. They don't like having their rents jacked up by algorithmic collusion. They don't like having their air and water poisoned. They don't like being mangled or killed on the job. They don't like having to sign noncompetes that bar them from taking a better job if one opens up.

More to the point, working people are not made better off when stuff like this happens. On average, working people own either zero or nearly zero stocks, not even in a 401(k) retirement savings, because 40 years of wage stagnation and the near-abolition of employer based defined-benefits pensions has left most Americans with nearly no retirement savings (hence the panic over Trump and Musk's attempt to kill Social Security):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/25/derechos-humanos/#are-there-no-poorhouses

By contrast, the richest 10% own 94% of all the stocks held by Americans. Even if you, personally, don't want to be locked up by a noncompete or have your water poisoned by frackers, if you're in the top 10%, you probably benefit when this happens. After all, businesses cheat and maim because it's profitable, not because they're sadistic (they may be sadistic, or they may be depraved in their indifference to the harms they visit upon the rest of us, but the reason they do it is money):

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/stock-market-ownership-wealthiest-americans-one-percent-record-high-economy-2024-1

Antitrust systematically attacks the sky-high monopoly rents extracted by the largest corporations and redistributes them to working people and small businesses, which, for the most part, are not listed on stock exchanges or traded over the counter. In other words, antitrust is a way to clobber the policy priorities favored by the wealthy in order to benefit the rest of us.

That means that the antitrust surge is amazing. It's one of those things that shouldn't exist at all. It defies political science. What's more, antitrust fervor precedes the Biden administration. Some of the Biden administration's most important antitrust cases (like the Google case) started under Trump. Some were even kicked off by far-right state attorneys general, like Texas's cartoonishly corrupt AG Ken Paxton, who led a coalition of nearly every AG in American in suing Facebook.

Antitrust fervor isn't a US phenomenon – it's global. Take Canada: in its entire history, the Competition Bureau (Canada's answer to the FTC) filed only three merger challenges, and won zero of them. But last year, Parliament passed a massive, muscular new bill giving the Competition Bureau unprecedented powers:

https://www.parl.ca/legisinfo/en/bill/44-1/c-59

In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority led the world in investigating and punishing Big Tech monopolies…and they did so under a succession of shambolic Conservative governments. Indeed, it was a Labour (or "Labour") Prime minister, Keir Starmer, who fired the head of the CMA and replaced him with the former head of Amazon UK:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/01/22/autocrats-of-trade/#dingo-babysitter

We've seen big, ambitious antitrust action all over the world: Germany, France, Spain, the EU, Australia, South Korea, Japan, and even China.

It goes without saying that there is no dark money org funneling billionaires' wealth into this project to destroy billionaires. This is a groundswell political phenomenon, it's global, and it's powerful. The fact that Starmer and Trump have gutted their wildly effective antitrust agencies is heartbreaking, but it's not the end. The reason the US and the UK pursued such an ambitious antitrust agenda is the public groundswell. Getting rid of the agencies doesn't kill that groundswell – if anything, it only makes people madder.

It's hard to overstate just how weird the antitrust surge is. We've been fighting for decades for even tiny concessions to the interests of working people – a modest, below-inflation rise in the minimum wage, say, or small-dollar efforts to improve public education, reduce student debt, or control the price of prescription drugs. These efforts have largely failed, and when they've succeeded, the victories were modest, or worse, merely symbolic.

But antitrust is the exception. Antitrust – again, a movement that is squarely aimed at neutralizing the power of the wealthy – is the most successful popular movement of the past decade. Companies worth trillions of dollars are facing breakup as a result of antitrust cases. Everyone from meat-packers to landlords to sea freighters to pharma companies have faced massive, multi-billion-dollar setbacks at the expense of the antitrust movement.

Like I said, the current antitrust surge kicked off under Trump. But of course, that doesn't mean the GOP power-brokers support it – rather, they were cornered into it by their own base. The same is true of the Democrats: Biden didn't appoint the most effective antitrust enforcers the US has seen since the 1970s because he opposed corporate monopolies. Remember, this is the guy who, on the campaign trail, told business audiences that "nothing would fundamentally change" under a Biden administration:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Nor does the Democratic Party power-structure support this stuff. Remember when Harris's billionaire surrogates Marc Cuban and Reid Hoffman demanded that Harris fire the Biden administration's antitrust enforcers?

https://prospect.org/power/2024-07-26-corporate-wishcasting-attack-lina-khan/

The success of the antitrust movement happened in spite of the Democratic Party, in spite of the GOP. To the extent that either party embraced an antitrust agenda, it's because the people demanded it, so undeniably that the parties chose the public interest over the interest of the billionaires who call nearly every shot for them.

It's impossible to overstate what an anomaly this is. On today's episode of the excellent Organized Money podcast, hosts Matt Stoller and David Dayen reminisce with Jonathan Kanter, Biden's former DoJ antitrust boss, about a conference they attended together in 2017 where the after-dinner keynote speaker was Richard Posner, a judge who was hugely influential in the dismantling of antitrust in the 1970s and 1980s. According to Dayen, the substance of Posner's keynote was:

Antitrust. That's dead, isn't it? I don't know what you guys are even talking about. This is ridiculous. There is no such thing as antitrust law.

And Kanter, Dayen, Stoller and future FTC chair Lina Khan were all sitting around a table, listening to this in 2017. By 2021, Kanter and Khan were running the DoJ and FTC antitrust agenda, and they did more in the next three years than all their predecessors over the past 40 years, combined.

Khan, Kanter, and their colleagues (like Rohit Chopra at the CFPB) did incredible work during the Biden administration. There is no denying their skill, their competence, their commitment. But the reason they were able to bring all those virtues to bear in service to working Americans is the massive popular surge of rage at corporate dominance. In other words, the Biden administration's prodigious trustbusting accomplishments were the effect of the antitrust movement, not its cause.

The corollary is that just because Trump has dismantled the agencies that were buoyed up by the movement, it doesn't make the movement itself smaller or less powerful. If anything, the Trump regime's relentless pursuit of an agenda in service to the rich at working people's expense will only add fuel to the anti-corporate, anti-billionaire wildfire. Trump's tariff chaos might be bad for some parts of the ruling class, but as Van Jackson writes for Labor Notes, there's plenty of plutocrats who love the prospect of a deep recession sparked by global trade chaos:

[L]avish tax cuts, deregulation, and an environment friendly to union-busting are just as valuable to most CEOs as a growing economy. What they lose in the stock market, they will more than make up in surplus labor, a fire sale on distressed assets, and Trump’s promise to totally eliminate the capital gains tax.

https://labornotes.org/blogs/2025/04/viewpoint-why-oligarchs-want-recession?

American wealth is more concentrated today than it was in France on the eve of the French Revolution. People are pissed. That anger is out there, waiting to be harnessed by smart political movements:

https://twitter.com/highbrow_nobrow/status/1909607195961917687

To grab that anger and mobilize it, we need to show people that their rage over specific issues is actually downstream of excessive corporate power. Furious that one company owns every brand of eggs and has used the excuse of bird flu to make record profits? You're not angry about eggs, you're angry about corporate power:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/10/demand-and-supply/#keep-cal-maine-and-carry-on

Worried that the EPA has been put in an induced coma and that means your kids will grow up with asthma and lead poisoning? You're actually angry about corporate power:

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2025/04/air-pollution-trump-administration/682361/

The Department of Education is in the hands of a woman who took over her rapey husband's professional wrestling monopoly, a corporation that misclassified performers as contractors, leaving them without health care so they have to beg for pennies on Gofundme so they can die with dignity of their workplace-related injuries:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8UQ4O7UiDs

Trump's Secretary of Education is monumentally unqualified for her position. Not only is she is planning to fire teachers en masse and replace them with AI, she doesn't know what AI is and just gave a speech where she repeatedly referred to it as "A-1":

https://gizmodo.com/trumps-education-chief-linda-mcmahon-repeatedly-calls-ai-a1-in-school-speech-2000587329

Angry about this? Worried that your kids' teachers are about to be replaced with steak-sauce thanks to the incompetence of this fucking muttonhead? Me too. But you're not just angry at Trump or Linda McMahon – you're angry at corporate power.

In his book The Public Domain, the copyright scholar James Boyle talks about the political salience of the term "ecology." Boyle recounts how, prior to the rise of the word "ecology," there were many standalone issues, but no movement. Sure, you care about owls, and I care about the ozone layer, but what does the gaseous composition of the upper atmosphere have to do with the destiny of charismatic nocturnal avians?

https://thepublicdomain.org/thepublicdomain1.pdf

The term "ecology" welded all these thousands of issues together into a movement. When I look at the incredible, organic, bottom-up surge of antitrust energy, the only explanation I can find is that something similar is happening here. Concentrated corporate power is the common enemy of beer drinkers, surgeons, shippers, patients, farmers, grocery shoppers, social media users, any anyone who wears sneakers:

https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/learn/monopoly-by-the-numbers

Something remarkable is happening, right under our noses. Nothing like this has happened in my lifetime. The world is terrifying, but this? This is exciting.

Smart political organizers have a once-in-a-century opportunity here. Trump's wildly unpopular destruction of the antitrust enforcement system opens up all kinds of opportunities for state enforcers (remember, states can also enforce antitrust law):

https://www.thesling.org/state-antimonopoly-enforcement-must-be-a-guardian-of-american-democracy-heres-how/

A massive political change that bubbles up from the bottom, aimed directly at the richest, most powerful people in the history of the human race, is an amazing thing. As bad as things are – and boy are they bad – this remains true, and important.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/10/solidarity-forever/#oligarchism

Image: umseas (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/snre/34605145761/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

[typhlonectes]

EPA Proposes To Fire Hundreds of Scientists

“This is not designed to cut expenses, it's designed to destroy,” one official said.

The mood was grim at a town hall meeting called by the Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday. The gathering came one day after the New York Times reported a bombshell — Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator, plans to dismantle its Office of Research and Development, eliminating 50 to 75 percent of its 1,500 or so chemists, toxicologists, biologists and other experts. The department, which conducts essential research to inform federal policies, plays a critical role in the agency’s mission to safeguard public health and the environment. Laying off most of its staff, many of whom are career scientists, would leave the EPA without the independent and rigorous science needed to develop effective regulations. No one consulted the office’s leaders about the plan...

Read more: https://www.truthdig.com/articles/epa-proposes-to-fire-hundreds-of-scientists/

[saywhat-politics]

RFK, Jr., Once Poisoned by Mercury, Is Silent as EPA Weakens Rules against It

RFK, Jr. fought mercury pollution for years, but he is now in an administration that wants to make it easier for industries to dump it into the air and water

CLIMATEWIRE | The last time President Donald Trump tried to roll back a mercury regulation, he faced a high-profile opponent: Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Kennedy railed against EPA at an August 2017 public hearing for going along with the Trump administration’s demands to repeal wastewater limits. He warned that allowing more power plant pollution to enter waterways would poison people through mercury-contaminated fish — a problem he experienced personally after a period of eating tuna.

"It is really troublesome for those of us who will suffer from your irresponsibility," Kennedy said at the time. "The law says the waterways of this country, the fisheries of this country, belong to the people."

Eight years later, Kennedy has been silent as the Trump administration is again rolling back those same mercury regulations, along with at least a dozen other pollution controls announced last week in what EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has called the agency's "biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history."

[gwydionmisha]

This May Look Small, But Trump is seizing control of the judiciary, persecuting political opposition, and removing checks that prevent Autocracy.

He is calling openly for political prosecutions.

Donald Trump demands 'accountability' for his pursuers in Justice Department speech

They are criminalizing non-violent political speech.

Luckily, push back is having an effect.

Because what Ed Martin's doing is illegal and unethical.

They need to do this because Ed Martin is in danger of being disbarred for all the illegal and unethical things he is doing to persecute people Trump doesn't like.

[victusinveritas]

[mysharona1987]

[unbfacts]

It is completely legal to be buried at sea in the United States. The EPA requires the body to be wrapped in a biodegradable shroud or casket, weighted, and released at least 3 nautical miles from shore in water at least 600 feet deep. The U.S. Navy also offers a burial at sea program for veterans, providing full military honors and arranging the ceremony at no cost to the family.

[reasonsforhope]

"Seven federal agencies are partnering to implement President Biden’s American Climate Corps, announcing this week they would work together to recruit 20,000 young Americans and fulfill the administration's vision for the new program. 

The goals spelled out in the memorandum of understanding include comprehensively tackling climate change, creating partnerships throughout various levels of government and the private sector, building a diverse corps and serving all American communities.

The agencies—which included the departments of Commerce, Interior, Agriculture, Labor and Energy, as well the Environmental Protection Agency and AmeriCorps—also vowed to ensure a “range of compensation and benefits” that open the positions up to a wider array of individuals and to create pathways to “high-quality employment.”  

Leaders from each of the seven agencies will form an executive committee for the Climate Corps, which Biden established in September, that will coordinate efforts with an accompanying working group. They will create the standards for ACC programs, set compensation guidelines and minimum terms of service, develop recruitment strategies, launch a centralized website and establish performance goals and objectives. The ACC groups will, beginning in January, hold listening sessions with potential applicants, labor unions, state and local governments, educational institutions and other stakeholders. 

The working group will also review all federal statutes and hiring authorities to remove any barriers to onboarding for the corps and standardize the practices across all participating agencies. Benefits for corps members will include housing, transportation, health care, child care, educational credit, scholarships and student loan forgiveness, stipends and non-financial services.

As part of the goal of the ACC, agencies will develop the corps so they can transition to “high-quality, family-sustaining careers with mobility potential” in the federal or other sectors. AmeriCorps CEO Michael Smith said the initiative would prepare young people for “good-paying union jobs.” 

Within three weeks of rolling out the ACC, EPA said more than 40,000 people—mostly in the 18-35 age range—expressed interest in joining the corps. The administration set an ambitious goal for getting the program underway, aiming to establish the corps’ first cohort in the summer of 2024. 

The corps members will work in roles related to ecosystem restoration and conservation, reforestation, waterway protection, recycling, energy conservation, clean energy deployment, disaster preparedness and recovery, fire resilience, resilient recreation infrastructure, research and outreach. The administration will look to ensure 40% of the climate-related investments flow to disadvantaged communities as part of its Justice40 initiative.  

EPA Administrator Michael Regan said the MOU would allow the ACC to “work across the federal family” to push public projects focused on environmental justice and clean energy. 

“The Climate Corps represents a significant step forward in engaging and nurturing young leaders who are passionate about climate action, furthering our journey towards a sustainable and equitable future,” Regan said. 

The ACC’s executive committee will hold its first meeting within the next 30 days. It will draw support from a new climate hub within AmeriCorps, as well as any staffing the agency heads designate."

-via Government Executive, December 20, 2023

-

This news comes with your regularly scheduled reminder that WE GOT THE AMERICAN CLIMATE CORPS ESTABLISHED LAST YEAR and basically no one know about/remembers it!!! Also if you want more info about the Climate Corps, inc. how to join, you can sign up to get updates here.

[rjzimmerman]

Excerpt from this New York Times story:

The Trump administration intends to eliminate Environmental Protection Agency offices responsible for addressing the disproportionately high levels of pollution facing poor communities, according to a memo from Lee Zeldin, the agency administrator.

In the internal memo, viewed by The New York Times, Mr. Zeldin informed agency leaders that he was directing “the reorganization and elimination” of the offices of environmental justice at all 10 E.P.A. regional offices as well as the one in Washington.

Mr. Zeldin’s move effectively ends three decades of work at the E.P.A. to try to ease the pollution that burdens poor and minority communities, which are frequently located near highways, power plants, industrial plants and other polluting facilities. Studies have shown that people who live in those communities have higher rates of asthma, heart disease and other health problems, compared with the national average.

“If anybody needed a clearer sign that this administration gives not a single damn for the people of the United States, this is it,” said Matthew Tejada, a former E.P.A. official who is now a senior vice president for environmental health at the Natural Resources Defense Council, a nonprofit organization.

In a statement, Mr. Zeldin suggested that environmental justice — which the agency defined as “the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income” with respect to environmental laws — was tantamount to discrimination.

“President Trump was elected with a mandate from the American people,” Mr. Zeldin said. “Part of this mandate includes the elimination of forced discrimination programs.”

[femenaces]

I don't even have words. Trump directing the FBI to criminalize nonprofits for taking LEGAL GOVERNMENT GRANTS, just because they were put in place under the previous administration. We are in full blown fascism. The American Experiment is over.

[porterdavis]

Make America a toxic dump again