DAILY TRIFECTA: Fences Can't Help You With These Neighbors
They Don't Give A Hoot When They Pollute
TITLE: To Live and Die in Philadelphia: Sonya Sanders Grew Up Next Door to a Giant Refinery. She’s Still Suffering From Environmental Trauma.
https://insideclimatenews.org/news/19022024/sonya-sanders-grew-up-next-door-to-a-giant-refinery-in-philadelphia/
EXCERPTS: Sonya Sanders knows better than most the physical toll of living next door to an ecological hazard.
For a century and a half, the towering stacks at the former PES Refinery in her old South Philadelphia neighborhood spat flames, belched smoke and poisoned the air over her working-class community that now has outsized rates of cancer, asthma and other rare diseases.
Among those lost: Sander’s husband, Ray Williams, whose rare bone cancer, she believes, was caused by the polluted refinery air, even though he never smoked and never drank. Diagnosed, he was given only five years to live, but lived for 12. He died in March 2020.
Sanders’ life in the refinery’s shadows, the death of her husband and her new work as an environmental and climate activist have left her among an increasing number of people suffering from what researchers and therapists are calling eco-anxiety and, in even more extreme cases, environmental trauma.
While the largest and oldest refinery on the East Coast closed after a fire nearly destroyed it in 2019, Sanders, 51, continues to work daily on coping with what has been diagnosed as post-traumatic stress disorder, even though she moved to a new home five miles away.
“I feel everything closing in. Panic attacks. I feel like my heart races and like I’m having a heart attack but I’m not,” she said, describing her worst moments, which come when she considers the deaths that have ravaged her old neighborhood. “It feels like everything is spinning.”
In Philadelphia, at an event just before Earth Day last year called Healing the Land & Repairing Harm, Sanders watched herself in a video about the explosion that rocked the massive refinery in the summer of 2019, describing on film how she heard the sound and saw the flames and ran back to her home a few blocks away, where she found her husband, Ray, uninjured.
And suddenly it all came rushing back—she’s there running from the refinery, breathing the acrid smoke and polluted air that killed her husband and all the others from the neighborhood who’d died.
“So it brings all those feelings back,” she explained afterwards. “Ray’s just down the street, you know what I’m saying. The house is just down the street.”
Only now, she’s able to deal with the panic, understand what’s happening, maintain her composure and keep her emotions to herself.
In many ways, Sanders is an outlier: Unlike other Black and brown people who are dealing with climate anxiety and post-traumatic stress, she was able to find help—and that help has given her the tools to navigate through her trauma.
Through therapy sessions and other treatment, she has been able to acknowledge the trauma she experienced growing up a few blocks away from the refinery and identify what triggers a stress reaction.
She found a Black therapist by asking other activists where she could go to get help. The costs of her sessions are covered by her insurance.
When Sanders talked about wanting to walk on the refinery site as part of a protest in the fall of 2022, her therapist did not discourage her. Sanders wasn’t sure if being on the soil of what she calls a “deadly land” would make her sick mentally and physically.
“It was scary when I went home because I felt like I had to kind of wash this dirty, nasty gritty place off of me,” said Sanders, who fears that pollution from the refinery made her husband and neighbors sick and drives much of her PTSD. “I felt like I was bringing that with me in my house, you know what I’m saying. I just wanted to clean the atmosphere.”
When the protest ended, Sanders went straight home, used a disinfectant spray all over her house, grabbed a towel to clean herself and put her clothes in the washing machine.
“Just to make sure I felt better,” said Sanders, who was later arrested after walking a mile at the former refinery. “I still could feel like I did something to try to fight against it. To protect my own house and my own family’s health.”
TITLE: Supreme Court seems poised to halt EPA plan to cut cross-state pollution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/02/21/emissions-states-epa-supreme-court/
EXCERPT: Supporters of what’s known as the “good neighbor” rule say there would be real health consequences from even a temporary stay of the EPA regulation, which expands an Obama-era rule that required power plants in Midwestern and Appalachian states to clean up emissions that the nation’s prevailing west-to-east winds carry across state boundaries.
President Biden’s EPA extended the mandate to cover steel mills, cement factories and other major sources of industrial air pollution. The new limits target nitrogen oxide pollution, a major component of ground-level ozone, or smog, that has been found to worsen asthma, chronic bronchitis and other respiratory illnesses. They are designed to cut emissions of nitrogen dioxide from upwind states by roughly 70,000 tons by the summer of 2026, which EPA officials estimate could prevent as many as 1,300 premature deaths and reduce hospital and emergency room visits.
In recent years, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority has taken a skeptical view of federal agency power not specifically granted by Congress.
Two years ago, in a blow to the Biden administration’s plans for combating climate change, a divided court limited the EPA’s ability to reduce carbon emissions from power plants. Now, the court is considering a challenge that could at least temporarily curb the agency’s power to address deadly air pollutants that have long been a source of tension between states dependent on coal-generated electricity and their downwind neighbors.
Unlike other cases before the court testing the authority of federal agencies to interpret ambiguous federal statutes, the EPA’s power to set air quality rules is clear under the Clean Air Act. Instead, the justices in this case are asking about the reasonableness of the EPA’s technical, scientific and economic judgments — all of which are well within the agency’s mandate, according to environmental advocates.
The case “represents an even further invasion from the Supreme Court into what have traditionally been considered legislative and executive branch policy judgments,” said Sam Sankar, senior vice president for programs at Earthjustice and a former law clerk to the late Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.
After the plan went into effect last August, a divided panel of the D.C. Circuit denied the upwind states’ request to put the rule on hold while litigation continues. The challengers then asked the Supreme Court to intervene on an emergency basis.
Legal analysts questioned the court’s decision to schedule argument before a lower court has ruled on the underlying issues in the case and without the usual additional written briefs. According to University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck, Wednesday’s session at the high court is just the third time since 1971 that the justices have heard arguments based on this type of emergency application.
Sankar noted following the argument that the court typically accepts challenges to government regulations after they take effect. If the Supreme Court blocks the EPA rule, he told reporters, it would “effectively be saying to industry, ‘Look, any time you face costs from a regulation, c’mon up and take a shot. We might block that rule for you.’ And my question is whether this is a new rule that applies only to environmental regulations or whether it applies to all regulations.”
Kagan pushed back on the suggestion from the challengers’ attorney that the EPA could have contemplated every possible permutation when it devised the rule.
“One of my clerks who does math better than I do tells me that there are two to the 23rd power, which is like 4 million different permutations. What was the EPA supposed to do?” she asked.
Conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett seemed to share concerns expressed by her more liberal colleagues about whether lawyers for the challengers were being forthcoming about the costs of complying with the federal regulations.
“The rule has been in effect for a while. Why haven’t you talked about that?” she asked Catherine Stetson, a lawyer for the industry groups. “Have you incurred significant financial costs that are unreasonable?”
Stetson pointed to the costs of permitting to install new pollution controls and said later that industry anticipates “hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in costs over the next 12 to 18 months.”
Downwind states such as New York and Connecticut have argued that they cannot meet federal clean air standards without tighter controls on the smokestacks in neighboring states.
Critics of the federal plan counter that the expense of adding new technology would put them out of business. They also say it could threaten the electrical grids in upwind states if power plant operators decide the compliance costs are too high to stay open.
There was very little discussion at oral arguments on Wednesday of the health dangers to downwind state residents if the court blocked the regulation while the litigation continues.
TITLE: Exclusive: US regulator drops some emissions disclosure requirements from draft climate rules
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/us-regulator-drops-some-emissions-disclosure-requirements-draft-climate-rules-2024-02-22/
EXCERPT: The SEC has dropped a requirement for U.S.-listed companies to disclose so-called Scope 3 emissions, which was included in its original draft of the rules published in March 2022, the sources said.
Scaling back these rules would be a blow for President Joe Biden's agenda to address climate change threats through federal agencies. Biden, a Democrat, has been under pressure from many lawmakers in his party to do more and move at a faster pace.
Scope 3 emissions account for greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, released in the atmosphere from a company's supply chain and the consumption of its products by customers. For most businesses, Scope 3 emissions represent more than 70% of their carbon footprint, according to consulting firm Deloitte.
If adopted, the new draft would represent a win for many corporations and their trade groups that lobbied to water down the rules. But it would also deviate from European Union rules which make Scope 3 disclosures mandatory for large companies starting this year and potentially complicate compliance for some global corporations.