TITLE: EPA rule curbing air toxics is lifesaving for Houston area | Editorial
https://www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/epa-air-pollution-rule-toxics-19399918.php
EXCERPT: In 2021, Michael Regan, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, set out on a 550-mile road trip, starting in Jackson, Miss., and heading along the Gulf Coast into Texas as part of an environmental justice tour, visiting places like Cancer Alley in Louisiana. When he got to Houston, Regan met with leaders from Kashmere Gardens to hear about the cancer clusters there. He took a “toxic tour” with Texas Environmental Justice Advocacy Services that led him from the East End to the Ship Channel. And he visited with Furr High School students who shared their own experiences of living through natural disasters that quickly became environmental ones for vulnerable communities. Such listening tours are good press but in the case of this administration, good policy, too.
"We promised to listen to folks that are suffering from pollution and act to protect them. Today we deliver on that promise with strong final standards to slash pollution, reduce cancer risk, and ensure cleaner air for nearby communities," Regan said last Tuesday, finalizing a new rule that curbs six cancer-causing pollutants from chemical plants that produce such things as paints, plastics and pesticides. The changes will cut toxic air pollution by 6,200 tons annually, according to the agency. That factors in cuts to pollution emitted from chemical plant flaring — a routine yet dirty practice that spikes with every plant shutdown and startup amid big storms.
Almost half of the 200 affected plants nationwide are in Texas, including 32 in the Houston area, many situated along the Ship Channel. The new rule also requires companies to step up air quality monitoring for fence line communities, a major win for advocacy groups that have been fighting for better data for years. Areas such as Baytown, Deer Park and La Porte will breathe easier, maybe even live longer, thanks to this new rule.
"We have the largest petrochemical complex in the United States," Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee wrote to the editorial board, "This will impact Harris County probably more than anywhere else in the country." Menefee joined in a multistate coalition supporting the new rule and has pushed back against Attorney General Ken Paxton's attempts to tie up another recently introduced EPA rule regulating particulate matter.
With this latest rule, some industry groups have also pushed back, citing the costs of implementation, which the EPA estimates would be around $150 million annually until 2038. These companies supply critical products. Ethylene oxide, for example, goes into computer chips, which are a near ubiquitous part of modern life, and it helps sterilize medical equipment, the head of the Texas Chemistry Council pointed out to the Texas Tribune.
But Dr. Inyang Uwak, policy director for Air Alliance Houston, thinks that the balance sheet has to include the benefits of this change.
“The cost of implementing the final rule is less than 1% of their annual national sales,” Uwak said, citing the EPA’s own analysis of the facilities, most of which are owned by large corporations.
Meanwhile, the EPA found that communities within 6 miles of facilities covered by this rule would experience a 96% reduction in cancer risk due to air toxics. There are a whole host of other benefits, including less smog in a metropolitan area that’s been among the most severe violators of federal standards.
TITLE: Republican AGs Are Teaming Up With The Corporations Poisoning Their States To Gut The Clean Air Act. Why?
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/cafe/republican-ags-are-teaming-up-with-the-corporations-poisoning-their-states-to-gut-the-clean-air-act-why
EXCERPT: [W]hy are AGs willing to deploy public resources — by way of frivolous lawsuits — to aid antagonists of the public interest in their own states?
Follow the paper trail and you’ll find that it’s likely because [the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers] (and its member organizations) are reliable donors for AGs and for their governing organization, the Republican Attorneys General Association (RAGA).
As tracked by the Center for Media and Democracy, AFPM donated $246,720 from 2014-2016, $60,625 in 2017, $220,725 from 2019-2020, $40,000 in 2021 and another $75,150 in 2023. In sum, over the last ten years, AFPM organizationally has funneled at least $643,220 to RAGA overall. Member groups have also funneled money to RAGA, including Valero ($225,000 in 2023,) Exxon ($100,000 in 2023,) Chevron ($25,000 in 2023), and more.
Such a favorable financial dynamic means that individual AGs benefit hugely from AFPM dollars, even when the people of their states don’t, and — as the numbers make clear — the people of their states don’t.
But beyond simple mutually beneficial financial relationships, these cases highlight just how coordinated right-wing organizations are in attempting to influence policy at the state and national level. For example, Ohio v. EPA has seen significant industry participation in the suit via amici, or friend of the court, briefs. Those briefs reveal even more entrenchment between the offices, interests, and activities of Republican AGs, industry actors, and the dark-money influence peddling organizations which live in between. One specific amici, filed on behalf of the Western States Trucking Association (WSTA), illustrates this point well. WSTA’s brief was filed by Robert Henneke and Theodore Hadzi-Antich, Texas Public Policy Foundation attorneys. TPPF is the Texas branch of the Koch-backed State Policy Network. While it styles itself a network of independent, non-partisan, think-tanks, SPN is actually a hard-right hub of state-level orgs pushing “an extreme right-wing agenda that aims to privatize education, block healthcare reform, restrict workers’ rights, roll back environmental protections, and create a tax system that benefits most those at the very top level of income,” as explored by the Center for Media and Democracy.
TPPF, and Henneke & Hadzi-Antich specifically, are no strangers to supporting (and being supported by) Republican Attorneys General. Indeed, TPPF and Texas’ Attorneys General office (itself a co-litigant in Ohio v. EPA), are well acquainted with each other. Henneke and Hadzi-Antich have even previously served as Texas’ outside counsel in that states’ attack on other issues of environmental law and policy.
And neither do the AGs who use your tax dollars in ardent defense of their apocalyptic corporate bottom line.
TITLE: The EPA Has Done Nearly Everything It Can to Clean Up This Town. It Hasn’t Worked.
https://www.propublica.org/article/calvert-city-kentucky-epa-pollution-westlake-sacrifice-zones
EXCERPT: The inability to stop Westlake [Corporation] from polluting is really an indictment of the rules that govern toxic air pollution, experts told ProPublica. Scott Throwe, a former senior EPA enforcement official, put it this way: If Westlake followed every regulation, the emissions “would still be significant.”
The EPA regulates only a handful of pollutants with enforceable standards for outdoor air quality. Air monitors track those compounds, like particulate matter and lead, and when concentrations hit a certain limit, regulators must intervene to bring them down. That might involve limiting the construction of new industrial plants or requiring emissions testing on residents’ cars.
The law governing ethylene dichloride doesn’t work like that. The EPA regulates it and 187 similar air toxics in a less direct way, by enforcing standards for the technology that polluters must install to lower emissions.
A facility like Westlake has dozens of smokestacks, tanks and other points where air toxics are supposed to be released. The company has to install pollution-control equipment on these devices to reduce emissions.
Many of them have specific emissions limits, like 2 pounds of ethylene dichloride per hour. But there’s little to no direct air monitoring to ensure the limit is met, and generally no cap on the total emissions that are allowed to come from a plant. If one of the Westlake facilities expands production and adds three smokestacks permitted at 10 pounds of ethylene dichloride per hour, it’s not required to cut back on 10 pounds in another part of the facility.
And not all air toxics come out where they’re supposed to. So-called “fugitive” emissions can escape from pumps, valves and thousands of other places. Westlake is supposed to conduct routine maintenance to identify and repair leaks. But at the end of the day, no one knows exactly how many tons of air toxics are streaming out of a particular plant.
The law has a backstop to alleviate these weaknesses: Every eight years, the EPA is supposed to review its chemical plant regulations and update them as needed. That might involve requiring newer and better pollution-control technology. Additionally, the EPA might conduct risk studies by estimating the total amount of air toxics coming from these plants and modeling how they disperse into communities. If the results show a lot of residents at high risk, that adds urgency to tightening controls.
But the agency is so understaffed that these reviews can take decades. Westlake Vinyls, one of the plants in Calvert City, got a stricter rule in April for many of its processes — the first revision since 2006.
EPA rarely conducts these reviews for industrial polluters until they’re “practically under pain of death to do it,” often due to lawsuits from environmental groups, Throwe said.
There’s ample evidence that Westlake’s emissions have gotten out of hand. The Calvert City facilities have been repeatedly fined for leaking air toxics since at least 2010. When the EPA inspected the plants in September 2022 — several months after ProPublica wrote about alarming air-monitoring results — inspectors found multiple leaks, including one estimated at 170,000 parts per million. Throwe called it a “huge” deal, considering the EPA typically counts anything above 500 parts per million as a leak. In April 2023, EPA inspectors showed up with experts from the agency’s National Enforcement Investigations Center, an elite unit whose involvement shows the case’s escalating importance. They documented additional problems in an inspection report, including a pipe with “a visible gap or hole allowing emissions to be released.”
But EPA staff are spread thin. The National Enforcement Investigations Center has five inspectors handling air-pollution violations. They’re supported by additional inspectors from other EPA offices; the one in charge of Kentucky refused to say how many air-pollution inspectors they have. (The vast majority of inspections are conducted by state and local regulators. The EPA has more of an oversight role.)
To wrap up its most recent investigation, the EPA can’t just lean on the dozen or so leaks its inspectors witnessed. If the agency wants real improvements from Westlake, it needs proof of systemic problems. It needs to examine Westlake’s records for patterns of poor maintenance and prior leaks, a labor-intensive process that could take many months.
“It is totally unacceptable” for the EPA not to act more quickly to protect the public, said Wilma Subra, an environmental health expert who advises communities on air pollution. She said the agency should know which parts of the facilities are prone to leaks based on its history and target enforcement to immediately fix those weak spots.
Once the EPA is ready to penalize Westlake, any kind of significant fine requires input from the Department of Justice, Throwe said. If the agency accepts an EPA referral, he said, negotiating a settlement with Westlake could take three to five years.
Then, whatever penalty comes out of this process would be added to the other fines the company has faced in the past.
The recent $1 million fine, for example, took eight years to levy.
The company’s net worth is $19 billion.