September, 28 2017, 11:45am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Thomas Cmar | Earthjustice | 708.613.5061 | tcmar@earthjustice.org
Pete Harrison | Waterkeeper Alliance | 828.582.0422 | pharrison@waterkeeper.org
Michael Kelly | Clean Water Action | 202.393.5449 | mkelly@cleanwater.org
Brian Willis | Sierra Club | 202.675.2386 | Brian.Willis@sierraclub.org
Tom Pelton | Environmental Integrity Project | 443.510.2574 | tpelton@environmentalintegrity.org
EPA Withholding Public Information; Groups File Freedom of Information Suit Over America's Worst Toxic Water Pollution Source
First, EPA abruptly abandoned protections to prevent toxics from being dumped into our waterways -- now, the agency is illegally keeping information from the public.
WASHINGTON
A coalition of environmental and public health advocates filed suit today to compel the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to stop withholding critical information about the Trump administration's swift attempt to roll back safeguards against America's leading source of toxic water pollution: coal power plants.
Coal plants all over the country dump toxic chemicals into rivers, lakes, and streams that millions of Americans use for drinking water and recreation, yet the EPA is illegally refusing to provide the public with key information on why it's scrapping new safeguards to protect public health from water contamination.
Earthjustice filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit today in federal district court in Manhattan on behalf of the Waterkeeper Alliance, Sierra Club, Clean Water Action, and the Environmental Integrity Project.
Barely two months after EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt took office, the EPA abruptly issued an April 25 order to put an indefinite hold on safeguards designed to control the amount of arsenic, mercury, selenium, lead and other pollutants that spew from coal plants into our public waters. By putting those protections on hold indefinitely, the Trump administration is allowing power plants to continue discharging toxics without any specific limits, using standards set 35 years ago.
To find out why the agency would take an action so contrary to the public's interest, Earthjustice filed a FOIA request on behalf of the coalition in April, asking the EPA to provide the documents that led to the decision to allow more toxic coal waste dumping in America's waterways. Four months later, despite acknowledging that it has hundreds, if not thousands, of documents that are responsive to the request, the EPA has produced only one document - and much of that document was inked out before releasing.
While the new EPA administration has rebuffed environmental and public health advocates, it has held numerous meetings with polluting industries, following up with accelerated actions that benefit polluters at the public's expense.
"Industry's wish list has become the EPA's to-do list," said Earthjustice attorney Thomas Cmar. "EPA is taking illegal steps to conceal its obvious collusion with industry. The American public has the right to know what their government is up to - especially when the decisions determine the safety of our drinking water."
"Scott Pruitt held private meetings with multi-billion-dollar power companies, and then went on a crusade to allow those companies to dump billions of pounds of poison in our rivers," said Waterkeeper Alliance staff attorney Pete Harrison. "Meanwhile, Pruitt's agency is breaking federal laws to conceal information about his interactions with the utilities."
The toxics in coal plant waste can cause cancer, make fish unsafe to eat, and inflict lasting brain damage on small children. Heavy metals in the waste, like lead, arsenic, and mercury, don't degrade over time, and can concentrate as they travel up the food chain - impacting fish and wildlife, and ultimately collecting in people's bodies.. Power plant pollution can also make municipal water bills more expensive because water treatment plants may have to spend more money to ensure that they deliver safe water to their customers.
"With Trump and Pruitt in charge, no American should take clean water for granted. In 2017, safe water shouldn't be something that American communities need to fight for, but Scott Pruitt and Donald Trump are putting the profits of coal executives before the health of the American people and the safety of our drinking water," said Mary Anne Hitt, Director of Sierra Club's Beyond Coal campaign. "This isn't some obscure, wonky issue in Washington, it's about the Trump administration allowing coal plants to keep dumping industrial sludge into the waterways Americans count on every day. Whether you're making a cup of morning coffee or taking your kids fishing, this brazen action by the Trump Administration is putting your clean water at grave risk. "
After decades of inaction, limits for these toxic discharges from coal power plants were finally updated by the Obama Administration in September 2015 due to a court order secured by some of the same groups filing suit today. The new safeguards - which the Trump Administration is seeking to roll back - would have required power plants to eliminate the vast majority of this pollution, protecting our nation's drinking water sources and making thousands of river miles safer for swimming and fishing.
"EPA is stonewalling the public because the agency knows it can't justify the dangerous decision to let coal plants continue to dump toxic metals and other chemicals into our water," said Jennifer Peters, National Water Programs Director for Clean Water Action. "The facts haven't changed - coal plants are the number one toxic water polluter in the country. But Scott Pruitt is hoping Americans will give up and stop fighting his reckless handouts to industry if EPA drags its feet long enough."
"This is the largest industrial source of toxic water pollution in the country," said Abel Russ, an attorney with the Environmental Integrity Project. "EPA's failure to protect our children's health is shameful, and they know that, and they would like to keep it quiet. But we will keep fighting to shine a light on EPA's dereliction of duty."
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.
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'Outrageous': US Accepts Israeli Assurances on Legal Use of Weapons in Gaza
Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer called the U.S. assessment "absolutely scandalous."
Mar 25, 2024
The Biden administration on Monday said that Israel's use of U.S.-supplied weapons in a war that's killed and maimed more than 114,000 Palestinians complies with international law, a conclusion that flies in the face of multiple court rulings that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza and the assessments of legal and human rights experts around the world.
Referring to a letter from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a Monday press briefing that the Biden administration has "had ongoing assessments of Israel's compliance with international humanitarian law" and "have not found them to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had until Monday to certify to Congress that Israel is adhering to President Joe Biden's February 2023 memo stating that "no arms transfer will be authorized where the United States assesses that it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit... genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949... or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law."
"These assurances are perspective, but of course, our view on them is informed by our ongoing assessments of Israel's conduct in the war in Gaza," said Miller.
Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer called the U.S. assessment "absolutely scandalous."
US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller insisted during a press briefing that Israel has not violated international law in its military operation in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/9OP5xRm0Gx
— The Great Investor (@TheGreatInvest2) March 25, 2024
According to Palestinian and international officials, Israeli bombs and bullets—many of them provided by the United States as part of the $3.8 billion in annual military aid and additional emergency shipments—have killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, the majority of them women and children.
In December, Biden implored Israel to stop its "indiscriminate bombing" of Gaza. Since then, Israeli forces have killed or wounded over 40,000 people.
Experts have pointed to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided "bunker-buster" bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas' underground tunnels.
Aided by artificial intelligence-based target selection systems, Israel Defense Forces commanders are approving bombings they know will cause large numbers of civilian casualties. In a bid to assassinate a single Hamas commander, the IDF dropped at least two 2,000-pound bombs on the densely populated Jabalia refugee camp on October 31, killing more than 120 civilians.
Even the United States military—which since 2001 has killed hundreds of thousands of people during the open-ended so-called War on Terror—avoids using 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas due to the tremendous damage they cause.
Regarding the Biden administration's assessment that Israel is adhering to international law when it comes to providing humanitarian assistance to besieged and starving Gazans, journalist Krystal Ball noted Monday that Blinken "admits 100% of the population is being starved yet somehow certifies that Israel isn't blocking humanitarian aid."
WATCH: "100% of the population of Gaza is experiencing severe levels of acute food insecurity. We cannot, we must not allow that to continue."
U.S. Sec. of State Antony Blinken pushes for an immediate cease-fire and more humanitarian aid into Gaza. pic.twitter.com/U1Mme7fqiJ
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 21, 2024
"This is fucking outrageous," Ball said on social media as critics pointed out how Gallant publicly declared in October that Israel would commit the war crime of a "complete siege" of Gaza.
The U.S. assessment stands in stark contrast with two major court rulings—one by the International Court of Justice and the other by a federal court in California—that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, as well as with findings by at least hundreds of jurists and other experts around the world, including in Israel, that the assault on Gaza is genocidal. Observers accuse Israel of ignoring an ICJ order for Israel to avoid acts of genocide.
On Monday, the United Nations Human Rights Council published a draft report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The report recommended suspending military aid to Israel in light of its numerous violations of international law.
A growing number of Democratic U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have urged the Biden administration to immediately cut off arms transfers to Israel, citing its illegal conduct in Gaza, including mass killing and destruction and the blocking of lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Also on Monday, Palestine defenders rallied in Washington, D.C. to protest a visit to the State Department by Gallant and to demand an end to U.S. aid and weapons to Israel. Another high-level Israeli delegation's visit to Washington was canceled Monday after the U.S. abstained from a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
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Federal Court Rules Major Wyoming Oil and Gas Lease Sale Illegal for Ignoring Climate Impacts
"This is a huge victory for the protection of our public lands," said Friends of the Earth.
Mar 25, 2024
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management will have to reevaluate the wildlife and public health impacts of a major 2022 oil and gas lease sale in Wyoming after a federal judge ruled Friday that the agency had overlooked "what is widely regarded as the most pressing environmental threat facing the world today" when it moved forward with leasing 120,000 of federal land.
U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in Washington, D.C. that the BLM did not halt the lease sale even after it acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on the federal lands could result in the same negative environmental and social impacts as the addition of hundreds of thousands of cars to U.S. roads each year.
Moving forward with one of the Biden administration's largest lease sales despite its likely environmental harm, said Cooper, was illegal under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws.
Representing The Wilderness Society and Friends of the Earth (FOE), environmental legal group Earthjustice sued BLM over its leasing plans' potential impact on the greater sage grouse, an endangered bird species, and other wildlife, as well as groundwater impacts.
The judge found BLM did not complete a sufficiently detailed review of drilling impacts on the greater sage grouse, and relied too heavily on outdated and overly broad analyses of oil and gas drilling in Wyoming.
While the agency has been attempting to "stop the bleeding" of the greater sage grouse, whose population has declined nearly 40% since 2002, the BLM still refused to postpone leasing in a critical habitat for the bird.
The Biden administration also did not adequately explain its analysis of potential groundwater harms, said the ruling.
Despite some conservation strides by the Biden administration, The Wilderness Society's Ben Tettlebaum said the court's decision "affirms that much work remains" to be done. The BLM, he added, "must fully account for the serious impacts of its oil and gas program on groundwater, wildlife, and the climate."
Tettlebaum said the ruling also proves the agency is required to "factor into its leasing decisions the enormous costs that greenhouse gas emissions stemming from its oil and gas program impose on public land resources and on the communities that depend on them for clean air and water."
Hallie Templeton, legal director for FOE, added that the federal government "simply cannot ignore climate, wildlife, and water impacts when analyzing the myriad risks of oil and gas leasing, whether in Wyoming or across the country," as the ruling makes clear.
"We are beyond pleased with this outcome," said Templeton.
The ruling "should be another wake up call for the Bureau of Land Management to at long last address the damage caused from federal oil and gas development," said Alexandra Schluntz, senior associate attorney for Earthjustice. "It is time to make fossil fuel leasing on our public lands a thing of the past."
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Draft UN Report Finds Israel Has Met Threshold for Genocide
"Israel's genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure."
Mar 25, 2024
The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.
The advance unedited version of the report—entitled Anatomy of a Genocide—concludes that Israel's far-right government and military "have intentionally distorted jus in bello principles, subverting their protective functions, in an attempt to legitimize genocidal violence against the Palestinian people."
"The overwhelming nature and scale of Israel's assault on Gaza and the destructive conditions of life it has inflicted reveal an intent to physically destroy Palestinians as a group," the draft report states, enumerating Israeli actions that violate Article II of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: "Killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to group members; and deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part."
"Israel has de facto treated an entire protected group and its life-sustaining infrastructure as 'terrorist' or 'terrorist-supporting,' thus transforming everything and everyone into either a target or collateral damage, hence killable or destroyable," the paper continues. "In this way, no Palestinian in Gaza is safe by definition. This has had devastating, intentional effects, costing the lives of tens of thousands of Palestinians, destroying the fabric of life in Gaza, and causing irreparable harm to its entire population."
Israel
rejected the report as "an obscene inversion of reality."
According to Palestinian and international humanitarian officials, Israel's 171-day Gaza onslaught has killed at least 32,333 Palestinians, most of them women and children, while wounding nearly 75,000 others and displacing around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people. Thousands more Palestinians are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings. Disease and deadly starvation caused and exacerbated by Israel's siege and blockade of Gaza are spreading rapidly.
"Israel's genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure," the draft report asserts. "For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group—demographically, culturally, economically, and politically—seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources."
Referring to the flight and ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Arabs from Palestine during the foundation of the modern state of Israel in 1948, the paper contends that "the ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all. This is an imperative owed to the victims of this highly preventable tragedy, and to future generations in that land."
"The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all."
The draft report urges U.N. member states to "enforce the prohibition of genocide in accordance with their... obligations" under international law. In January, the U.N.'s International Court of Justice (ICJ) found that Israel was "plausibly" perpetrating genocide in Gaza and ordered the country's government to "take all measures within its power" to prevent genocidal acts. Human rights defenders say Israel has ignored the order.
"Israel and those states that have been complicit in what can be reasonably concluded to constitute genocide must be held accountable and deliver reparations commensurate with the destruction, death, and harm inflicted on the Palestinian people," the publication argues.
The draft report recommends measures including:
- Immediate implementation of an arms embargo on Israel, as it appears to have failed to comply with the binding measures ordered by the ICJ;
- Immediate referral of the situation in Palestine to the International Criminal Court in support of its ongoing investigation;
- Ensuring that Israel, as well as states who have been complicit in the Gaza genocide, acknowledge the colossal harm done, commit to nonrepetition, with measures for prevention and full reparations, including the full cost of the reconstruction of Gaza;
- Deploying an international protective presence to constrain the violence routinely used against Palestinians in the occupied territories; and
- Ensuring that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) is properly funded to enable it to meet the increased needs of Palestinians in Gaza.
Israel on Monday informed the U.N. that it will no longer allow UNRWA convoys carrying food aid into northern Gaza, even as the Palestinians are starving to death, a move that one humanitarian campaigner called a "death sentence."
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