September, 11 2023, 01:08pm EDT
13 Groups Sue EPA Over Factory Farm Water Pollution
Lawsuit seeks to expand and strengthen industry regulation under the Clean Water Act.
On Friday, Food & Water Watch and 13 groups sued Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency over the agency’s failure to regulate factory farm pollution under the Clean Water Act. The lawsuit follows EPA’s denial last month of a 2017 petition asking EPA to initiate a rulemaking to overhaul its ineffective factory farm regulations; EPA elected instead to form a study group to make recommendations, delaying action until at least 2025—that is, if the agency decides to act at all.
Petitioners’ lawsuit asks the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to reject EPA’s denial and require it to immediately reconsider key reforms proposed in the 2017 petition that have the potential to expand and strengthen water pollution permits for concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs).
“EPA’s deliberate head-in-sand approach to factory farm regulation has facilitated a national clean water crisis, decades in the making. When given the opportunity to finally right its wrongs, EPA elected instead to double down on special treatment for factory farms,” said Food & Water Watch Legal Director Tarah Heinzen. “Factory farms are polluters by design — true environmental protection requires a willingness by EPA to confront this industry head on. It is high time EPA addressed the crisis it has spent decades enabling.”
Agriculture is the nation’s leading polluter of rivers and lakes. Factory farm waste is responsible for a significant share, including at least 14,000 miles of rivers and 90,000 acres of polluted lakes and ponds nationwide. In 2003, EPA estimated that CAFOs generated more than three times the amount of raw sewage than that of our human population; since then the industry has grown by about 40 percent.
Yet for over 50 years, most factory farms have evaded Clean Water Act regulation altogether. EPA has acknowledged that it lacks basic information about where the nation’s CAFOs are located, let alone which are illegally polluting. Fewer than one third of the country’s 21,000+ largest factory farms have National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits.
“The EPA response is disappointing,” said Kathy Tyler, a Dakota Rural Action Board Member from Big Stone City, SD. “I have personal experience with the impacts of unregulated manure application onto tiled farm fields that has caused significant pollution to streams and lakes. In our area millions of gallons of manure is applied to these fields without concern or oversight.”
“The Trom family farm in rural Dodge County, Minnesota is surrounded by 12 swine factory farms in a 3-mile radius,” said Sonja Trom Eayrs, attorney, rural advocate, farmer’s daughter, and co-founder of Dodge County Concerned Citizens. “Like many families in rural America, ours must contend with dangerous discharges from neighboring factory farms on a daily basis. We’ve contacted the regulators on several occasions, with little to no assistance. What do you do if the regulators will not regulate?”
“In the 1950s and 1960s many of Iowa's rivers and lakes were essentially lifeless,” said Curt Nelson, Iowa CCI member from Cerro Gordo County. “The 1972 Clean Water Act began the cleanup process. Huge progress was made and life returned to our waters. Sadly the rise of large scale CAFOs and over application of other fertilizers has radically reversed that trend and we are now seeing algae blooms and fish kills. This simply cannot continue.”
“For over a decade, the EPA has doggedly looked the other way as factory farms across the U.S. balloon in size and regional concentration, destroying watersheds and accelerating the decline of endangered species,” said Hannah Connor, Environmental Health Deputy Director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Denying this petition after the Supreme Court took an ax to the Clean Water Act is an appalling abdication of this administration’s clean water and environmental justice objectives. I’m hopeful the court will force the EPA to reconsider its dangerous failure to curb factory farm pollution.”
Petitioners are Food & Water Watch, Center for Biological Diversity, Center for Food Safety, Dakota Rural Action, Dodge County Concerned Citizens, Environmental Integrity Project, Helping Others Maintain Environmental Standards, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement, Kewaunee CARES, Land Stewardship Project, Midwest Environmental Advocates, and North Carolina Environmental Justice Network.
The petitioners are represented by Food & Water Watch and Earthrise Law Center.
Food & Water Watch mobilizes regular people to build political power to move bold and uncompromised solutions to the most pressing food, water, and climate problems of our time. We work to protect people's health, communities, and democracy from the growing destructive power of the most powerful economic interests.
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'Screaming the Quiet Part': Trump Advisers Say He's Ready to Embrace King-Like Powers
The U.S. Supreme Court's immunity decision has reportedly emboldened the presumptive GOP nominee to pursue his far-right agenda and authoritarian aims "without fear of punishment or restraint."
Jul 02, 2024
Presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump—who has pledged to be a dictator on "day one" if elected to another four years in the White House—is reportedly preparing to exploit the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling Monday that current and former presidents are entitled to sweeping immunity from criminal prosecution.
Citing unnamed advisers to the former president, Axiosreported Tuesday that if Trump is reelected in November, he "plans to immediately test the boundaries of presidential and governing power, knowing the restraints of Congress and the courts are dramatically looser than during his first term."
"They're screaming the quiet part, and yet Democrats are mostly focused on renominating a sundowning 81-year-old losing to him in key swing state polls," The Lever's David Sirota wrote in response to Axios' reporting, referring to President Joe Biden.
Facing mounting calls to drop his reelection campaign following his disastrous debate performance against Trump last week, Biden said in an address following the Supreme Court's decision in Trump v. United States that the ruling means "there are virtually no limits on what a president can do."
"I know I will respect the limits of the presidential power, as I have for three and a half years," said Biden. "But any president, including Donald Trump, will now be free to ignore the law."
Among the steps Trump—who celebrated the ruling—intends to take swiftly upon assuming office following a possible November victory, according to Axios, are setting up "vast camps" to "deport millions of people," moving to "fire potentially tens of thousands of civil servants" and replace them with "pre-vetted loyalists," and centralizing "power over the Justice Department," which the former president has repeatedly threatened to wield against his political opponents.
Trump has also pledged to gut environmental rules—which the Supreme Court also targeted in recent rulings—and ram through climate-wrecking drilling projects, moves backed by the powerful oil and gas industry that's helping finance his campaign.
"Thanks to Monday's Supreme Court ruling, Trump could pursue his plans without fear of punishment or restraint," Axios reported.
“It's coming, fast and furious, if he's elected.”
Being a dictator on Day One. Swapping civil servants for “pre-vetted loyalists.” Threatening to “target and even imprison critics.” Pardoning insurrectionists. Jacking up prices with new tariffs. And more: https://t.co/sEiORyvMOt
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) July 2, 2024
While Trump made his support for such actions clear well before the U.S. Supreme Court's Monday ruling, the decision is likely to embolden the twice-impeached former president who, since leaving office, has been indicted by a federal grand jury on election-subversion charges and convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records.
The high court's ideologically divided 6-3 decision in the immunity case has already impacted both legal proceedings, with Manhattan prosecutors agreeing Tuesday with the former president's request to delay his criminal sentencing on the 34 felony charges as the judge on the case examines whether the Supreme Court's ruling has any bearing on the conviction.
In the separate election-subversion case, the Supreme Court's ruling further pushes back a trial as the judge now has to determine which of the actions described in the indictment qualify as "official" duties that—according to the high court's right-wing supermajority—are entitled to "absolute immunity" from criminal prosecution.
"So, yes, all this will delay Trump's trial. In that sense, he gets what he craved," Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice, wrote Monday. "But the implications are far worse for the structure of American self-government."
"We read sonorous language in the majority opinion that 'the president is not above the law,'" Waldman added. "But just in time for Independence Day, the Supreme Court brings us closer to having a king again."
"The Framers of the Constitution, wary of reestablishing the monarchy they overthrew, carefully limited the chief executive's powers. And six justices just crowned him king."
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent against Monday's decision that the Supreme Court's majority has effectively endorsed assassinations of political rivals, orchestration of a military coup to remain in power, and the acceptance of bribes in exchange for pardons as legitimate and unprosecutable uses of presidential authority.
"The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably," Sotomayor wrote. "In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law."
Slate legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern echoed Sotomayor, writing that "it is unclear, after Monday's decision, what constitutional checks remain to stop any president from assuming dangerous and monarchical powers that are anathema to representative government."
"The immediate impact of the court's sweeping decision will be devastating enough, allowing Donald Trump to evade accountability for the most destructive and criminal efforts he took to overturn the 2020 election. But the long-term impact is even more harrowing," Stern wrote. "All future presidents will enter office with the knowledge that they are protected from prosecution for even the most appalling and dangerous abuses of power so long as they insist they were seeking to carry out their duties, as they understood them."
"The Framers of the Constitution, wary of reestablishing the monarchy they overthrew, carefully limited the chief executive's powers," he added. "And six justices just crowned him king."
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'Historic' Category 5 Hurricane Beryl Offers Terrifying View of Future
"Beryl isn't 'unbelievable,'" one expert said. "it's what happens when you heat up the planet with fossil fuel pollution for decades."
Jul 02, 2024
As Hurricane Beryl barreled toward Jamaica on Tuesday after killing at least four people in the Caribbean's Windward Islands, climate scientists warned the record-breaking Category 5 storm is a present-tense example of what's to come on a rapidly heating planet.
Even before the Atlantic hurricane season began on June 1, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted an 85% chance of above-normal activity and 17-25 total named storms this year. Matthew Cappucci, a meteorologist for The Washington Post's Capital Weather Gang, highlighted some records Beryl has already broken.
"There is a strong, well-documented link between the effects of human-induced climate change and the development of stronger, wetter storms that are more prone to rapidly intensify," he wrote Tuesday. "Beryl sprung from a tropical depression to a Category 4 hurricane in just 48 hours, the fastest any storm on record has strengthened before the month of September."
Beryl is also the earliest Category 4 and 5 hurricane on record in the Atlantic, Cappucci pointed out. Previously, the earliest storm to reach the top level of the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale was Emily, in mid-July of 2005.
The Capital Weather Gang reported that Beryl "strengthened more Monday night, its peak winds climbing to 165 mph. It has surpassed Emily (2005) as strongest July hurricane on record. It's early July but Atlantic is acting like late August."
Certified consulting meteorologist Chris Gloninger emphasized that "the climate crisis has led to well-above-average ocean water temperatures and helped this storm explode."
As Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Potsdam University explained: "The heat in the upper ocean is the energy source for tropical cyclones. This heat is at record level, mainly caused by emissions from burning fossil fuel. That's why an extreme hurricane season has been predicted for this year. It's off to a bad start!"
Colorado State University meteorologist Philip Klotzbach on Monday shared graphics showing that "Caribbean ocean heat content today is normally what we get in the middle of September."
While some expressed disbelief over the storm, CNN extreme weather editor Eric Zerkel stressed that "Beryl isn't 'unbelievable' or 'defying all logic,' it's what happens when you heat up the planet with fossil fuel pollution for decades. The oceans store roughly 90% of that excess heat. The ocean is as warm as it typically is... when Category 4 storms form. June is now August."
Acknowledging Beryl's strength, Steve Bowen, a meteorologist who serves as chief science officer at the global reinsurance firm Gallagher Re, concluded that "this is a massive warning sign for the rest of the season."
Looking beyond this hurricane season, which ends in November, University of Hawaii at Mānoa professor and [C]Worthy co-founder David Ho said, "Let's remember that things are just going to get [worse] as we continue to consume nearly 100 million barrels of oil every day."
The "historic" storm is sparking calls for action to phase out fossil fuels across the globe. Noting how Beryl "is breaking records and leaving a trail of destruction throughout the Caribbean," the U.S.-based Sunrise Movement argued that "we must prosecute Big Oil for their role in causing devastation like this."
In response to a climate scientist who shared a photo of some damage Beryl has already caused, Rahmstorf expressed hope that people around the world won't "wait with voting for climate stabilization until extremes hit their homes."
Beryl made landfall Monday as a Category 4 hurricane on Carriacou, a Grenada island, and also affected St. Vincent and Grenadines. According toThe Associated Press, at least four people were killed.
The U.S. National Hurricane Center said Tuesday afternoon that on its current path, "the center of Beryl will move quickly across the central Caribbean Sea today and is forecast to pass near Jamaica on Wednesday and the Cayman Islands on Thursday. The center is forecast to approach the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico on Thursday night."
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Rudy Giuliani Permanently Disbarred in New York State
A court found that the former Trump lawyer "flagrantly misused his prominent position" and "repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious," about the 2020 election.
Jul 02, 2024
Rudy Giuliani—onetime mayor of New York City, federal prosecutor, and attorney for former President Donald Trump—was permanently disbarred in New York state on Tuesday for lying about the 2020 presidential election being "stolen" by Democrats.
The New York Supreme Court's Appellate Division unanimously disbarred Giulian, calling his propagation of Trump's "Big Lie" about 2020 election fraud a threat to the public interest and the legal profession.
The panel found that Giuliani—whose law license was suspended in 2021—"flagrantly misused his prominent position as the personal attorney for former President Trump and his campaign" and "repeatedly and intentionally made false statements, some of which were perjurious, to the federal court, state lawmakers, the public … and this court concerning the 2020 presidential election, in which he baselessly attacked and undermined the integrity of this country's electoral process."
"The seriousness of [Giuliani's] misconduct cannot be overstated," the court stressed.
As the New York Law Journalreported:
Once known as "America's Mayor," the 80-year-old has faced mounting legal battles and financial ruin in recent years.
Giuliani was indicted in Arizona in May alongside 17 others for his alleged role in an attempt to overturn Trump's loss in the state during the 2020 presidential election.
Giuliani filed for bankruptcy protection in December following a $148 million defamation judgment leveled against him for false statements in the wake of former President Donald Trump's failed attempt to retain the presidency.
He is also facing multiple actions in New York state—including a $10 million complaint from an alleged former employee who accuses him of sexual assault and wage theft—though many were stayed in the wake of his Chapter 11 filing.
Giuliani—who is also facing felony charges in Georgia along with Trump and others who allegedly tried to subvert the 2020 election—denies these and other accusations, including that he tried to sell presidential pardons for $2 million each.
Barry Kamins, the retired judge who represented Giuliani as he fought to keep his New York law license, said his client "is obviously disappointed in the decision" and that they are weighing their appeals options.
A bar disciplinary committee in the District of Columbia has also recommended that Giuliani be disbarred.
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