February, 17 2023, 11:35am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Erin Fitzgerald, Earthjustice, efitzgerald@earthjustice.org,
Lori Harrison, Waterkeeper Alliance, lharrison@waterkeeper.org,
Sean Dixon, Puget Soundkeeper, Sean@PugetSoundkeeper.org,
Cindy Carr, Sierra Club, cindy.carr@sierraclub.org,
Chase Lindemann, Riverkeeper, clindemann@riverkeeper.org
Advocates Renew Call to Modernize Federal Rail Brake Systems Following Ohio Train Derailment
Environmental groups urge federal agencies to reinstate modern train safety requirements in the wake of recent disaster
As a public health and environmental disaster unfolds following the derailment and explosion of a toxic-chemical cargo train in East Palestine, Ohio, advocacy groups renewed their challenge to the U.S. Department of Transportation’s (DOT) 2018 repeal of a regulation requiring electronic brake systems for trains carrying hazardous and flammable material.
In 2018, the federal agencies charged with regulating hazardous materials on trains actually removed safety rules requiring modern braking systems. But they failed to conduct mandated safety tests, used inaccurately low estimates of accidents and risks, and restricted public participation. Earthjustice, on behalf of Waterkeeper Alliance, Sierra Club, Riverkeeper, Washington Conservation Action, and Stand, appealed the rule, but the agencies failed to respond, siding with companies like Norfolk Southern, who lobbied against more stringent safety requirements. The DOT’s silence has meant more explosive tank cars with "Civil War-era braking systems” traveling through towns and neighborhoods.
“It should not take another exploding train to get DOT’s attention,” said Earthjustice Attorney Kristen Boyles. “Communities can’t keep trains out, can’t get safety measures, can’t know what trains are carrying, and yet are left with the human health and environmental problems when there’s an accident.”
Earthjustice’s appeal focused on trains carrying large amounts of volatile crude oil in long unit trains, and it is not clear whether the Norfolk Southern train carrying hazardous and cancer-causing chemicals in Ohio would have been covered by DOT’s repealed brake system requirement. What is clear, however, is that the agency has failed to require up-to-date, modern brake systems for most trains carrying explosively toxic materials.
The long-term impacts of the Feb. 3 toxic chemical explosions on people’s health are yet unknown, but residents have reported experiencing nausea, shortness of breath, dizziness, and headaches. It has also been confirmed that the hazardous chemicals have spilled into the Ohio River, which covers 14 states and provides drinking water to more than 5 million people. The state confirmed the contaminated waterways have led to the deaths of at least 3,500 fish. Environmental groups have called on Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine to declare a state of emergency and formally ask President Joe Biden for FEMA aid so that affected residents can get immediate help.
Following the explosions, state officials ordered residents living within a mile of the site to evacuate immediately, said River Valley Organizing Development Director Emily Wright, who lives a few miles from the disaster site. Many East Palestine community members sheltered in a local high school as they had nowhere else to go. Residents in other areas in Ohio surrounding the site and in Beaver County, Pennsylvania were also told to evacuate.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the water, air, and soil surrounding the disaster site have been contaminated by hazardous and carcinogenic petrochemical derivatives used in factories to make paint, adhesives, plastics, and more. Despite the EPA’s greenlight for residents to return home a week after the explosions, the agency cannot say what kind of health impact this amount of exposure to these hazardous chemicals will have on people.
Petrochemicals are toxic chemicals derived from oil and gas that are used to make a variety of substances, including plastics. As the U.S. shifts to clean energy, fossil fuel companies are turning to petrochemicals to protect their profits. EPA must adopt stronger protections from these chemicals across their life cycles -- including how they are transported -- to protect against chemical disasters, as well as the everyday exposures, that are poisoning communities.
Earthjustice is representing Stand, Waterkeeper Alliance, Riverkeeper, Puget Soundkeeper, Washington Conservation Action, and the Sierra Club.
Quotes from our Clients:
"The disaster unfolding in East Palestine could irreversibly harm people's health and wildlife, and without immediate action the next incident could be even more catastrophic," said Daniel E. Estrin, Waterkeeper Alliance's General Counsel. “While the cause of this accident has not definitively been established, it has been clear for several years that modern braking systems are essential to protecting our communities from the increasing threat of trains carrying dangerous products like explosive oil, toxic gasses, and carcinogenic chemicals through the hearts of our neighborhoods and watersheds."
“Following the recent derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, the dangers of transporting hazardous substances by rail have been made abundantly clear,” said Riverkeeper Legal Fellow Chase Lindemann. “The DOT can reduce the risks of these accidents by requiring long sought after safety features, and it is our hope that the Department will work with us to take a necessary next step in protecting the safety of our communities and environments.”
“Railroads crisscross the nation running along our waterfronts, bridging our rivers, and rolling through our neighborhoods,” said Sean Dixon, Executive Director at Puget Soundkeeper. “Reliance on century-old braking technology is unacceptably negligent; the DOT cannot continue to delay modernization of this vital aspect of rail safety. Hazardous, flammable cargos of dangerous chemicals and volatile hydrocarbons present an undeniable threat to public health and the environment – a threat that must be mitigated, immediately.”
“We all deserve to live in safe and healthy communities no matter if we live along a rail line or the shoreline,”said Rebecca Ponzio, Climate and Fossil Fuel Program Director at Washington Conservation Action. “The railroad industry and fossil fuel companies have lobbied to avoid accountability for too long on critical safety measures. It is time to make sure they are held accountable to the highest safety standards to protect the health and well-being of our water, air and people.”
"Unbelievably, another Norfolk Southern train derailed this week in Michigan. It's troubling that the revised safety regulations clearly do not go far enough to prevent such disasters, and the government's ability to respond and provide essential disclosures to the community is far from adequate,” said Devorah Ancel, Senior Attorney at the Sierra Club. “There is simply no excuse for these shortfalls, given the slew of disasters that occurred in the past 10 years. The Biden Administration must do everything in its power to protect the people in East Palestine and other rail-adjacent communities from the devastating impacts of train accidents and explosions."
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13 Months of Record-Smashing Heat Called 'Another Red Alert' for Humanity
"This alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance," said one campaigner.
Jul 08, 2024
Scientists on Monday underscored the urgent need to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy following the publication of data from the European Union's climate change monitor showing that last month was the hottest June ever recorded and that 2024 is likely to be the planet's hottest year on record.
Each month since June 2023 has been the hottest since records have been kept, the European Union's Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said last week in its latest monthly bulletin.
According to the agency, June "was 1.50°C above the estimated June average for 1850-1900, the designated preindustrial reference period, making it the 12th consecutive month to reach or break the 1.5°C threshold."
"European temperatures were most above average over southeast regions and Turkey, but near or below average over western Europe, Iceland, and northwestern Russia," C3S noted. "Outside Europe, temperatures were most above average over eastern Canada, the western United States and Mexico, Brazil, northern Siberia, the Middle East, northern Africa, and western Antarctica."
"Temperatures were below average over the eastern equatorial Pacific, indicating a developing La Niña, but air temperatures over the ocean remained at an unusually high level over many regions," the agency added.
C3S Director Carlo Buontempo said in a statement Monday that "even if this specific streak of extremes ends at some point, we are bound to see new records being broken as the climate continues to warm."
"This is inevitable unless we stop adding greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and the oceans," he stressed.
In an interview with The Associated Press published Monday, C3S climate scientist Nicolas Julien called the new data "a stark warning that we are getting closer to this very important limit set by the Paris agreement."
"The global temperature continues to increase," he added. "It has at a rapid pace."
Zeke Hausfather, a researcher at the California-based nonprofit Berkeley Earth, toldReuters, "I now estimate that there is an approximately 95% chance that 2024 beats 2023 to be the warmest year since global surface temperature records began in the mid-1800s."
As Reuters reported Monday:
The changed climate has already unleashed disastrous consequences around the world in 2024. More than 1,000 people died in fierce heat during the Hajj pilgrimage last month. Heat deaths were recorded in New Dehli, which endured an unprecedentedly long heatwave, and amongst tourists in Greece.
"This is not good news at all," Aditi Mukherji, who co-authored the most recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, toldThe Guardian.
"We know that extreme events increase with every increment of global warming," she added, "and at 1.5°C, we witnessed some of the hottest extremes this year."
The Guardiansurveyed hundreds of IPCC authors earlier this year. Three-quarters of them said they expect Earth to heat by at least 2.5°C by the end of this century. Half of the surveyed scientists expect temperatures to rise above 3°C by 2100.
"It is a crisis," said Mukherji, and one that has a clear solution, given that burning fossil fuels is the leading cause of global heating.
Antonia Juhasz, a senior researcher on fossil fuels at Human Rights Watch, toldNation of Change that "as a result of the burning of fossil fuels, heatwaves are becoming more common, and intense heatwaves are more frequent."
"We can break the cycle, we can make oil companies stop burning fossil fuels," she added.
Reacting to the latest C3S data, Amnesty International climate adviser Ann Harrison said on social media that "this alarming record underlines the need to urgently phase out fossil fuels, and to hugely increase climate finance."
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Led by Left Coalition, French Election Shows 'How You Defeat the Far Right'
France's left-of-center parties held off a far-right advance in the country's parliamentary elections by building a progressive platform and forming strategic alliances, their supporters say.
Jul 08, 2024
Political figures from across the world congratulated France's left-of-center coalition following parliamentary elections on Sunday in which it gained the most seats of any group, outperforming the far-right party that many feared would take control of the National Assembly, in what the The Washington Postcalled "one of the greatest political upsets in recent French history."
In the second and final round of voting, the Nouveau Front Populaire (NFP) won roughly 180 out of the 577 seats in the assembly, far from a majority but more than President Emmanuel Macron's centrist coalition, which won about 160, or Marine Le Pen's far-right Rassemblement National (RN), which won about 140 or 145.
Several parties including the leftist La France Insoumise (LFI), the center-left Parti Socialiste (PS), and Les Écologistes, a green party, joined forces to form the NFP after Macron announced a snap election in early June.
The parties came together out of fear of the RN, which led the polls and had the strongest showing of any party or alliance in the first round of the parliamentary elections on June 30. The NFP also opposed Macron's neoliberal agenda and supported progressive economic policies such as a lower retirement age.
Jeremy Corbyn, member of U.K. parliament and standard-bearer of the British left, said the French results provided "an urgent, valuable lesson."
"Don't concede ground to those who sow division and fear," Corbyn, who himself was reelected a few days ago, wrote on social media. "Build a bold left movement that offers an alternative of inclusion and hope. That is how you defeat the far right."
Similarly, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) argued that the French results offered confirmation of the popularity of progressive economic platforms like the NFP's.
"Here's a simple fact: If politicians stand with working families, working families will stand with you," Sanders wrote on social media. "As it turns out, lowering the retirement age and raising the minimum wage are very popular. Congratulations to the French left for taking on right-wing extremism and winning."
Ce soir, la justice sociale a gagné.
Ce soir, la justice environnementale a gagné.
Ce soir, le peuple a gagné.
Et ça ne fait que commencer !#VictoireNFP #ElectionsLegislatives2024 pic.twitter.com/3OwoRTdFTG
— Marine Tondelier (@marinetondelier) July 7, 2024
Several members of France's multiracial soccer team, currently competing in the UEFA European Football Championship in Germany, expressed joy and relief at the results of the election back home.
"The victory of the people," midfielder Tchouameni Aurélien wrote on social media.
Forward Marcus Thuram reacted similarly.
"Congratulations to all those who came forward in the face of the danger that hovered over our country," he wrote. "Long live diversity, long live the republic, long live France. The fight continues."
The effort to defeat the far right involved multiple levels of negotiation between left and centrist parties—not just the formation of the NFP, which prevented member parties from running candidates against one another, but also strategic cooperation between the NFP and Ensemble, Macron's own coalition, before Sunday's second round of voting.
Last week, going into the second round, more than 300 of the 577 legislative races had three or more candidates still in contention—in most cases, one NFP candidate, one Ensemble candidate, and one RN candidate. Because of a shared fear of the far right, the NFP and Ensemble negotiated to drop their third-place candidates from more than 220 races so that left and centrist votes wouldn't be split.
The strategy worked, with RN leaders, who last week had been openly speaking about obtaining a parliamentary majority of 289 seats, left with only about half of that figure or less—though even 140 seats marks a significant gain for the party, which had only 88 previously. The tallies are still being finalized, with different media outlets reporting slightly different totals.
Source: La Libération, based on data from France's interior ministry
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the leftist president of Brazil, praised the "maturity" of the groups that joined together to defeat the far right. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, a centrist, expressed relief in light of the impact an RN victory could have had on the Ukraine war.
"In Paris enthusiasm, in Moscow disappointment, in Kyiv relief," Tusk wrote on social media. "Enough to be happy in Warsaw."
The coalition-building stands as a remarkable accomplishment given the challenges that it entailed: Just building the NFP alliance required tricky negotiation. Left-of-center parties, after decades of discord, formed an alliance for the first time in 2022, but it fell apart last year, and, though the PS was part of that alliance, it was not endorsed by prominent center-left figures such as former President François Hollande, who has backed the NFP.
The NFP parties didn't decide in advance whom they'd put forward for prime minister, and the different factions within the alliance are now jockeying for the position. Many of the more centrist NFP figures have declared that it can't be Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the LFI leader, whom they view as divisive.
In any case, Macron has the power to name the prime minister, and it's not clear if he would be willing to name Mélenchon, who ran against him for president in 2017 and 2022. Macron on Monday declined to accept the resignation of Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, an ally from his own party, explaining that he should stay on "to ensure the stability of the country."
That's likely just a temporary solution: Ensemble had a near-majority in the previous parliament but, having lost more than 80 seats, will no longer be strong enough to avoid a vote of no confidence in the prime minister and his government. Macron will have to name a prime minister that a majority of the incoming National Assembly approve of or risk triggering such votes of no confidence. The newly elected parliamentarians are scheduled to begin their first session on July 18.
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'Unfathomable': Lancet Study Estimates Gaza Death Toll May Exceed 186,000
"The horror unfolding in Gaza is unquestionably a genocide, and the full extent of that horror won't be truly known until it comes to an end," said one political analyst.
Jul 08, 2024
Amid the decimation of Gaza's healthcare system and Israel's relentless attacks on the enclave, officials have struggled to account for all the Palestinians who have been killed since the Israel Defense Forces began its assault in October—and a new analysis shows how "indirect" killings will likely push the death toll of the war to what one peace advocate called an "unfathomable" number.
In a letter published in the medical journal The Lancet on July 5, three public health experts cited a previous official death toll of 37,396, but pointed out that "armed conflicts have indirect health implications beyond the direct harm from violence," making it likely that the total number of deaths of Palestinians so far is much higher—and could ultimately reach close to 200,000, if not more.
"Even if the conflict ends immediately, there will continue to be many indirect deaths in the coming months and years from causes such as reproductive, communicable, and noncommunicable disease," wrote the authors. "The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict."
Since the authors researched the analysis, the death toll has grown to 38,193, according to Gaza health officials.
The authors wrote that an untold number of Palestinians in Gaza have died as a result of destroyed healthcare infrastructure and an inability to get medical care, starvation amid Israel's near-total blockade on humanitarian aid, and the loss of funding to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), one of the "very few humanitarian organizations" still working in Gaza.
Rasha Khatib of the Advocate Aurora Research Institute, Martin McKee of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Salim Yusuf of McMaster University and Hamilton Health Sciences noted that "in recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths."
"Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza."
Using the 2022 population estimate of more than 2.3 million people, the projected total death toll "would translate to 7%-9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip," reads the study.
Anthropologist Jason Hickle said the study pointed to "apocalyptic figures" in Gaza.
The Gaza Health Ministry's death count has been questioned since Israel began its bombardment of the enclave, with U.S. President Joe Biden saying in October that he had "no confidence" in officials' reports and the U.N. revising its civilian death toll in May as the Health Ministry amended its reporting of unidentified bodies.
Despite that change, wrote the authors, "the number of reported deaths is likely an underestimate," both because of "indirect" causes of death and the probability that thousands of Palestinians are still buried under rubble left behind by Israeli air-strikes.
"The U.N. estimates that, by February 29, 2024, 35% of buildings in the Gaza Strip had been destroyed, so the number of bodies still buried in the rubble is likely substantial, with estimates of more than 10,000," reads the analysis.
The authors also dismissed claims by Israeli authorities and others who have contested the Health Ministry's figures, noting that the Israeli intelligence services, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations "all agree that claims of data fabrication leveled against the Palestinian authorities in Gaza over its death toll are 'implausible.'"
Considering statements by top-level Israeli officials regarding their intent to "thin the population" of Gaza, "to a minimum," as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said, political analyst Omar Baddar said the estimated true death toll "isn't all that surprising."
The analysis was published days before the Israeli news outlet +972 Magazine published an article drawing from interviews with six Israeli soldiers who described how they "routinely executed Palestinian civilians simply because they entered an area that the military defined as a 'no-go zone'" and followed a "systematic policy of setting Palestinian homes on fire after occupying them."
Andre Damon of the World Socialist Web Sitesaid the projected death toll outlined in The Lancet represents "a systematic effort to exterminate the Palestinian people: armed, funded, and led by the U.S."
Israel faces an ongoing South Africa-led genocide case at the International Court of Justice.
The authors of the study said that "an immediate and urgent cease-fire in the Gaza Strip is essential, accompanied by measures to enable the distribution of medical supplies, food, clean water, and other resources for basic human needs."
"At the same time, there is a need to record the scale and nature of suffering in this conflict," they wrote. "Documenting the true scale is crucial for ensuring historical accountability and acknowledging the full cost of the war."
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