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"This ruling ensures that the 17 other states that follow California can keep driving towards a future with cleaner air and cleaner vehicles," said one advocate.
Three judges serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on Tuesday affirmed the Biden administration's 2022 decision to preserve California's strict emissions standards—dealing a blow to a coalition of right-wing state attorneys general and fossil fuel industry groups that had challenged the rules.
The panel—made up of judges who were appointed by Democratic Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama—ruled that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was right to reinstate its waiver, dating back to the 1970s, which allows California to impose stricter emissions standards than the federal government.
The waiver, which has helped the massive state to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons annually, was introduced to help the state address smog stemming from congested freeways and roads in Los Angeles.
The Trump administration revoked the exception in 2018, and Biden reinstated it in 2022, a move that one Sierra Club leader said was "vital to California" and would have a "positive ripple effect on states across the country, driving forward climate progress and delivering cleaner air for millions of Americans."
On Tuesday, Sierra Club senior attorney Joshua Berman said the D.C. Circuit panel's ruling in Ohio v. EPA was "a victory for cleaner air and cleaner cars not just in California, but across the nation."
"The D.C. Circuit has reaffirmed California's critical role in protecting its residents from harmful vehicle emissions, thereby benefiting the many states that rely on adoption of California's standards to achieve and maintain the Clean Air Act's air quality mandate," said Berman.
California's strict emissions standards have been adopted by 17 states and Washington, D.C. since they were first introduced. The Biden administration recently approved new emissions standards for cars as well as buses and trucks that campaigners and experts said were progress but didn't go far enough.
Alice Henderson, director and lead counsel for the Environmental Defense Fund, said the upheld standards "will save lives, protect people from the climate crisis and unhealthy air pollution, save drivers money, and help create good new jobs."
Scott Hochberg, transportation attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity's Climate Law Institute, which intervened in Ohio v. EPA in support of California's waiver, called on the state to now "go full speed ahead with strong car standards."
"This year California should continue to show national leadership on clean vehicles by adopting ambitious new standards for gas-powered cars, pickups, and SUVs," said Hochberg. "Importantly, this ruling ensures that the 17 other states that follow California can keep driving towards a future with cleaner air and cleaner vehicles."
One campaigner called it "a foundational step toward protecting the health and safety of communities and workers on the fenceline of the petrochemical industry."
Hazardous chemical incidents such as explosions, fires, and toxic releases happen almost daily in the United States, often at fossil fuel facilities, and the Biden administration won praise on Friday for stepping up safeguards for impacted communities.
Dionne Delli-Gatti, associate vice president of community engagement at Environmental Defense Fund, was among the public health and environmental justice advocates applauding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for what she called "a foundational step toward protecting the health and safety of communities and workers on the fenceline of the petrochemical industry."
The agency finalized changes to a Risk Management Program (RMP) that covers 11,740 facilities across the country. Noting that many communities "vulnerable to chemical accidents are in overburdened and underserved areas," EPA Administrator Michael Regan framed the rule as a key piece of the administration's "commitment to advancing environmental justice."
"The new rule, while not perfect, will go a long way to protect people's health."
Accidental releases from RMP facilities cost over $540 million annually and highly impact approximately 131 million people who live within three miles of such sites—including 44 million earning less than or equal to twice the poverty level, 32 million who identify as Hispanic or Latino, and 20 million who identify as Black or African American, according to EPA estimates.
"Over 1 in every 3 schoolchildren in the U.S. attends a school within the danger zone of these facilities. Children are uniquely vulnerable to the health impacts caused by toxic chemical exposures such as respiratory illnesses and cancers," said Moms Clean Air Force vice president Dominique Browning. "Moms—and all caregivers—support EPA's important step in the strengthening of the Risk Management Program. We urge EPA to swiftly implement and enforce the new rules to help protect the health and safety of all children."
As the EPA summarized, the amendments include:
"While there is certainly more that must be done to prevent chemical disasters, EPA's rule is a major step forward for ensuring that the most hazardous facilities implement safer technologies and provide greater public access to information," said Earthjustice attorney Kathleen Riley. "We urge industry to implement these lifesaving measures without delay."
Jason Walsh, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, which brings together labor unions and environmental groups, also welcomed the update, stressing that "a strong RMP rule empowers workers and saves lives. It protects workers and emergency responders and safeguards communities in the shadow of these chemical facilities."
Jennifer Jones, director of the Union of Concerned Scientists' Center for Science and Democracy, pointed out that "the previous administration severely weakened those rules, depriving communities of information about what hazardous chemicals they might be exposed to and rolling back critical safety requirements intended to protect workers at facilities covered by the RMP."
"In recent years, hundreds of chemical incidents have occurred at facilities covered by the RMP—imposing a serious cost to workers and people living in harm's way, as well as to first responders and local governments that have to deal with the aftermath," Jones continued. "The new rule, while not perfect, will go a long way to protect people's health."
The Coalition to Prevent Chemical Disasters, which has tracked incidents involving hazardous chemicals since January 2021, documented at least 323 events last year, at least 81 of which occurred at RMP facilities.
"We're glad that EPA stood its ground despite strong industry pressure and required more RMP facilities to report on safer chemicals and processes that could be implemented to prevent chemical disasters," Maya Nye, federal policy director at coalition member Coming Clean, said Friday. "This establishes an important precedent."
"We will continue urging EPA to require all RMP facilities to identify and transition to safer chemicals and processes in accordance with the principles laid out in the Louisville Charter for Safer Chemicals, as part of our ongoing work to transform the chemical industry so that it's no longer a source of harm," Nye added.
Michele Roberts, co-coordinator of another coalition member, the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, celebrated the EPA's new online database for RMP facilities, and highlighted that "communities have been asking for this information for decades."
"We have a right to know whether our houses, schools, and places of worship are threatened by a potential chemical disaster," she said. "We look forward to a time when a database on RMP facility and hazard information will no longer be needed because every facility will have transitioned to safe chemicals and processes, but in the meantime EPA making this critical information more accessible to communities is a huge step."
"Protective landfill standards are an urgently needed addition to other significant actions EPA has recently taken to reduce climate-destabilizing and health-harming pollution," said one advocate.
Joined by two residents of a community where emissions from landfills have forced them to live in the "center of a toxic wasteland," more than a dozen environmental and community advocacy groups on Thursday filed a petition with the Biden administration calling for a number of specific regulations to address the United States' third-largest source of methane pollution.
A month after the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP) published a report detailing how the nation's roughly 1,100 city and county landfills emitted at least 3.7 million metric tons of methane in 2021, the group was joined by the Sierra Club, Black Warrior Riverkeeper, Chesapeake Climate Action Network (CCAN), and several other organizations to demand the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) take action.
Javian Baker and Gilda Hagan-Brown, residents of Waggaman, Louisiana, which is adjacent to a landfill, also joined the petition. The emissions coming from the landfill mean that residents' "right to a healthy, safe and clean environment [is] jeopardized," said Hagan-Brown in a statement, and that their "aspirations have been destroyed."
"The foul gassy smell lurking in our neighborhood inhibits me from bringing my fifteen-month-old outside to play," said Baker. "This petition offers a glimpse of hope when politicians in Jefferson Parish and landfill officials have yet to get to the root of the problem impacting our predominately Black community."
The yearly methane emissions from landfills are equivalent to 295 million metric tons of greenhouse gases over 20-year period, or 66 million gasoline-powered vehicles over a year.
Edwin LaMair, attorney for the Environmental Defense Fund, noted that technological advances in recent years, including the ability to conduct aerial surveys of methane emissions at landfills, offer the EPA "an enormous opportunity to update and strengthen its standards for landfill pollution."
"Landfill pollution poses serious public health threats, and protective landfill standards are an urgently needed addition to other significant actions EPA has recently taken to reduce climate-destabilizing and health-harming pollution," said LaMair.
In its report, Trashing the Climate, last month, EIP noted that landfills contribute to methane emissions mainly due to rotting food waste. Americans throw away roughly 40% of their food and food waste has soared in the last three decades.
The petition calls on the EPA to encourage composting and waste reduction to reduce landfill methane emissions.
The Rocky Mountain Institute explained on social media earlier this week how diverting waste from landfills not only reduces emissions, but also allows the waste to be converted into valuable resources for communities.
The groups on Wednesday also called on the EPA to:
"Virginia is home to eight 'mega-landfills,' many of which are sited in low-income communities of color," said Anne Havemann, general counsel for CCAN. "These landfills emit huge amounts of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, but have not received the attention they deserve for all the pollution they release. We look forward to EPA taking action on this under-the-radar issue."