Trump EPA to shred rules on
toxic pollution
By
Patrick Martin
9 June 2018
At the direction of the Trump administration, the Environmental
Protection Agency (EPA) is radically revising its method for determining health
and safety risks associated with toxic chemicals, considering only the impact
of exposure in the workplace and direct consumption of the toxins, but not the
longer-term impact of the diffusion of such substances into the air, water and
land.
A report in the Friday edition of the New York Times characterized
the decision as “a big victory for the chemical industry,” which effectively
guts enforcement of a law passed in 2016 requiring the EPA to evaluate hundreds
of chemicals, many of them in common use, and determine if they should face new
restrictions or be withdrawn from the market.
According to the Times,
“as it moves forward reviewing the first batch of 10 chemicals, the E.P.A. has
in most cases decided to exclude from its calculations any potential exposure
caused by the substances’ presence in the air, the ground or water, according
to more than 1,500 pages of documents released last week by the agency.”
The agency will consider possible harm caused by workplace
exposure—i.e., in the manufacturing of a chemical—and by direct consumption
where the chemical is normally used, as with perchloroethylene, a suspected carcinogen
widely used in dry-cleaning. But the accumulating runoff of perchloroethylene
into rivers and streams, into the air, or into landfills will not be studied,
even though 44 states have found the chemical in drinking water.
Two of the senior officials involved in this decision-making come
directly from the chemical manufacturing industry. Nancy B. Beck, who oversees
the toxic chemical unit of the EPA, was previously an executive at the American
Chemistry Council (ACC), an industry lobby. Another official involved is Erik
Baptist, a former lawyer for the American Petroleum Institute, which lobbies
for the oil and gas companies, many of which have chemical subsidiaries.
According to the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), “the Trump
administration is systematically weakening the EPA and seeking to dismantle key
new authorities and mandates Congress just gave it under the reformed Toxic
Substances Control Act.” Among the actions taken by EPA include an indefinite
delay on bans of high-risk uses of three dangerous chemicals: methylene
chloride, N-methylpyrrolidone and trichloroethylene.
The EDF warned of capture of the EPA by cronies of the polluting
industries, giving Nancy Beck as a prime example of “a senior official at the
American Chemistry Council—the chemical industry’s primary lobbying arm. In her new job, she is shaping policy on
hazardous chemicals, making decisions that directly affect the financial
interests of ACC member companies.”
In some cases, Beck has introduced language written by the ACC
directly into EPA mandates, the environmental group charged.
In just its risk analysis for the first 10 chemicals assessed
under the TSCA, the EPA will discount the effect of an estimated 68 million
pounds a year of emissions, according to an EDF analysis.
The Times added,
based on its review of hundreds of EPA documents, that other changes in the
interests of polluters “narrow the definitions of certain chemicals, including
asbestos. Some asbestos-like fibers will not be included in the risk
assessments, one agency staff member said, nor will the 8.8 million pounds a
year of asbestos deposited in hazardous landfills or the 13.1 million pounds
discarded in routine dump sites.”
All told, more than 70 lawsuits have been filed against EPA
regulatory actions, nearly all of them challenging agency actions that were
aligned with corporate interests and aimed at increasing the risk to the
general population from toxic substances being released into the air and water
or dumped into ordinary landfills rather than specially prepared sites.
Also Thursday, the EPA issued an advanced notice of proposed
rule-making indicating that it was going to largely scrap any consideration of
social costs and social benefits in the formulation of anti-pollution
regulations, limiting rules instead to the immediate cost and benefit for the
corporations involved.
A few days earlier, on June 1, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt
announced that the agency would no longer evaluate asbestos in homes and
businesses as a health risk, even though the death toll from asbestos exposure
is estimated at 12,000 to 15,000 people a year in the United States alone.
The EPA has also sought to suppress a study by the Department of
Health and Human Services (HHS) that suggested much lower levels of
perfluorooctanesulfonic acid and perfluorooctane acid (PFOS and PFOA) for human
health and safety than suggested by the EPA. These chemicals are in widely used
substances like Teflon.
A coalition of more than 50 public interest groups issued an
appeal June 7 for the immediate release of the suppressed HHS study on
perfluorinated chemicals in drinking water. In a letter to HHS, the groups
wrote that the family of bioaccumulative and persistent chemicals known as PFAS
“are potent toxicants linked to cancer, liver and thyroid damage, developmental
impacts, and numerous other adverse health effects, including harming our immune
systems. The government should be sharing information about these dangers, not
hiding it.”
Congressional Democrats have made repeated attacks on EPA
administrator Pruitt, but these have largely revolved around his evident
personal corruption, including accepting gifts from industry lobbyists and
other petty transgressions. There has been little effort to highlight the
colossal impact on public health of the “get out of jail free” card issued by
the Trump EPA to every major corporate polluter.
The Democrats, like the Republicans, do the bidding of corporate
America when it comes to any serious threat to their profit interests. While
they posture as more environmentally conscious, this has as much substance as
their pretense to be pro-worker, while the death toll of workers killed and
injured on the job mounted throughout the Obama administration.
And it was under Democrats as well as Republicans that such
atrocities as the poisoning of the water supply of Flint, Michigan, and other
cities took place, all in the service of boosting corporate profits through
privatization and the selloff of public assets.
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