After river disaster, is it time to re-evaluate EPA?
August 14, 2015
By Rob Nikolewski
Exxon had its Valdez, BP had its Deepwater Horizon and now the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has its Animas River disaster with which to contend.
The federal agency ensured with safeguarding the nation’s ecosystems is facing a barrage of criticism and charges of double standards after millions of gallons of toxic sludge containing cadmium, lead, arsenic and mercury spilled into the Animas River after an EPA backhoe accidentally punched a hole into a waste pit during a clean-up effort at an abandoned gold mine in Colorado.
“Nobody is going to take the attention away from EPA’s incompetence on this,” Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colorado, told the Wall Street Journal. “If this was a private company, all hell would be breaking loose.”
Nicolas Loris is an economist who focuses on energy, environmental and regulatory issues for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that has been critical of EPA.
“They’re heavy-handed with their fines to an extent that it prohibits economic development and when you have something like this that’s their own fault, obviously the efforts to identify the problem and clean it up as efficiently and as swiftly as possible have been negligent,” Loris told Watchdog.org.
But Loris emphasized his larger question in the wake of the Animas River disaster centers less on EPA’s initial response and more on the agency’s reason for existing, some 45 years after it was created.
“That’s really what’s at the heart of the matter,” Loris said in a telephone interview. “Transitioning away from the federal government and devolving most of those decisions down to the states.
“There are just too many times the federal government and EPA are placing more stringent air quality standards that produce diminishing marginal returns that are almost to a vanishing point. Whether it’s new ozone standards, the Clean Power Plan regulations for climate change all are going to cost the economy a great deal of money in terms of higher prices, higher compliance costs, lost jobs and less gross domestic product — all for minimal or negligible environmental benefits.”
But can states really take on greater environmental responsibilities?
“The states have shown they do care about their own backyards,” Loris said. “People don’t want to pollute their own property. States don’t want to do so either. That’s not to say there aren’t cross-border issues but that can be dealt with between states and through a federal arbitrator. So I don’t necessarily think that returning the power to the states will result in environmental degradation. Just the opposite. I think states are better equipped to customize policies for the local conditions of their states.”
Richard Revesz, director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law, vehemently disagrees.
“The idea that environmental regulation can be devolved to the states is frankly ludicrous as an across-the-board argument because pollution doesn’t respect state boundaries,” Revesz told Watchdog.org. “States left to their own devices will not and cannot regulate pollution that has impact on other states. They have no incentive to do that.”
In the meantime, EPA is trying to minimize the damage that’s rolled through Colorado, entered into New Mexico and threatens Utah, Arizona andpossibly even the Colorado River that flows into California.
EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy flew into Durango, Colorado, on Wednesday to look at the damage first-hand and promised the agency will take “full responsibility” for the accident that she described as “heartbreaking.”
“My job is to manage the agency and the response and to ensure everyone that we will be fully accountable,” McCarthy said. “Our mission is to protect public health. We will hold ourselves to a higher standard.”
McCarthy said early testing shows the river’s water quality has returned to the level prior to the spill, but Colorado’s attorney general told reporters the long-term contamination effects may take years to determine.
EPA has been blasted on a number of fronts since the the breach occurred Aug. 5, some seven days before McCarthy arrived on the scene.
State officials in New Mexico and Colorado as well as leaders of the Navajo Nation complained that EPA did not notify them of the spill until nearly 24 hours after it happened. A spokesman for New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez told Watchdog.org the governor’s office first got word of the spill from an Indian tribe instead of EPA.
Related: Two coal ash spills, two very different penalties
In addition, the EPA first reported the spill was estimated at 1 million gallons, but that estimate was way too low. The U.S. Geological Survey reported the leakage to be about 3 million gallons, turning the river into a mustard-colored mess.
“I am very concerned by EPA’s lack of communication and inability to provide accurate information,” said Martinez, a Republican. “One day, the spill is 1 million gallons. The next, it’s 3 million. New Mexicans deserve answers we can rely on.”
“I think we share the anger that something like this could happen,” said Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper, a Democrat. “But I think that said, our primary role is now: that’s behind us and how are we going to move forward.”
“This is an all too familiar story on the lax oversight responsibility of the U.S. government,” said Navajo Nation President Russell Begaye, who added he had not received a telephone call from President Obama.
“It seems like the Obama administration just closed their doors and disappeared,” Begaye told Associated Press.
The Audubon Society has placed a petition on its website, calling on EPA to “commit immediate and long-term resources for cleaning up and monitoring of all rivers affected by the mine spill.”
But while EPA, through the Department of Justice, issued record fines to private companies such as Exxon and BP in the aftermath of their disasters, it appears that under the common law rule of “sovereign immunity” the agency is protected from fines.
“The government doesn’t fine itself,” Thomas L. Sansonetti, former assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s division of environment and natural resources, told the Washington Times. “The EPA does not fine itself the way that you would fine an outside company like BP.”
Watchdog.org emailed questions to EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C., asking for comment on charges the agency employs a double-standard — one for private companies and another for itself — but did not receive a response.
Colorado’s attorney general said Wednesday a lawsuit against EPA “is certainly on the table.”
“The statements by the (EPA’s administrator) indicate the EPA is accepting responsibility for the accident,” said Colorado AG Cynthia Coffman, a Republican. “The question is: What does that mean? What does accepting responsibility mean?”
Coffman, along with the attorneys general of New Mexico and Utah, say they are trying to set up a face-to-face meeting with McCarthy.
“While the spill is very important and something that’s pressing and needs to be clean up, it speaks to a very big problem that the federal government is outdated and outmoded to handle the environmental challenges that the United States will deal with in the future,” Loris said. “That’s what the principles of environmental policy should be about — improving the environment and not just checking a box and putting in these regulations.”
“I think to look at a single, isolated event on something that went wrong and to say it’s an argument for an across the board re-evaluation of policy that has been in place for 45 years is wrong,” Revesz said in a telephone interview. “I’m sure we could find many cases in which states are responsible for various actions where things went wrong.”
Read and see the photos
Yes, that letter to the editor about the EPA was published
From Silverton Standard, the place where you can write!
Posted on August 12 2015
by Mark Esper in Local News category
Yes this letter was published in the July 30, 2015 edition of the Silverton Standard.
EPA plan is really a “Superfund blitzkrieg”…..
– Mark Esper, editor and publisher.
Read and see the letter
Report: EPA Tested Deadly Air Pollutants On Children
01/20/2015
A government watchdog group has obtained documents detailing how EPA-backed research exposed children as young as 10 to deadly air pollutants without disclosing the full risks of the substances.
Government watchdogs say these EPA-backed studies could violate California state and federal law, because children were exposed to diesel exhaust in experiments with no health benefits to the subjects.
Between 2003 and 2010, the EPA backed experiments done at the University of Southern California and the University of California, Los Angeles that exposed children aged 10 to 15 to diesel exhaust — an air pollutant which the EPA and the California Air Resources Board says has no safe exposure limit.
CARB found in 1998 that based “on available scientific information” a “level of diesel exhaust exposure below which no carcinogenic effects are anticipated has not been identified.” This statement was made by CARB six years before the EPA-backed studies took place. The EPA lists diesel exhaust as a “likely” carcinogen.
“Not only has EPA been caught violating the letter and spirit of virtually every national and international code, law and regulation for the protection of human subjects in medical experiments developed since World War II,” said David Schnare, an attorney with the Energy and Environmental Law Institute, the group that has released the documents. “They have done so in shocking style, abusing the most vulnerable people of all, children.”
“Compounding the basic villainy of the experimentation itself,” Schnare added, “is that the USC/UCLA researchers failed to warn the parents and children how dangerous EPA and CARB had determined diesel exhaust to be. So there was no informed consent as required by law.”
Researchers sprayed diesel exhaust up the noses of 20 children to see what happened to them after being exposed to the substance. But these experiments have no direct health benefits to the study “except for learning how well your body can cope with pollution,” according to an application for one of the experiments.
Schnare said these experiments violated the Nuremberg Code, which has been adopted in California and federal regulations as the Common Rule. In California, violating medical experimentation laws can result in fines and/or imprisonment.
Documents showing the EPA was exposing children to diesel exhaust were obtained by the website JunkScience.com through a Freedom of Information Act Request. JunkScience.com and EPA critics say the agency is being negligent or hiding the real effects of diesel exhaust on human health to advance a regulatory agenda.
“The only way EPA, USC and UCLA are not guilty of illegal experimentation is if EPA and CARB had wildly exaggerated the dangers of diesel exhaust,” said Craig Rucker, president of Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow, a conservative group that released the documents alongside EELI.
“But in that case, the two regulators have then been grossly misleading the public and Congress in order to issue scientifically unsupported and costly regulations,” Rucker said.
“If EPA and CARB have not lied about the science, then the EPA and the researchers conducted flatly illegal experiments and lied to the children and other human subjects involved in the experiments,” writes JunkScience.com. “In this case, the institutions and individuals involved should be investigated, and subject to civil and criminal liability as prescribed by law.”
According to CARB, the EPA set its concentration “value of 5 Вµg/m3 for noncancer effects of diesel exhaust.” But children were exposed to up to 300 micrograms per cubic meter — 60 times higher than what the EPA says is safe.
Diesel exhaust is largely made up of fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5, which the EPA has said is deadly when exposed too. The agency was criticized last year after a government report surfaced that the agency exposed the elderly and people with breathing disorders to PM2.5 in a series of experiments done in 2010 and 2011.
The EPA inspector general said “the EPA did not include information on long-term cancer risks in its diesel exhaust studies’ consent forms,” adding that an agency manager “considered these long-term risks minimal for short-term study exposures.” The IG’s report found that “human subjects were not informed of this risk in the consent form.”
“This lack of warning about PM,” said the IG report, “is also different from the EPA’s public image about PM.”
