PITTSBURGH — On Saturday, five of the seven candidates running for Allegheny County Executive participated in a community forum on environmental justice, discussing some of the most pressing issues facing residents, including air pollution and fracking.
The event marked the first time the candidates have discussed environmental issues in a public forum. The candidates shared their views on everything from air pollution and water contamination to safe housing, stormwater management, food justice, blight and community land use.
Allegheny County encompasses Pittsburgh, and the county executive oversees many agencies that impact the daily lives of the county’s 1.2 million residents, including the Allegheny County Health Department, which is responsible for air quality.
The region faces numerous environmental justice issues, including higher than average rates of asthma and cancer, particularly in low-income neighborhoods near major polluters, which are home to substantial portions of the region’s communities of color.
All of the candidates running were invited. John Weinstein, Sarah Innamorato, Will Parker, Michael Lamb and Dave Fawcett attended, Theresa Sciulli Colaizzi and Joseph Rockey did not. Rockey is the sole Republican running; all other candidates will face off in a Democratic primary on May 16 before the election in November.
Questions were submitted by local health and environmental advocacy groups.
Credit: Kristina Marusic for EHN
Local health and environmental advocacy groups submitted the questions. Two candidates answered each question, while the remaining candidates were given the opportunity to respond in writing to questions they didn’t get to answer during the forum. Those written responses will eventually be shared online by the environmental justice advocacy group 412Justice (we’ll update this story with a link once it’s available).
The first question asked the candidates how they’d revamp the county health department to make it more responsive to community environmental justice needs.
“We need folks appointed to our board of health that have public health experience, we need climate scientists and, most importantly, we need to include folks from environmental justice communities that have that lived experience,” said Innamorato, Pennsylvania state representative for District 21, which includes Etna, Millvale and Pittsburgh neighborhoods including Lawrenceville and the Strip District.
Fawcett, a trial attorney who served two terms on Allegheny County Council more than a decade ago, didn’t address environmental justice communities, but said that if elected, he’d establish a department of legal experts responsible for enforcing clean air regulations and remove that responsibility from the board of health, which he believes should be made up of physicians.
“The Mon Valley community is hit the hardest [by air pollution],” said Parker, a mobile delivery app developer, in response to a question about how to best improve the region’s air quality, particularly in environmental justice communities. “A lot of people are affected when it comes to their health…their mental health and physical health, and we need to…come down on [polluters].” Parker added that he would focus on stricter permitting for polluting facilities, said he’d support shutting down polluters that regularly violate clean air laws, and said he’d focus on green jobs.
Weinstein, who currently serves as county treasurer, said the Board of Health should include representatives from communities impacted by air pollution and said he’s spent time speaking with residents in Clairton, which is home to the largest polluter in the region, U.S. Steel’s Clairton Coke Works, and regularly sees some of the worst air quality in the country. “There are a lot of jobs affected by this, and we have to find that balance of protecting the environment and the workforce as well,” he added.
When it comes to protecting residents from harms like lead poisoning and toxic substances in their homes, Innamorato said she’d implement a countywide rental registry for better oversight of property-owners to ensure they’re not subjecting renters to harmful substances like lead, radon and mold. She also talked about using state funding to pay for home repairs and weatherization, prioritizing environmental justice communities, and ensuring that the county health department is adequately staffed to perform home inspections.
Lamb, who currently serves as county controller, talked about his role in getting the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA) to replace lead pipes. He talked about the importance of working with landlords and homeowners. “I actually don't think we can do this without a new partnership with our municipal governments. We have to be able to drive that change and do it in a way that allows them to follow through on it.”
Asked about public transit and helping Pittsburghers reduce their carbon footprints, Fawcett talked about the importance of increasing public transit ridership, saying he’d taken the bus for 30 years, but no longer did because rerouting had turned a 25-minute bus ride from his home downtown into an hour-long ride. He added that he’d like to focus on expanding bike trails and light rail lines.
Asked how they’d address increased flooding driven by climate change, Parker said he’d rely on bringing together the best minds to collaborate and find solutions together. Weinstein, who has served on the board of the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority (ALCOSAN) for 10 years, talked about initiatives he’s already been part of to take responsibility from municipalities for the lines that move stormwater so ALCOSAN can ensure that they’re properly maintained, and said that if elected, he’d continue to partner with the region’s 130 municipalities to continue finding solutions.
The candidates were also asked what measures should be put into place to prevent future train derailments like the one that devastated East Palestine, Ohio. Parker said trains should be required to slow down and maintain certain speed limits through highly populated neighborhoods; and Fawcett said, “we need to reclaim our riverfronts from rail lines…they go right up to the water, our sources of drinking water,” saying he’d move the rail lines back, away from riverfronts.
At the end of the event, candidates were asked a series of yes or no questions.
All of the candidates except for Fawcett indicated that they’d support a ban on fracking in Allegheny County — an issue that has been contentious for current Allegheny County executive Rich Fitzgerald, who unsuccessfully attempted to veto County Counsel’s ban on fracking in county parks in 2022.
The event was hosted by 412Justice and moderated by Matt Mehalik, executive director of the Breathe Project, a collaborative of more than 50 environmental health advocacy groups.
NaTisha Washington, an environmental justice organizer with 412Justice said, “We had a lot of great partners submit a lot of great questions, and I think our candidates were able to answer them thoroughly and we have a good idea of what our candidates feel about these issues, which impact us every day.”
Kristina Marusic is an investigative reporter at EHN.org. Follow her on Twitter at @KristinaSaurusR.
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Millions of India's waste pickers face increased dangers from extreme heat as they sort through toxic landfills for recyclable materials, earning barely enough to survive.
It is estimated that 1.5 to 4 million people make a living searching through India’s waste.
Waste pickers in Jammu, a city in northern India, endure severe heat and toxic fumes while scavenging for recyclables, risking their health for minimal income.
Rising temperatures and poorly managed landfills increase the frequency of hazardous landfill fires and gas emissions.
Experts emphasize the need for basic amenities like water, shade and medical care for waste pickers to mitigate health risks.
Key quote:
“It’s really very sad to look at how the poor are trying to live somehow, just take their bodies and try to reach the end of this heat wave in some form of being intact.”
— Bharati Chaturvedi, founder of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group in New Delhi.
Why this matters:
As global temperatures soar, waste pickers, the unsung heroes of urban recycling, find themselves in increasingly perilous conditions. Extreme heat amplifies the already harsh realities of their work, exposing them to severe health risks and underscoring the urgent need for dignified working conditions.
CAMERON PARISH, La. — Late into the night, John Allaire watches the facility next to his home shoot 300-foot flares from stacks.
He lives within eyesight of southwest Louisiana’s salty shores, where, for decades, he’s witnessed nearly 200 feet of land between it and his property line disappear into the sea. Two-thirds of the land was rebuilt to aid the oil and gas industry’s LNG expansion. LNG — shorthand for liquified natural gas – is natural gas that's cooled to liquid form for easier storage or transport; it equates to 1/600th the volume of natural gas in a gaseous state. It’s used to generate electricity, or fuel stove tops and home heaters, and in industrial processes like manufacturing fertilizer.
In the U.S., at least 30 new LNG terminal facilities have been constructed or proposed since 2016, according to the
Oil and Gas Watch project. Louisiana and Texas’ Gulf Coast, where five facilities are already operating, will host roughly two-thirds of the new LNG terminals – meaning at least 22 Gulf Coast LNG facilities are currently under construction, were recently approved to break ground or are under further regulatory review.
Although the U.S. didn’t ship LNG until 2016, when a freight tanker left, a few miles from where Cameron Parish’s LNG plants are today, last year the country became the global leader in LNG production and export volume, leapfrogging exporters like Qatar and Australia. The
EIA’s most recent annual outlook estimated that between the current year and 2050, U.S. LNG exports will increase by 152%.
Allaire, 68, watches how saltwater collects where rainwater once fed the area’s diminishing coastal wetlands. “We still come down here with the kids and set out the fishing rods. It's not as nice as it used to be,” he told
Environmental Health News (EHN).
That intimacy with nature drew Allaire to the area when he purchased 311 acres in 1998. An environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran, he helped lead environmental assessments and manage clean-ups, and although retired, he still works part-time as an environmental consultant with major petroleum companies. With a lifetime of oil and gas industry expertise, he’s watched the industry's footprint spread across Louisiana and the Gulf of Mexico’s fragile shores and beyond. Now that the footprints are at the edge of his backyard, Allaire is among a cohort of organizers, residents and fisher-folk in the region mobilizing to stop LNG facility construction. For him, the industry’s expansion usurps the right-or-wrong ethics he carried across his consulting career. For anglers, oil and gas infrastructure has destroyed fishing grounds and prevented smaller vessels from accessing the seafood-rich waters of the Calcasieu River.
From the view of Allaire’s white pickup truck as he drives across his property to the ocean’s shore, he points to where a new LNG facility will replace marshlands. Commonwealth LNG intends to clear the land of trees and then backfill the remaining low-lying field.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.”
Community bands together
John Allaire, left, purchased 311 acres in Cameron Parish in 1998, and has watched the oil and gas industry's footprint spread to his property.
Credit: John Allaire
During an Earth Day rally in April, community members gathered in the urban center of Lake Charles to demand local oil and gas industries help deliver a safer, healthier future for all. In between live acts by artists performing south Louisiana’s quintessential zydeco musical style, speakers like James Hiatt, a Calcasieu Parish native with ties to Cameron Parish and a Healthy Gulf organizer, and RISE St. James organizer Sharon Lavigne, who’s fighting against LNG development in rural Plaquemines Parish near the city of New Orleans, asked the nearly 100 in attendance to imagine a day in which the skyline isn’t dotted by oil and gas infrastructure.
Not long ago, it was hard to imagine an Earth Day rally in southwest Louisiana at all. For decades, the area has been decorated with fossil fuel infrastructure. Sunsets on some days are highlighted by the chemicals in the air; at night, thousands of facilities’ lights dot the dark sky.
“It takes a lot of balls for people to start speaking up,” Shreyas Vasudevan, a campaign researcher with the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, told EHN in the days after the rally. In a region with its history and economy intertwined with oil and gas production, “you can get a lot of social criticism – or ostracization, as well – even threats to your life.”
Many are involved in local, regional and national advocacy groups, including the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, Healthy Gulf, the Sierra Club, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Turtle Island Restoration Network, the Center for Biological Diversity and the National Audubon Society.
“You see what’s happening with the environment,” Allaire said. “When the facts change, I got to change my mind about what we’re doing.” - John Allaire, environmental engineer and 30-year oil and gas industry veteran
But environmental organizers are fighting a multi-billion-dollar industry with federal and state winds at its back. And LNG’s federal support is coupled with existing state initiatives.
Under outgoing Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards — a term-limited Democrat — the state pledged a goal of reaching net-zero greenhouse emissions by 2050. Natural gas, which the LNG industry markets as a cleaner-burning alternative, is cited as one of the state’s solutions. Louisiana is the only state that produces a majority of its carbon emissions through fossil fuels refining industries, like LNG, rather than energy production or transportation. Governor Edwards’ office did not return EHN’s request for comment.
This accommodating attitude towards oil and gas industries has resulted in a workforce that’s trained to work in LNG refining facilities across much of the rural Gulf region, said Steven Miles, a lawyer at Baker Botts LLP and a fellow at the Baker Institute’s Center on Energy Studies. Simultaneously, anti-industrialization pushback is lacking. It’s good news for industries like LNG.
“The bad news,” Miles added. “[LNG facilities] are all being jammed in the same areas.”
One rallying cry for opponents is local health. The Environmental Integrity Project found that LNG export terminals emit chemicals like carbon monoxide –potentially deadly– and sulfur dioxide, of which the American Lung Association says long-term exposure can lead to heart disease, cancer, and damage to internal or female reproductive organs.
An analysis of emissions monitoring reports by the advocacy group the Louisiana Bucket Brigade found that Venture Global’s existing Calcasieu Pass facility had more than 2,000 permit violations.That includes exceeding the permit’s authorized air emissions limit to release nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and volatile organic compounds 286 out of its first 343 days of operation.
The Marvel Crane, the first liquid natural gas carrier to transport natural gas from the Southwest Louisiana LNG facility, transits a channel in Hackberry, Louisiana, May 28, 2019.
“This is just one facility,” at a time when three more facilities have been proposed in the region and state, Vasudevan said. Venture Global’s operational LNG facility — also known as Calcasieu Pass — “is much smaller than the other facility they’ve proposed.”
In an area that experienced 18 feet of storm surge during Hurricane Laura in 2020 — and just weeks later, struck by Hurricane Delta — Venture Global is planning to build a second export terminal Known as “CP2,” it’s the largest of the roughly two dozen proposed Gulf LNG export terminals, and a key focal point for the region’s local organizing effort.
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” Hiatt told EHN of locals’ nostalgia for a community before storms like Rita in 2005 brought up to 15 feet of storm surge, only for Laura to repeat the damage in 2020. Throughout that time, the parish’s population dipped from roughly 10,000 to 5,000. “But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG. Folks in Cameron think that's going to bring back community, bring back the schools, bring back this time before we had all these storms — when Cameron was pretty prosperous.”
“Clearly,” for the oil and gas industry, “the idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports,” Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana, told EHN.
Helping fishers’ impacted by LNG is about “actual survival of this unique culture,” Cooke said.
In a measure of organizers’ success, she pointed to a recent permit hearing for Venture Global’s CP2 proposal. Regionally, it’s the only project that’s received an environmental permit, but not its export permit, which remains under federal review. At the meeting, some spoke on the company’s behalf. As an organizer, it was a moment of clarity, Cooke explained. Venture Global officials “had obviously done a lot of coaching and organizing and getting people together in Cameron to speak out on their behalf,” Cooke said. “So, in a way, that was bad. But in another way, it shows that we really had an impact.”
“It also shows that we have a lot to do,” Cooke added.
Environmental organizers like Alyssa Portaro describe a sense of fortitude among activists — she and her husband to the region’s nearby town of Vinton near the Texas-Louisiana border. Since the families’ relocation to their farm, Portaro has worked with Cameron Parish fisher-folk.
“I’ve not witnessed ‘community’ anywhere like there is in Louisiana,” Portaro told EHN. But a New Jersey native, she understands the toll environmental pollution has on low-income communities. “This environment, it’s so at risk — and it’s currently getting sacrificed to big industries.”
“People don’t know what we’d do without oil and gas. It comes at a big price,” she added.
Southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish is one of the state’s most rural localities. Marine economies were the area’s economic drivers until natural disasters and LNG facilities began pushing locals out, commercial fishers claim.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
Residents “don’t really want LNG as much as they want Cameron [Parish] from 1990 back,” James Hiatt , a Healthy Gulf organizer, told EHN. "But the wolf knocking at the door is LNG."
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
For the most part, Cameron Parish’s life and economy has historically taken place at sea. As new LNG facilities are operational or in planning locally, locals claim the community they once knew is nearly unrecognizable.
Credit: Xander Peters for Environmental Health News
A disappearing parish
The stakes are seemingly higher for a region like southwest Louisiana, which is the epicenter of climate change impacts.
In nearly a century, the state has lost roughly 2,000 square miles of land to coastal erosion. In part driving the state’s erosion crisis is the compounding impacts of Mississippi River infrastructure and oil and gas industry activity, such as dredging canals for shipping purposes, according to a March study published in the journal Nature Sustainability. Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority said Cameron Parish could lose more land than other coastal parishes over the next 50 years. A recent Climate Central report says the parish will be underwater within that time frame.
On top of erosion and sea level rise impacts, in August, 2023, marshland across southwest Louisiana’s Cameron Parish burned. The fires were among at least 600 across the Bayou State this year. Statewide, roughly 60,000 acres burned — a more than six-fold increase of the state’s average acres burned per year in the past decade alone.
But while the blaze avoided coastal Louisiana communities like Cameron Parish, the fires represented a warning coming from a growing chorus of locals across the region — one that’s echoes by the local commercial fishing population, who claimed to have experienced unusually low yields during the same time, according to a statement from a local environmental group. At the site of the Cameron Parish fires are locations for two proposed LNG expansion projects.
"The idea is to transform what was once the center of commercial fishing in Louisiana to gas exports.” - Cindy Robertson, an environmental activist in southwest Louisiana
It was an unusual occurrence for an area that’s more often itself underwater this time of year due to a storm surge from powerful storms. For LNG expansion’s local opposition, it was a red flag.
As the Louisiana Bucket Brigade has noted prior, the confluence of climate change’s raising of sea levels and the construction of LNG export terminals — some are proposed at the size of nearly 700 football fields — are wiping away the marshland folks like Allaire watched wither. Among their fears is that the future facilities won’t be able to withstand the power of another storm like Laura and its storm surge, which wiped away entire communities in 2020.
Amidst these regional climate impacts, LNG infrastructure has shown potential to exacerbate the accumulation of greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. For the most part, LNG is made up of methane — a greenhouse gas that’s more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Among the 22 current LNG facility proposals, the advocacy group Sierra Club described a combined climate pollution output that would roughly equal to that of about 440 coal plants.
The climate impacts prompt some of the LNG industry’s uncertainty going forward. It isn’t clear if Asian countries, key importers of U.S. LNG, will “embrace these energy transition issues,” said David Dismuke, an energy consultant and the former executive director of Louisiana State University’s Center for Energy Studies. Likewise, European nations remain skeptical of embracing LNG as a future staple fuel source.
“They really don't want to have to pull the trigger,” Dismukes added, referring to Europe’s hesitation to commit more resources to exporting LNG from the American market. “They don't want to go down that road.”
While there will be a tapering down of natural gas supply, Miles explained, “we’re going to need natural gas for a long time,” as larger battery storage for renewables is still unavailable.
“I'm not one of these futurists that can tell you where we're going to be, but I just don't see everything being extreme,” Dismukes said. “I don't see what we've already built getting stranded and going away, either.”
For now, LNG seems here to stay. From 2012 to 2022,U.S. natural gas demand — the sum of both domestic consumption and gross exports — rose by a whopping 43%, reported the U.S. Energy Information Administration, or EIA. Meanwhile, in oil and gas hotbeds like Louisiana and Texas, natural gas demand grew by 116%.
Throughout 25 years, Allaire has witnessed southwest Louisiana’s land slowly fade, in part driven by the same industrial spread regionally. Near where the front door of his travel trailer sits underneath the aluminum awning, he points to a chenier ridge located near the end of the property. It’s disappearing, he said.
“See the sand washing over, in here?” Allaire says, as he points towards the stretches of his property. “This pond used to go down for a half mile. This is all that's left of it on this side.”
Texas issued its largest request for proposals to inject greenhouse gases underground to mitigate climate change yet, targeting Lavaca Bay, Matagorda Bay and other coastal areas.
,Backed by federal funding and with support from the oil and gas sector, carbon sequestration is expanding, despite concerns over long-term feasibility and cost.
The Texas Railroad Commission seeks authority to regulate these wells, but environmental groups and lawmakers urge caution.
Key quote:
“We are really now on the cusp of moving away from institutional research and more towards broad commercial deployment.”
— Charles McConnell, director of the Center for Carbon Management in Energy at the University of Houston.
Why this matters:
Reducing atmospheric CO2 through sequestration could have immediate benefits. Lower CO2 levels can help mitigate the adverse effects of climate change, such as extreme weather events, heatwaves and poor air quality, all of which have direct impacts on human health. However, a continued dependence on fossil fuels, facilitated by carbon sequestration, could maintain high levels of other pollutants that pose serious health risks, including particulate matter and nitrogen oxides.
Women are 14 times more likely to die and face higher rates of violence and homelessness during and after natural disasters in Australia, yet climate policies fail to address these dangers, experts say.
Domestic violence and homelessness spike for women following natural disasters in Australia, with significant cases noted after events like the 2009 Black Saturday bushfires and the 2022 NSW Northern Rivers floods, new research found.
Despite research, climate policies still overlook the heightened risks faced by women, who make up 80% of those displaced after disasters.
Traditional gender roles during disasters often lead men to heroic duties while women bear increased caregiving burdens, exacerbating social and economic disadvantages.
Key quote:
“There’s the social disadvantage, but women are also economically disadvantaged and … when a crisis strikes, they’ve got less security and fewer resources to draw upon.”
— Carla Pascoe Leahy, research manager at the Women's Environmental Leadership Australia.
Many candidates label climate change warnings as a "hoax" or "scam," promoting conspiracy theories involving "global elites" and "the Illuminati."
Reform UK's only MP, Lee Anderson and the party chair, Richard Tice, also express skepticism about the impact of decarbonization on global heating.
The party's election contract pledges to eliminate the UK's net-zero commitments, reflecting a broader denial of human-caused climate disruption.
Key quote:
“This is a scientifically illiterate approach. People across the country are suffering from climate change and these candidates are not suitable to represent them.”
— Bob Ward, the policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics.
Inhabitants of the Amazon have created a comprehensive plan to prevent climate and ecological collapse, focusing on ending fossil fuel subsidies and securing Indigenous land rights.
The Pan-Amazon Social Forum (FOSPA) gathered Indigenous and local communities to discuss strategies to protect the Amazon rainforest.
Participants criticized international climate talks and emphasized the need for direct action and local knowledge.
The proposed plan includes ending fossil fuel subsidies, securing land rights and prioritizing biodiversity hotspots for conservation.
Key quote:
“We are being suffocated by large enterprises.”
— Vanuza Abacatal, leader of a Quilombola community in Para, Brazil.
Why this matters:
The Amazon rainforest plays a critical role in regulating the global climate, and study after study have shown that Indigenous communities with secure land tenure have the best conservation outcomes, even compared to national parks. However, the rainforest faces unprecedented threats from deforestation, illegal mining and oil extraction. Indigenous leaders argue that continuing to support fossil fuel industries through government subsidies only exacerbates these threats, accelerating the pace of ecological destruction and climate change.
As mounds of dredged material from the Houston Ship Channel dot their neighborhoods, residents are left without answers as to what dangers could be lurking.
