The noted philosopher Rodney Dangerfield described his fictional marriage in a way that provides insight into the widening gulf in U.S. environmental politics: "She's a water sign. I'm an Earth sign. Together, we make mud."
It's a useful exercise to look at today's muddy, swampy political mess through the lens of five decades past.
Since the 1970's, each new decade brought a different perspective.
1970s
President Nixon in 1974. (Credit: National Archives)
The seventies dawned with a year that saw the founding of Earth Day and two pivotal government agencies—the Environmental Protection Agency and National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—under that quintessential tree-hugger, President Richard M. Nixon.
Three weeks into the decade, Nixon killed a proposal to pave 39 acres of the already-stressed Everglades into a massive jetport. Within two years, he banned DDT, and signed the Clean Air Act, Endangered Species Act, National Environmental Policy Act (the Environmental Impact Statement law).
Even when Nixon vetoed the Clean Water Act as too costly, a unified Congress overrode it. Nixon tipped his hat to bipartisan environmental values in his 1970 State of the Union address: "Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions".
Existing conservation groups like the Environmental Defense Fund (founded 1967), the World Wildlife Fund (1961) and the Sierra Club (1891) enjoy expanded memberships and political clout, while new groups like Friends of the Earth and the Natural Resources Defense Council (both 1970) and Greenpeace (1971) joined the fray.
1980s
Late seventies resentment over the snail darter undermined support for the Endangered Species Act. The tiny fish with a tiny habitat temporarily blocked completion of Tennessee's Tellico Dam.
Meanwhile, a toxic waste crisis at Love Canal led to the 1980 Superfund law. And 1979's near-calamity at Three Mile Island ended construction of new nuclear power plants.
Jimmy Carter suffered a landslide loss to Ronald Reagan, whose EPA and Interior leaders schemed to hobble their own departments.
And my favorite artifact concerns two young Congressmen and the 1980 voting scorecard from the League of Conservation Voters: Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich got a 50 percent approval rating from LCV, outpacing Tennessee Democrat Al Gore, at 35 percent.
The nineties arrived on the heels of a decade of high-profile eco-disasters: Bhopal, Chernobyl, medical waste on New Jersey beaches, the first dire reports of a warming planet and a vanishing ozone layer, and, in 1989, the Exxon Valdez spill.
The 20th annual Earth Day saw a huge crowd turn out on the Washington Mall.
George H. W. Bush, who promised to be the "Environmental President," signed strong revisions to the Clean Air Act – unthinkable for subsequent Republican presidents.
Corporate "greenwashing" – dubious marketing-inspired claims of environmental virtue by notoriously dirty companies and industries – hit an all-time high. And ABC turned over two hours of its most valuable property – prime time – for an Earth Day special positively choked with A-list celebrities: Bette Midler as Mother Earth, Dustin Hoffman, Meryl Streep, Magic Johnson, the aforementioned Rodney Dangerfield, and of course, America's Dad, Bill Cosby.
2000s
21st Century environmental politics began with Bush v Gore. Al Gore's million-vote win was an excruciating Electoral College loss. Instead of a president both fluent in and passionate on climate change we got an oil man whose Cardinal Richelieu, Vice President Dick Cheney, took charge of deregulatory efforts and energy policy.
Cheney's Energy Task Force operated largely in secrecy, paving the way for the fracking boom by removing regulatory obstacles. The decade was bracketed by domestic disasters that reduced the environment as a political concern: The 2001 Al Qaeda attacks and the 2008 economic collapse.
2010s
Protests over the Supreme Court Citizen United decision. (Credit: Joe Brusky/flickr)
In the last month of 2009, the Copenhagen climate talks ended in failure. Climate deniers made hay with a few ill-worded emails in a cache of thousands of hacked messages from climate scientists.
Not all Americans have come to grips with the 2010 Supreme Court Citizens United decision. It unleashed huge amounts of anonymous campaign spending for candidates and fake grassroots groups like the Koch-funded Americans for Prosperity.
As the money started pouring in, the Tea Party (b. 2009) brought in the ground troops. Many moderate Republicans, spooked by the prospects of being "primaried" from the far right, either altered their views or fled from politics altogether. Prominent Republicans who backed away from advocating action on climate change included Mitt Romney, John McCain, Newt Gingrich and Lindsey Graham.
The Democrats lost control of the House in the 2010 midterms, stifling much of the "hope" in the two-year-old Obama presidency. And the kind of high profile disasters that jelled public sentiment in 1990 had impact only as lethal tragedies, not catalysts: the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, the Fukushima meltdown a year later, and the unprecedented damage of Superstorm Sandy in 2012.
2020s
Clean energy is finally taking hold. But climate-denying leaders hold forth in the U.K., Australia, Brazil, and, of course, the U.S.
This is the decade when we may let one of those comparatively easy-to-save marine mammals, the vaquita porpoise, go extinct in full view. The ice caps liquidating. Venice awash. Australia ablaze. Oceans full of acid, and plastic.
Is America awake? We'll see. We cannot afford to make mud anymore.
Peter Dykstra is our weekend editor and columnist. His views do not represent those of Environmental Health News, The Daily Climate or publisher, Environmental Health Sciences.
“The number of stress-activated health conditions people reported was quite staggering."
PITTSBURGH — Engaging in public participation during permitting for oil and gas pipelines often harms mental health and creates distrust in government, according to a new study.
Numerous studies have examined physical health effects associated with living near oil and gas pipelines, but there’s little research on the mental health impacts associated with these projects.
The study, published in Energy Research & Social Science, was conducted through surveys and interviews with more than 1,000 people living near proposed natural gas pipelines in Virginia, West Virginia, Oregon and Pennsylvania. It documented a long list of mental health symptoms associated with living near pipeline routes, including anxiety, depression, Complex post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (CPTSD) and suicidality.
“I live in Blacksburg, Virginia, which is one of the places the Mountain Valley Pipeline goes through,” Shannon Bell, a professor of sociology at Virginia Tech and lead author of the study, told Environmental Health News (EHN). “In conversations with community members who are affected by the pipeline, it became very clear there were some pretty significant traumas going on.”
By using screening tools to measure the severity of mental health symptoms, the researchers also determined that the more people engaged with public participation processes related to the pipelines, the worse their mental health impacts were.
“Having a pipeline built through your land is incredibly stressful for many people, but we were surprised to learn that the people who were the most engaged in public participation processes related to the pipeline had significantly greater mental health impacts than people who didn’t engage at all, regardless of whether the pipeline was actually being constructed through their land,” Bell said.
Karen Feridun, an activist who lives in eastern Pennsylvania, has fought two pipeline projects, the PennEast and Commonwealth pipelines, both of which were canceled following community resistance. She’s proud of those wins, but they were difficult for her and the community.
“The PennEast fight went on for seven years,” Feridun told EHN. “People were so dedicated. It was like they made fighting the pipeline their second full time job. Many people expressed how stressed this made them feel, the pain of seeing their property devalued and their beautiful community disrupted, and how unending it all was. It was a lot to endure.” stories like that.”
When the Commonwealth and PennEast pipelines were canceled, Feridun said, there was a lot of relief. “The state of everybody’s mental health improved to the extent that this was over and they could move on with their lives,” she said. However, many of the Pennsylvanians involved in those fights were soon faced with additional oil and gas-related projects in their communities, like fracking wells or related infrastructure, pulling many of them right back into fight mode.
“There’s this constant pressure and feeling of powerlessness that comes with not knowing what’s about to happen,” Feridun said. “For some people it just starts to feel like a never-ending nightmare.”
Bell’s study found that pipeline development and related public participation processes were associated with a long list of physical symptoms including insomnia, high blood pressure, heart problems, teeth grinding, headaches, tremors, irregular heartbeat, shingles, heart problems, chest pain, strokes and brain hemorrhages. At least one person said they were so physically sickened by the stress they felt about the pipeline and the public participation process that they had to move.
“The number of stress-activated health conditions people reported was quite staggering,” Bell said. “It was devastating to read some of the things people had gone through.”
Feridun shared a story about a community member who protested a FERC meeting and had a stroke afterwards. “The family’s feeling was that the pressure she was under contributed to her having a stroke at a very young age,” she said. “There were lots of stories like that.”
Performative public participation creates harm
Bell researched the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), passed in 1969, which heightened the public involvement requirements for federal agencies' decision-making on actions that could significantly affect the environment.
She found previous research that suggested NEPA’s public participation requirements are only intended to diffuse public outrage since government agencies don’t have standardized ways to incorporate public input into decision-making or permitting.
She also learned that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), the agency responsible for regulating pipelines, approved 99% of eminent domain cases between 1999 and 2020, allowing pipelines to be built through privately owned land despite widespread public opposition to many of these projects.
"Many people expressed how stressed this made them feel, the pain of seeing their property devalued and their beautiful community disrupted, and how unending it all was. It was a lot to endure.” - Karen Feridun, an activist who lives in eastern Pennsylvania
Other researchers had highlighted the flaws in NEPA’s public participation requirements and FERC’s apparent bias against landowners, but no one had measured how participating in performative public participation processes impacts residents’ mental health.
Bell and colleagues found that people who participated in these processes felt their input was dismissed, that their concerns were not addressed and did not have any impact on decision-making about the pipelines.These feelings created disillusionment and distrust. The more people participated in public feedback processes, the stronger their feelings of disillusionment were.
“Many people talked about feeling betrayed by their government,” Bell said. “A number of our respondents stated that up until this point, they had believed government agencies existed to protect residents. But after spending tremendous amounts of time engaging in public input opportunities, many of our respondents came to believe that these government agencies were actually just there to facilitate the construction of pipelines.”
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission approved 99% of eminent domain cases between 1999 and 2020.
Credit: Karen Feridun
“The PennEast fight went on for seven years. It was like they made fighting the pipeline their second full time job," said Karen Feridun.
Credit: Tara Zrinksi
Feridun has seen this firsthand.
“In all my years fighting pipelines and fracking,” she said, “I’ve heard so many people say: ‘I thought the government was here to protect me,’ and it comes as this terrible blow to learn they’re actually representing someone else’s best interest, not yours.”
Bell’s research focused on natural gas pipelines, but she said these findings are relevant to any scenario where government agencies invite public participation during the permitting process for industrial projects. For example, permitting for fracking wells and petrochemical plants are often contentious and generally overseen by state regulatory agencies that may invite public input but also typically lack any ways to incorporate it into permitting decisions.
“People aren’t stupid — they realize when their comments aren’t making a bit of difference,” Bell said. “It’s incredibly disempowering when people spend hours and days writing public comments and attending public meetings, just to be ignored.”
“I don’t want to beat up on regulators because this is an institutional problem,” she added, “but wasting people's time and energy by asking for public input without providing a mechanism to act on most of their concerns not only brings substantial harm to these individuals' mental and physical health, but it also violates core aspects of environmental justice."
Feridun said that although she tells people joining pipeline fights that public participation is “just theater and a box regulators have to check,” there are important reasons to participate anyway.
The first is that pipeline route often travel through rural areas where impacted landowners feel isolated and alone in their discomfort about the pipeline, and joining with others who are in the same situation creates strong community bonds and fosters empowerment. During the PennEast fight, for example, municipalities all along the proposed pipeline route passed resolutions stating their opposition to the pipeline. Those could be ignored by FERC, but they made it clear in writing that many communities along the pipeline route were prepared to fight the project in court if needed.
The second reason Feridun encourages people to participate in the permitting process is that even if FERC won’t do anything with public comments, it’s critical to put them in the public record so that a judge can consider them in subsequent lawsuits, which can be a powerful tool in winning pipeline fights.
“That’s part of how we won against PennEast,” she said. “People put so many comments on that docket, they were relentless … and gave lots of ammunition to judges who might one day have to consider those lawsuits.”
No environmental justice without real public input
Under guidance from the Biden presidential administration, federal and state governmental agencies are working to improve environmental justice.
Many states, including Pennsylvania, are developing new environmental justice plans that include additional community input related to permitting for polluting industries, but Bell said few of these plans create ways for environmental justice communities to influence permitting decisions (though there are some indications that this is beginning to shift).
Traditionally, governmental environmental justice efforts in the U.S. tend to focus on “distributive justice” — ensuring equity in the allocation of burdens and benefits. But the principles of environmental justice also include recognition justice, which entails valuing the perspectives of historically marginalized groups; procedural justice, which involves providing these communities with equitable access and opportunities to influence decision-making; and reparative justice, which requires acknowledging past harms against these communities and working to repair them.
Environmental justice communities can’t achieve procedural justice or restorative justice until they’re actually empowered to decide whether new pipelines or polluting facilities should be built in their neighborhoods, according to Bell.
“Environmental justice is not possible if public participation is performative,” Bell said. “If we’re serious about environmental justice, there need to be consistent [ways] for public input to be incorporated into agencies' decision-making processes. It needs to be possible for public input to actually influence agency decisions."
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.”
Some funding for this reporting was also provided by the Wake Forest University Environmental and Epistemic Justice Initiative.
Keep reading...Show less
The third session of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution negotiations were held in Nairobi, Kenya last November. (Credit: UNEP/Ahmed Nayim Yussuf)
With a presidential election looming, a wave of state-level legislation circulating, an international plastics treaty taking form and fights brewing over proposed facilities, 2024 is set to shape the regulatory future of chemical recycling in the U.S.
As of September 2023, the 11 constructed chemical recycling facilities in the country are capable of processing 459,280 tons of waste plastic each year, using pyrolysis and gasification to convert it into fuel or chemicals that can then be used to create new plastic, according to a
report from Beyond Plastics and IPEN (the International Pollutants Elimination Network). At full capacity, those facilities can process about 1.3% of the country’s plastic waste, the report found. Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics, told Environmental Health News (EHN) at least twice as many new facilities have been proposed, some of which haven’t yet advanced past a press release but all of which are emboldened by a flurry of state laws loosening regulations on the controversial practice.
In 2017, Florida became the first state in the country to exempt chemical recycling from solid waste regulations and ensure it would be regulated as manufacturing. The following year, Wisconsin and Georgia did the same, allowing facilities to skirt the environmental oversight of waste management plants while also opening them up to a larger universe of taxpayer subsidies, Enck said.
Twenty-four states have now passed similar legislation, according to the industry association American Chemistry Council, and bills are making the rounds in many more. Renee Sharp, strategic adviser for environmental health advocate Safer States, told
EHN the environmental community was “caught flat-footed” by the spread of industry-backed laws that ease the development of new facilities. “We’ve been playing catch-up, but we’re catching up very fast,” she said.
A bill
introduced in Maine last year was among the first state-level efforts to push back against the tide by declaring that “advanced recycling does not constitute recycling.” A failed Rhode Island bill, meanwhile, would have prohibited the construction of chemical recycling facilities. Peter Blair, policy and advocacy director for Just Zero, a waste-reduction advocate, said he expects that bill to be refiled this year and that more states will follow Maine’s lead.
Environmental advocates argue that advanced or chemical recycling is an insufficient answer to the plastics crisis that also pollutes neighboring communities. Enck called it “more of a marketing ploy than an actual solution to the problem.” She argues the “dismal” U.S. plastic recycling rate of 5% to 6% is a reason to reduce plastic production rather than supporting the status quo with chemical recycling.
Greenhouse gas emissions from plastic waste pyrolysis are also 10 to 100 times worse than those from the production of virgin plastic and the majority of output from the process comes in the form of process fuel, emissions and hazardous waste, the Beyond Plastics report found. Plastic additives that can be released during the chemical recycling process can “disrupt endocrine function and increase risk for male reproductive birth defects, infertility, obesity, cardiovascular disease, renal disease and cancers,” the report said.
Craig Cookson, senior director of plastics sustainability for the American Chemistry Council (ACC), said states’ interest in clearing the path for chemical recycling reflects a desire to “bring new, innovative businesses to their state. They’re looking to see how they can recycle a lot of the plastics that right now aren’t.”
As the ACC promotes legislation that recognizes chemical recycling as manufacturing, states are beginning to contemplate extended producer responsibility laws, which require companies to account for the end-of-life environmental costs of their products in an effort to reduce packaging and increase recycling volume.
California, Colorado, Maine and Oregon have passed this type of legislation, while a new Maryland law has committed the state to studying the practice. Each of the laws, though, functions differently, and the devil is in the details, advocates said — namely, whether chemical recycling is considered as an effective tool alongside mechanical recycling. The approved rules don’t explicitly contemplate chemical recycling but may leave the door open by failing to prohibit its inclusion.
“Bad [extended producer responsibility] is worse than nothing,” Sharp said, as it would “give legislators and the public the impression that they’ve done something when actually nothing has been done.”
Legislation
proposed in New York clearly prohibits chemical recycling from being counted in extended producer responsibility calculations, putting it front and center in the legislative battle, Enck said. She previously described the bill as “the most important environmental bill of the decade.”
Beyond these laws, federal regulations and requirements, global plastic treaty negotiations and community-level opposition will help shape the future of chemical recycling over the coming year, environmental advocates said.
The fight over facilities
With a growing number of states welcoming chemical recycling, Enck said at least 30 additional facilities have been proposed. Most notable among them are plants proposed in eastern Ohio and central Pennsylvania — two states among the 24 that consider chemical recycling as manufacturing — that have both drawn significant pushback.
SOBE Thermal Energy Systems has been planning to build a facility in Youngstown, Ohio, that would process discarded tires, plastic waste and used electronics. But Youngstown City Council established in December a one-year moratorium on pyrolysis and gasification plants, giving the community “time to catch their breath” and better understand the project’s potential impacts, Enck said. It was the first such moratorium passed in the country.
“Bad [extended producer responsibility] is worse than nothing." - Renee Sharp, Safer States
Meanwhile, in Point Township, Pennsylvania, Texas-based Encina hit a snag in its proposal to build a $1.1 billion plant that would operate at an unprecedented scale. Encina is eyeing a location along the Susquehanna River for a facility that would process 450,000 tons of plastic each year — as much as the country’s entire current capacity. But the company, which has faced opposition from environmental advocates and the local group Save Our Susquehanna, withdrew in October a key permit application after the state Department of Environmental Protection deemed portions of its plan “wholly inadequate,” delaying the project.
“Encina has become a model for how communities can raise their voices, speak up and let folks know about the concerns of a project,” Sage Lincoln, a legal fellow with the Clean Air Council, which previously brought a legal challenge to the facility’s development, told EHN. “You’re seeing the results of that in the close look regulators are taking at this project to make sure community concerns are addressed.”
Chemical recycling’s future at the federal level
The plastics industry is also promoting the inclusion of chemical recycling and the purchase of "recycling credits" – akin to carbon offsets – in calculations for a product’s recycled content.
At the federal level, the coming year could help dictate the future of chemical recycling, especially with the likelihood of increased rulemaking ahead of a possible administration change. Last year, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) withdrew a proposal by the Trump administration that relaxed clean-air regulations on chemical recycling facilities, but with so many states now operating with similar policies there may be more federal rulemaking to come. EPA press secretary Remmington Belford said the regulation of such facilities is “complex and based on a variety of legal and technical considerations.”
Environmental advocates are watching two areas in particular: the Federal Trade Commission’s Green Guides and the EPA’s approach to “mass balance,” a method for calculating a product’s recycled content. The Green Guides — the federal standards that govern environmental marketing claims — are due for revision this year, and industry groups, like the American Chemistry Council, have pushed to have them endorse chemical recycling, Blair said.
“Encina has become a model for how communities can raise their voices, speak up and let folks know about the concerns of a project." - Sage Lincoln, a legal fellow with the Clean Air Council
“If it includes language supporting advanced recycling, that will be a big sign of where things are going,” he added.
The plastics industry is also promoting the inclusion of chemical recycling and the purchase of "recycling credits" – akin to carbon offsets – in calculations for a product’s recycled content. Known as “mass balance,” this approach could find its way into both state legislation and federal regulations, Sharp said, putting a spotlight on any rules coming from the EPA.
Asked whether chemical recycling is part of an environmentally sound approach to the plastics crisis, EPA’s Belford said, “many approaches are needed to address the issues that plastics present. There are many concerns with chemical or thermoplastic processes that would need to be addressed.”
Global Plastic Treaty negotiations
The question arising from ongoing Global Plastic Treaty negotiations is whether the treaty will serve as an “enabler” of chemical recycling.
Credit: UNEP/Ahmed Nayim Yussuf
In the background of discussions about U.S. policy, negotiators from around the world are developing a global plastics treaty that would address the ongoing crisis. Chemical recycling hasn’t been addressed directly and is not specifically mentioned in the 70-page draft of the treaty that exists, according to Vito Buonsante, policy lead at the negotiations for IPEN, a network that supports civil society organizations in low- and middle-income countries. Nonetheless, he told EHN, “chemical recycling is always present there.”
The question arising from negotiations is whether the treaty will serve as an “enabler” of chemical recycling, Buonsante said, by considering it alongside mechanical recycling in extended producer responsibility and recycled content policies. The final treaty, which Buonsante said is unlikely to be ready by early 2025 (as planned), could define what is considered “environmentally-sound management” for plastics. If it does, that could open the door for the inclusion of chemical recycling, but agreement on the issue has been hard to come by. A spokesperson for the ACC said last year’s Basel Convention on hazardous waste left open a section of guidelines on chemical recycling because the parties couldn’t reach consensus.
"Many approaches are needed to address the issues that plastics present. There are many concerns with chemical or thermoplastic processes that would need to be addressed." - Remmington Belford, EPA
Environmental advocates said the U.S. hasn’t been ambitious enough at global treaty negotiations. Belford, the EPA spokesperson, said the U.S. approach to the treaty is “to be as ambitious as possible to protect human health and the environment. As a general matter, the U.S. also endeavors to align international goals with our domestic approaches to ensure that our commitments are implementable.”
The next session of negotiations is set to be held in Ottawa in late April.
Sharp said she and other environmental advocates are encouraged by a growing pushback against chemical recycling at the state level and by the emergence of legislative support at the federal level. As those domestic battles continue, the global negotiations could set the tone for the regulation of chemical recycling in the U.S. and beyond.
“We see this as an opportunity for the Biden administration to show their leadership on climate and the environment,” Sharp said. “We have seen some shifts in their positions toward a more pro-environment position and we’re hopeful we’ll see more.”
A deeper dive into the ocean's heart reveals a world rich with life, challenging our understanding of Earth's biosphere and highlighting the dire consequences of human pollution.
Discoveries in the deep sea, such as hydrothermal vents and new species, expand our knowledge of life's potential habitats, including implications for extraterrestrial life.
Human activity, including dumping nuclear waste and plastics, severely impacts deep-sea environments, affecting ecosystems and potentially human health.
The deep ocean's history and its role in the Earth's biosphere suggest a need for a paradigm shift in how we view and treat this vast, interconnected habitat.
Key quote:
"The deep ocean is the largest environment on Earth, making up 95% of the ocean biosphere and, depending on how you measure it, close to 90% of the livable space on the planet."
— James Bradley, The Guardian.
Why this matters:
The deep ocean's role in Earth's biosphere challenges our human perception of biodiverse habitats and the need to make the conservation of these mysterious depths a matter of urgency for both the planet's and our own health. Conflicting interests muddy the waters of US ocean protection.
A legal battle between the Everglades Foundation and a former scientist has sparked controversy, highlighting a clash over environmental policy and personal integrity.
The Everglades Foundation's lawsuit against former scientist Tom Van Lent has caused division within one of the nation's leading environmental coalitions.
Allegations of "trade secrets" theft and data destruction by Van Lent have led to legal consequences, including bankruptcy and potential jail time.
This dispute has raised concerns about the impact of internal conflicts on the broader effort to restore the Everglades, a critical environmental project.
Key quote:
“A 2022 employment matter does not impact those of us who are mission-focused on restoration and the environment. The Everglades is the priority.”
— Jacquie Weisblum, Everglades Foundation’s VP of communications
Why this matters:
This conflict brings to light the challenges of maintaining unity among allies in the fight for environmental causes, especially when personal and political agendas may interfere with collaborative efforts for the greater good. How did we get here? Together, we make mud: Environmental politics at the start of a new decade.
The EEA has identified 36 significant climate threats to Europe, urging immediate action on half, with five deemed urgent.
Southern Europe, a climate "hotspot," requires expedited measures to protect agriculture and communities from wildfires and extreme weather.
The report underscores the inadequacy of current financial sector stress tests in accounting for compounded environmental risks.
Key quote:
"Our new analysis shows that Europe faces urgent climate risks that are growing faster than our societal preparedness."
— Leena Ylä-Mononen, executive director of the EEA
Why this matters:
As climate change intensifies, leading to more frequent and severe weather events, European nations have been prompted to implement comprehensive strategies aimed at mitigation, adaptation, and resilience building.
Dr. Robbie Parks joins the Agents of Change in Environmental Justice podcast to discuss the need to treat destructive storms, hurricanes and typhoons as public health and justice issues.
Warm weather and rain have delayed and deteriorated the construction of vital winter roads in Manitoba, causing First Nations to declare a state of emergency due to a shortage of crucial supplies.
Climate change has led to a reduction in the winter road-building season, threatening the transportation of goods in northern communities that rely on these routes for essentials like fuel and medical supplies.
As northern temperatures rise significantly faster than the global average, communities and road builders grapple with increasingly unstable conditions that disrupt the annual supply routes.
Key quote:
“The winter road season should be well underway, but temperatures remain unseasonably warm, making them extremely dangerous and unsafe to use."
— Nishnawbe Aski Nation Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler
Why this matters:
Ice roads, which are temporary routes laid over frozen bodies of water or on land covered in ice and snow, serve as vital lifelines for remote communities and industries (like mining and oil extraction) by providing access to supplies, equipment, and emergency services during the winter months. The effects of climate change, including warmer temperatures and erratic weather patterns, present several risks and challenges for these ice roads.
While industry claims it could be part of a circular plastics economy, experts say that chemical recycling is extremely damaging to the environment and provides no real benefits.
Algoma Steel continues to exceed Canada’s standard air pollution limits for cancer-causing compounds and struggles with spills as it pushes toward a “green” makeover.
New analysis illustrates the climate, environmental, and human rights tolls linked to petrochemical production surrounding the Houston Ship Channel region.