pennsylvania
Photo credit: Kristina Marusic for EHN
Pennsylvania health advocates say Trump’s first 100 days in office have caused “100 harms” to local communities
“Climate change has created numerous dangerous realities for families in Pennsylvania,” said Vanessa Lynch, an organizer with Moms Clean Air Force who spoke at the event. “Severe storms are becoming more frequent and more severe, like yesterday's storm with winds ripping out trees, tearing off roofs, and causing hundreds of thousands of people to be without power.”
The event was part of a series of actions across the country by advocates for health, human rights, and the environment dubbed “100 days, 100 harms,” intended to highlight the on-the-ground impacts of the Trump administration’s first 100 days in office.
Lynch noted that the Trump administration has announced plans to revoke a 2009 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy, based on a Supreme Court ruling, that says greenhouse gasses are a threat to public health and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The policy, known as the “endangerment finding,” serves as the legal basis for most federal and many state climate pollution rules for power plants, industries, and cars, and experts have warned that revoking it could have substantial public health impacts.
Vanessa Lynch, organizer with Moms Clean Air ForceCredit: Kristina Marusic for EHN
“I’ve witnessed firsthand the impacts the oil and gas industry has had on my community in western Pennsylvania, where I live with my two children and my husband,” Lynch said, adding that an oil and gas well in her neighborhood negatively impacts air quality near daycares, schools, homes, and an assisted living facility. “Revoking the endangerment finding would threaten the EPA’s ability to protect us from climate pollution at all.”
Carrie McDonough, an assistant professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University who leads a research group focused on the health risks toxic chemicals pose to humans and wildlife, said the Trump administration has taken numerous actions undermining what agencies like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the EPA can do to protect Americans from harmful chemical exposures in their everyday lives. As an example, she pointed to the firing of most of the scientists working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency that regulates workplace safety, including at least 200 in Pittsburgh.
“They’re trying to use federal funding to control our universities — what scientists are allowed to work on, and who is allowed to do that work,” McDonough said, referencing new restrictions on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
“They want us to erase certain words from our work like ‘indigenous,’ ‘disparity,’ and ‘environmental justice,’ because they want to erase marginalized communities who are disproportionately impacted by environmental pollution,” McDonough said. “If this continues, and if scientists at our universities and our federal labs comply, you won't be able to trust our science anymore or the information they give you because our messages will be censored and distorted.”
Carrie McDonough, assistant professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCredit: Kristina Marusic for EHN
McDonough added that the Trump administration’s unlawful detention of international students across the country has “terrorized” her own international students, hampering their work.
“These are students who left their families behind — some leaving their countries for the first time for the opportunity to come and learn in the United States,” she said. “Some of my students can’t go home to visit their families because they’re afraid they won’t be able to get back into the country. They're terrorizing these scientists because they want to keep them silent.”
Speakers from the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Health Project also shared stories about how Trump’s roll-backs of environmental policies are worsening air pollution and threatening the health of communities that are home to fracking wells and industrial facilities in western Pennsylvania.
“If this was 100 days, what will the next three years look like?” said Lois Bower-Bjornson, an organizer with the Clean Air Council. “We can’t wait to be rescued. We’re going to have to work together to prevent as much of this harm as possible — we owe that to each other.”
“Climate change has created numerous dangerous realities for families in Pennsylvania,” said Vanessa Lynch, an organizer with Moms Clean Air Force who spoke at the event. “Severe storms are becoming more frequent and more severe, like yesterday's storm with winds ripping out trees, tearing off roofs, and causing hundreds of thousands of people to be without power.”
The event was part of a series of actions across the country by advocates for health, human rights, and the environment dubbed “100 days, 100 harms,” intended to highlight the on-the-ground impacts of the Trump administration’s first 100 days in office.
Lynch noted that the Trump administration has announced plans to revoke a 2009 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) policy, based on a Supreme Court ruling, that says greenhouse gasses are a threat to public health and should be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The policy, known as the “endangerment finding,” serves as the legal basis for most federal and many state climate pollution rules for power plants, industries, and cars, and experts have warned that revoking it could have substantial public health impacts.
Vanessa Lynch, organizer with Moms Clean Air ForceCredit: Kristina Marusic for EHN
“I’ve witnessed firsthand the impacts the oil and gas industry has had on my community in western Pennsylvania, where I live with my two children and my husband,” Lynch said, adding that an oil and gas well in her neighborhood negatively impacts air quality near daycares, schools, homes, and an assisted living facility. “Revoking the endangerment finding would threaten the EPA’s ability to protect us from climate pollution at all.”
Carrie McDonough, an assistant professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon University who leads a research group focused on the health risks toxic chemicals pose to humans and wildlife, said the Trump administration has taken numerous actions undermining what agencies like the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the EPA can do to protect Americans from harmful chemical exposures in their everyday lives. As an example, she pointed to the firing of most of the scientists working at the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, the agency that regulates workplace safety, including at least 200 in Pittsburgh.
“They’re trying to use federal funding to control our universities — what scientists are allowed to work on, and who is allowed to do that work,” McDonough said, referencing new restrictions on funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the largest public funder of biomedical research in the world.
“They want us to erase certain words from our work like ‘indigenous,’ ‘disparity,’ and ‘environmental justice,’ because they want to erase marginalized communities who are disproportionately impacted by environmental pollution,” McDonough said. “If this continues, and if scientists at our universities and our federal labs comply, you won't be able to trust our science anymore or the information they give you because our messages will be censored and distorted.”
Carrie McDonough, assistant professor of chemistry at Carnegie Mellon UniversityCredit: Kristina Marusic for EHN
McDonough added that the Trump administration’s unlawful detention of international students across the country has “terrorized” her own international students, hampering their work.
“These are students who left their families behind — some leaving their countries for the first time for the opportunity to come and learn in the United States,” she said. “Some of my students can’t go home to visit their families because they’re afraid they won’t be able to get back into the country. They're terrorizing these scientists because they want to keep them silent.”
Speakers from the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Health Project also shared stories about how Trump’s roll-backs of environmental policies are worsening air pollution and threatening the health of communities that are home to fracking wells and industrial facilities in western Pennsylvania.
“If this was 100 days, what will the next three years look like?” said Lois Bower-Bjornson, an organizer with the Clean Air Council. “We can’t wait to be rescued. We’re going to have to work together to prevent as much of this harm as possible — we owe that to each other.”
Regulators are underestimating health impacts from air pollution: Study
The new method, which accounts for the ways numerous chemical exposures impact the entire body, found increased risks to people’s brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys, and hormonal systems from air pollution in a community near Philadelphia. Traditional methods found no increased health risks based on the same level of pollution exposure in that community.
“I think this [is a] holistic approach,” Pete DeCarlo, study co-author and a Johns Hopkins University associate professor who studies atmospheric air pollution, told EHN. “The cumulative burdens across multiple health systems for every chemical that we measure is really, really important, because we breathe everything all at once.”
Multiple chemical exposures impact multiple body parts
Credit: Faux Toe/BigStock Photos ID: 1366970The study, conducted by researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Aerodyne Research Inc., a company that creates software and sensors for environmental research, differs from traditional risk models by accounting for simultaneous exposures to multiple chemicals and their potential impacts on multiple parts of the body.
Traditional regulatory approaches to analyzing health impacts from air pollution consider each chemical individually, rather than cumulatively. Limits are set based on the level of daily exposure to a chemical over a lifetime that is unlikely to cause harm. A chemical may harm different parts of the body at different concentrations, so this method uses the lowest harm-inducing concentration to begin regulation and then assumes other parts of the body won’t be affected, according to Keeve Nachman, study co-author and professor of environmental health and engineering at Johns Hopkins University.
“If we were exposed to one chemical at a time, that would be totally logical, right?” Nachman told EHN. “But the reality is that we are not exposed to one chemical at a time.”
The research team created an expanded method that would be able to better account for exposures to multiple chemicals by adding together their impacts to all parts of the body, not just the most sensitive.
The research team collected air samples from a mobile air monitor over a three-week period from communities along the Delaware River near Philadelphia that experience pollution from petrochemical refineries, municipal waste incinerators, and other industrial facilities.
Using this data, they conducted a non-cancer risk analysis for 32 volatile organic compounds, including formaldehyde, benzene, toluene, and xylenes (while some of these chemicals can cause cancer, analyzing cancer risk requires a different process).
“If we use the traditional approach to risk assessment, we don't find an elevated risk of any health endpoint in this community, nothing,” Nachman said. “So the result of using that risk assessment for making decisions would mean no change needed. We wouldn't need to intervene at all.”
But using their revised method, the researchers found increased risk of damage to the people’s brains, hearts, lungs, kidneys, and hormonal systems from the same level of air pollution exposure, which they say should prompt regulators to think differently about how industrial sites are permitted and regulated in communities across the country.
Empowering polluted communities
Heather McTeer Toney, former EPA Region 4 administrator and executive director of the environmental group Beyond Petrochemicals said this study confirms the experience of those who have been impacted by the petrochemical industry in Texas, Louisiana, and Appalachia for decades.
“We are validating what they have been saying, and that in and of itself is hope because it allows us to identify the problem,” Toney said. “And for so long people have been in and living in these spaces where people didn’t believe them.
The cumulative impact of these chemicals is “not only devastating, but generationally crushing,” Toney said. “[This discovery] should be a part of the decision-making process when we are thinking about what plant [to permit], where it’s going to go, and why we even need it in the first place.”
In an effort to make their research accessible and replicable, the researchers created a public database of the risk assessments for the chemicals they analyzed and plan to develop a tool to share in the future. DeCarlo and Nachman noted that the study has a few limitations, including the fact that they may not have a full picture of chemicals existing in the atmosphere and cannot accurately account for additional health stressors like poverty, social issues, or preexisting health conditions.
“While we think this paints a much more complete picture than the current way of looking at things, we still know that there's more things to add,” DeCarlo said. “There's more things to measure, and that would likely mean more health burden, but we're doing what we can with the data that we have right now.”
With the data they have right now, the research team believes they can make a positive impact.
“It’s a challenging time for cumulative risk research, people experiencing cumulative risk, [and] environmental injustices, but don’t lose hope,” Nachman said, reflecting on the Trump administration's efforts to roll back clean air protections, industry regulations, and public health research.
“Because I am confident that what we are helping contribute to…is a better set of methodologies that will account for these things, and that when that window opens back up for making smart policy that actually protects fenceline communities, we’re going to be ready with ways to do it.”
Editor’s note: The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Beyond Petrochemicals, and Environmental Health News receive funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Shell's petrochemical complex in southwestern Pennsylvania. (Credit: Nate Smallwood for Environmental Health News and Sierra Magazine)
Shell’s petrochemical plant in Pennsylvania still hasn’t spurred economic development: Report
Western Pennsylvania’s Beaver County, which is home to the plant, is worse off than it was before the Shell plant was announced in terms of jobs, businesses and GDP, according to the report, which was authored by the Ohio River Valley Institute, a progressive nonprofit.
When Shell first proposed its Pennsylvania plastics plant in 2012, state lawmakers gave the company a $1.7 billion subsidy — the largest ever offered by the state at the time — to bring the plant to Beaver County. Lawmakers who supported the subsidy pointed to studies commissioned by Shell that claimed the plant would provide significant economic revitalization to the region.
“If you're a taxpayer in Pennsylvania, you should be asking for a refund right about now because you got robbed,” study co-author Eric de Place said during a press call. “There are hardworking people in that county who deserve better. They deserve better from their elected officials, they deserve better from their business community and they deserve better from the state of Pennsylvania and the legislature that's made these decisions on their behalf.”
This report updates two similar analyses published by the same group in 2021 and 2023, with all three reports relying on data from government agencies including the U.S. Census Bureau, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. The new report includes data for the time period after the Shell plant became operational in late 2022.
According to the report, Beaver County’s GDP has shrunk by more than 12% since 2012, despite double-digit growth in Pennsylvania and the nation, adjusting for inflation.
Credit: Ohio River Valley Institute
The report also found that:
- Beaver County’s population has fallen by nearly 3% despite population growth nationally and statewide.
- Beaver County’s employment has dropped by more than 13%, according to the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, while the number of employed people grew in Pennsylvania and the U.S.
- Beaver County has lost business firms and establishments despite business growth nationally and statewide.
In contrast, a 2021 study commissioned by Shell projected that the Shell ethane cracker would bring $260 million to $846 million in annual economic activity in Beaver County, that the plant and the indirect jobs it would create would add between between 777 and 1,444 new jobs for Beaver County residents, and that labor income increases in Beaver County would be between $73 and $120 million, resulting in the addition of $10.3 to $16.7 billion to Beaver County’s economy over 40 years.
Public health costs and advice for lawmakersCredit: Ohio River Valley Institute
Public health costs and advice for lawmakers
Shell’s plant takes fracked ethane gas and turns it into tiny plastic pellets that are ultimately used to make plastic products like bags and packaging. This process emits large volumes of air and water pollutants including volatile organic compounds, carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides. These pollutants are linked to health effects including asthma, heart disease, mental health symptoms, poor birth outcomes, endocrine disruption and cancer.
Residents of Beaver County are bearing the public health costs associated with these emissions. Within six months of starting operations, the plant had exceeded its 12-month emission limit for numerous pollutants. Shell has been fined $10 million dollars by state regulators, about half of which is going toward impacted communities, and is being sued by advocacy groups representing local residents.
Plants like the Shell ethane cracker in Pennsylvania have been proposed throughout the U.S., as fossil fuel companies turn toward plastics production to keep their products in demand amid global decarbonization and the transportation sector’s shift toward renewables.
For example, ExxonMobil is currently seeking tax breaks to construct a similar ethane cracker in Calhoun County, Texas, about two and a half hours southwest of Houston.
“I would urge [Texas lawmakers] to take a hard look at actual economic performance, not marketing hype,” de Place said. “And I would urge them to include ‘clawback’ provisions if the promised results don't materialize.”
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