January, 14 2009, 11:34am EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Michael Oko, 202/513-6245 or cell 202/904-5245
As EPA Nominee Faces Hearing, Environmental Groups Point the Way to Clean Air Reforms
Petition EPA to Scrap Dozens of Bush-Era Pollution Loopholes, File Suit to End Years of Delay
WASHINGTON
As the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency prepares for an era under new leadership, environmental groups are taking legal action aimed at improving much-needed air pollution controls for almost 50 industries.
Attorneys at Earthjustice and the Natural Resources Defense Council are filing a rulemaking petition and lawsuit today targeting weak and overdue air regulations for 48 industries -- from chemical plants to refineries, paper mills to metal smelters.
The petition, which is being filed jointly by Earthjustice and NRDC, seeks to require unlawfully weak toxic air pollution rules for dozens of industries to conform to protections demanded by the Clean Air Act. The second, a lawsuit filed by Earthjustice, on behalf of Sierra Club, seeks to end years of delay by the outgoing administration in updating air pollution rules for more than two dozen additional industries.
Today's actions follow a steady stream of court findings that Bush-era environmental rules and policies have blatantly violated federal law.
"The Obama administration will have the opportunity to protect Americans against toxic air pollution that causes cancer and other harms, after the courts repeatedly found Bush administration rules broke the law," said John Walke, Clean Air Director for N RDC. "The public stands to benefit from stronger cleanup measures that will reduce carcinogens, smog and soot pollution that plague our communities."
The actions coincide with Senate confirmation hearings for Lisa Jackson, President-elect Barack Obama's pick to head the EPA. As the outgoing administration has failed to take required steps to protect the public, the groups expressed hope that the incoming administration would carry out its Clean Air Act responsibilities to protect the American people against toxic air pollution.
"The rules we're asking EPA to fix cover many of this country's worst toxic polluters," said Earthjustice attorney Jim Pew who is filing today's petition. "It's time for a fresh approach - one that is built around protecting public health instead of polluters' entitlement to continue business as usual."
The industries affected by the challenged regulations emit hazardous air pollutants, including some compounds that are associated with cancer, birth defects, anemia, lung and respiratory harm, damage to the nervous system, liver, kidneys, brain, skin and eyes, as well as other health disorders.
"USA Today's recent investigative report 'The Smokestack Effect' revealed that air outside more than 400 schools nationwide appears to be more toxic than the air at Meredith Hitchens Elementary, a school here in Cincinnati that was recently closed due to air toxics. Parents across the nation are concerned and rightly so," said Marti Sinclair, Chair of Sierra Club's National Air Committee.
The industries outlined in the petition and lawsuit have unlawfully weak, outdated or even nonexistent control requirements. In many instances EPA allowed industrial facilities to emit as much as they like by setting what the agency incredibly called "no control" emission standards for hazardous air pollutants. In other instances, EPA broke the law by setting standards tailored to accommodate the worst polluters rather than meeting the performance of the best and cleanest operations. The environmental groups are asking EPA to bring the pollution control requirements for these industries up to date and into compliance with the Clean Air Act.
"After the Bush administration, some serious housecleaning is in order," said attorney Emma Cheuse at Earthjustice, which filed today's lawsuit. "We've identified eight years' worth of bad air rules that need to be corrected and dozens of polluting industries that are long overdue for lawful regulation. The first step is for EPA to write rules that have been due for years so we can stop playing catch-up on toxic pollution and make the air in our local communities healthier to breathe."
The law requires that EPA set industry air pollution standards that reflect the emission levels currently being achieved by the least-polluting facilities in a given industry. Instead of following the law, in many instances EPA lowered the bar, tailoring weaker thresholds to the dirtiest factories. In addition, the law requires EPA to ensure that the standards use newly available technology and provide enough protection for human health and the environment.
For a copy of the petition being filed jointly with NRDC, please visit: https://www.earthjustice.org/library/legal_docs/mact-petition-for-rulemaking.pdf
For a copy of the complaint in the lawsuit, being filed in federal district court in San Francisco, CA on behalf of Sierra Club, please visit: https://www.earthjustice.org/library/legal_docs/mact-rtr-deadlines-complaint.pdf
NRDC works to safeguard the earth--its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. We combine the power of more than three million members and online activists with the expertise of some 700 scientists, lawyers, and policy advocates across the globe to ensure the rights of all people to the air, the water, and the wild.
(212) 727-2700LATEST NEWS
‘Pretty Explicit White Nationalism’: Trump National Security Strategy Document Leaves Critics Aghast
One critic described the document as "a pretty explicit defense of using the state as a means of enforcing white supremacy."
Dec 05, 2025
The Trump administration on Thursday released its official National Security Strategy, and many critics noted that it was loaded with rhetoric frequently used by white nationalists.
Some of the most inflammatory rhetoric in the document is aimed at US-allied European countries that supposedly face "the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure" within the next 20 years.
In particular, the document accuses the European Union of enacting policies "that undermine political liberty and sovereignty, migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife, censorship of free speech and suppression of political opposition, cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence."
The document goes on to claim that "should present trends continue, the continent will be unrecognizable in 20 years or less," while emphasizing that US policy is to help "Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation."
Jon Henley, Europe correspondent for the Guardian, noted in a Friday report that the document "appears to espouse the racist 'great replacement' conspiracy theory, saying several countries risk becoming 'majority non-European.'" Henley added that the document "underscores the Trump administration's clear alignment with Europe’s far-right nationalist parties, whose policies centre on attacking supposed EU overreach and excessive non-EU migration."
Scott Horton, legal affairs and national security contributor to Harper's and an adjunct professor at Columbia Law School, wrote on Bluesky that the document "reads like something written by Vladimir Putin," given its depiction of Europe as being "degenerate and... racially adulterated through the in-migration of dark-skinned people."
Progressive activist Max Berger argued that the document "contains some pretty explicit white nationalism." He pointed to the document's support for dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives as a way to restore "a culture of competence."
Berger also flagged a section in the document that named "ending mass migration" as the top US national security priority, which he described as "a pretty explicit defense of using the state as a means of enforcing white supremacy."
Edmund Luce, a columnist for the Financial Times, also took note of the administration's emphasis on "competence and merit" in the document. This is ironic, Luce continued, because "this administration personifies the opposites" of those traits.
Journalist Michael Weiss argued in a post on X that the document shows that it is now official US policy to promote and assist far-right parties in Europe.
"[US Vice President] JD Vance's intervention in Germany's election, on behalf of [far-right party Alternative für Deutschland], was not a one-off," he wrote. "It is now ingrained in the U.S. National Security Strategy... Europe is be treated as enemy terrain to be destabilized by America's enabling of far-right parties."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Global System 'Rigged for the Wealthy' Delivers World With 'More Billionaires Than Ever'
New annual report on "ambitions" of billionaires by wealth management giant UBS shows just 2,919 individuals have a combined wealth of $15.8 trillion.
Dec 05, 2025
A new assessment by the international wealth management giant UBS this week shows that the number of billionaires in the world has reached new heights and that the acceleration of inherited wealth represents a new chapter for the ultra-rich in the 21st Century.
The latest UBS Billionaire Ambitions Report, unveiled Thursday, details how just 2,919 individual billionaires have a combined wealth of $15.8 trillion. The number of billionaires in the world is up nearly 9 percent from the previous year. In the United States—where nearly a third of those on the list reside—924 billionaires hold a collective $6.9 trillion in wealth.
The assessment by UBS—which surveyed its own billionaire clients as part of the survey, now its eleventh edition—emphasizes a surge of inherited wealth among the billionaire class. According to the report:
In 2025, 91 heirs (64 of them male and 27 female) inherited a record USD 297.8 billion. That’s 36% more than in 2024, despite fewer people inheriting overall. Globally, inheritance bolstered the number of multigenerational billionaires, with some 860 multi-generational billionaires now overseeing total assets of USD 4.7 trillion. That’s up from 805 with USD 4.2 trillion in 2024.
Across the world, multi-generational billionaires are slowly extending down the generations, with the number of second-generation billionaires growing by 4.6% in the 2025 report, the number of third generation
by 12.3%, and the number of fourth generation and beyond by 10%.
The growing number of billionaires, including a rapidly increasing share who inherited their wealth rather than generating it themselves, says UBS, "heralds a new era" for the ultra-rich as "the great wealth transfer is intensifying as heirs inherit more than ever before.
The coming decades, the report notes, "will see growing numbers of billionaires and centi-millionaires as the Great Wealth Transfer continues to accelerate. Billionaires are estimated to transfer approximately USD 6.9 trillion of wealth globally by 2040, with at least USD 5.9 trillion set to be passed to children—either directly or indirectly through spouses."
Of the $6.9 trillion currently held by US billionaires, the report estimates that $2.8 trillion of that wealth will be passed down to heirs over the next 15 years.
"The world has more billionaires than ever because of a system that’s broken for workers and rigged for the wealthy and CEOs who already make 285 times what workers do," said the AFL-CIO in response to the report.
The union federation says that organized workers winning better collective bargaining is the first step needed to "level the playing field" for working people, while others see the surging fortunes of the ultra-wealthy as just more evidence that taxing the rich must remain at the top of the economic and political agenda both at the national level and internationally.
With the UBS report showing that 91 of the new billionaires created this year arrived at their financial status through inheritance, Hal Singer, economics professor at the University of Utah, said, "That's 91 additional reasons for a wealth tax."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Outrage Grows as Trump Admin Quietly Weighs New 'Tax Windfall for the Biggest Corporations'
"Apparently the Trump administration thinks the trillions they spent on tax cuts for the wealthy wasn't enough."
Dec 05, 2025
The Trump administration's quiet effort to deliver billions more in tax breaks to some of the largest companies in the United States drew fresh scrutiny and outrage this week, with Democratic members of Congress warning that a series of obscure regulatory changes could further undermine efforts to rein in corporate tax dodging.
In a letter to the US Treasury Department unveiled Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) led a group of lawmakers in denouncing the Trump administration's assault on the corporate alternative minimum tax (CAMT), a Biden-era measure that requires highly profitable US corporations to pay a tax of at least 15% on their book profits—the numbers reported to shareholders.
"The Trump administration has consistently chipped away at CAMT to further corporate interests," the lawmakers wrote, pointing to rules issued in recent months exempting many corporations from the tax.
"But these massive giveaways apparently aren’t enough for billionaire corporations and their lobbyists, which are trying to further undermine CAMT," the lawmakers continued.
The Democratic lawmakers, who were joined by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), specifically warned against an ongoing corporate push for a carveout to a research and experimentation (R&E) tax break included in the Trump-GOP budget law enacted over the summer.
Corporations supported the R&E tax break. But as the Wall Street Journal reported last month, the giveaway is driving some companies' "regular taxes down so far that they are pushed into CAMT."
"This is exactly what CAMT was designed to do, the tax’s defenders say," the Journal noted. "Companies are pressing the Treasury Department for relief, particularly on the way that CAMT limits the deduction for research expenses. The National Association of Manufacturers, the R&D Coalition, and the National Foreign Trade Council sent letters urging the administration to write rules that would be favorable to companies."
The Treasury Department and Internal Revenue Service are reportedly considering the corporate proposal.
Such a change, Democratic lawmakers warned in their new letter, "egregiously circumvents Congress' intent to set a floor on corporations’ tax liabilities regardless of deductions."
But the Trump administration's hostility to the CAMT, cozy relationship with powerful corporations, and willingness to trample existing law have fueled concerns that it will readily bow to industry demands.
"Apparently the Trump administration thinks the trillions they spent on tax cuts for the wealthy wasn't enough now they're planning another huge tax windfall for the biggest corporations in the country," Beyer said Thursday.
In a social media post, Warren wrote that "giant corporations are lobbying Donald Trump for yet another tax handout—this time for research they've ALREADY DONE."
"Give me a break," Warren added. "The last thing American families need is a tax code rigged even more for billionaires and billionaire corporations."
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular