January, 31 2010, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jan Hasselman, Earthjustice, (206) 343-7340, ext. 25
Dvija Michael Bertish, Rosemere Neighborhood Association, (360) 281-4747
Brett VandenHeuvel, Columbia Riverkeeper, (503) 348-2436
Mark Riskedahl, Northwest Environmental Defense Center, (503) 768-6673
Dvija Michael Bertish, Rosemere Neighborhood Association, (360) 281-4747
Brett VandenHeuvel, Columbia Riverkeeper, (503) 348-2436
Mark Riskedahl, Northwest Environmental Defense Center, (503) 768-6673
Clean Water Advocates Act For Stronger Stormwater Controls in Washington
Lawsuit filed to protect salmon and close illegal loopholes
LACEY, Wash.
Local residents and clean water advocates today filed a
challenge to Clark County's on-going failure to protect rivers, streams
and comply with laws limiting stormwater pollution.
The public interest law firm Earthjustice filed an appeal on behalf
of three local conservation organizations asking the Washington State
Pollution Control Hearings Board to throw out a recent agreement
between Clark County and the Washington Department of Ecology. Local
residents and clean water advocates argue the state authorized
inadequate development standards that will generate illegal stormwater
pollution.
"Clark County's refusal to comply with state stormwater requirements
is unfair to other cities and counties that are working hard to clean
up our polluted waterways," said Earthjustice attorney Jan Hasselman,
who is representing the groups. "When it comes to clean water, everyone
needs to do their share."
Stormwater contains toxic metals, oil, grease, pesticides,
herbicides, bacteria and nutrients. Last year, the Environmental
Protection Agency released a startling report on toxics in the Columbia
Basin, which identified stormwater as a leading cause of toxic
pollution in the basin. When stormwater runs off parking lots,
buildings, and other urban development, it carries with it toxic
metals, particularly copper and zinc, which harm salmon and other
aquatic life.
Under a lopsided deal reached in early January, Ecology agreed to
allow Clark County to retain inadequate stormwater standards for new
development in exchange for a promise to implement county-funded
stormwater mitigation projects.
However, Clark County is already required to implement these
projects under federal law. Additionally, the agreement allows Clark
County to mitigate new development anywhere in the county, up to three
years after the development occurs.
"Clark County's approach to stormwater is a bad deal for clean water
and species like salmon because developers will continue to use
outdated and inadequate building standards," said Dvija Michael Bertish
of the Rosemere Neighborhood Association, one of the appellant groups.
"It's also a bad deal for taxpayers because it transfers the burden of
mitigating stormwater from developers to the public."
"From subsistence to recreational fishing, so many people in our
area rely on fish from local streams and rivers," explained Brett
VandenHeuvel, Executive Director of Columbia Riverkeeper. "Given the
direct harm of stormwater toxics on salmon, we need our state and Clark
County to comply with the law to protect the salmon and the people who
rely on them."
Federal law required Clark County to adopt new rules governing
runoff from development by August of 2008. Rather than comply with
Clean Water Act requirements, the county knowingly adopted a
significantly weak flow control standard for new development. While
Ecology initially sought to bring an enforcement action against the
county, it later agreed to let Clark County retain the insufficient
standards.
"Clark County is allowing development that does not change the rate
of stormwater flow even though this flow continues to damage creeks and
rivers," said Dennis Dykes, an expert hydrogeologist who has reviewed
the Clark County's proposal. "The stormwater ordinance and the proposed
flow control program are not protective of water quality and endangered
species like salmon. There is simply no scientific basis for allowing
continued degradation of one watershed in exchange for a plan to do
something beneficial somewhere else."
The appealing groups include Rosemere Neighborhood Association,
Columbia Riverkeeper, and the Northwest Environmental Defense Center.
They are represented by attorneys Jan Hasselman and Janette Brimmer of
Earthjustice.
About the Pollution Control Hearings Board
The Pollution Control Hearings Board acts like a court for appeals
of state environmental regulations. The three board members hear
appeals from orders and decisions made by the Department of Ecology and
other agencies as provided by law. The Board's function is to provide
litigants a full and complete administrative hearing, as promptly as
possible, followed by a fair and impartial written decision based on
the facts and law. The Board is not affiliated with the Department of
Ecology or any other state agency. The Board consists of three members,
who are appointed by the governor and confirmed by the State Senate for
staggered six-year terms.
Earthjustice is a non-profit public interest law firm dedicated to protecting the magnificent places, natural resources, and wildlife of this earth, and to defending the right of all people to a healthy environment. We bring about far-reaching change by enforcing and strengthening environmental laws on behalf of hundreds of organizations, coalitions and communities.
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Groups Vow to Sue Biden for Ignoring Demand to End Drilling on Public Lands
"The climate deadline to end oil and gas extraction in the U.S. is 2034, and the natural place to start is on land the federal government controls," said one advocate. "It's pathetic that legal action is needed to force the administration to act."
Mar 16, 2023
Three environmental groups on Thursday filed a 30-day notice of their intent to sue the Biden administration for refusing to respond to a petition to wind down fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters.
Signed by a coalition of more than 360 progressive advocacy organizations, the January 2022 petition submitted to President Joe Biden and Interior Secretary Deb Haaland provides a framework to slash federal oil and gas production by 98% by 2035 using long-dormant provisions of the Mineral Leasing Act, Outer Continental Shelf Lands Act, and the National Emergencies Act.
Research published after the petition was submitted shows that wealthy countries must end oil and gas production entirely by 2034 to give the world a 50% chance of meeting the Paris agreement's more ambitious goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C—beyond which the climate emergency's impacts will grow increasingly deadly, especially for the world's poor who have done the least to cause the crisis.
And yet, not only has the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) ignored the coalition's regulatory blueprint for more than a year, but the agency on Monday approved the Willow project—ConocoPhillips' massive oil drilling operation in Alaska's North Slope. This decision, which prompted a pair of separate lawsuits, was the latest but far from the only time that Biden has reneged on his 2020 promise to curb federal fossil fuel extraction. A recent analysis from the Center for Biological Diversity shows that the Biden administration rubber-stamped more permits for oil and gas drilling on public lands in its first two years than the Trump administration did in 2017 and 2018.
"Biden's approval of the climate-killing Willow project shows how desperately we need rules cracking down on runaway oil and gas extraction on public lands," Taylor McKinnon of the Center for Biological Diversity said Thursday in a statement. "The climate deadline to end oil and gas extraction in the U.S. is 2034, and the natural place to start is on land the federal government controls. It's pathetic that legal action is needed to force the administration to act."
With Thursday's notice, the Center for Biological Diversity, Friends of the Earth, and WildEarth Guardians informed Haaland that they intend to sue DOI for "unreasonable delay" if, 30 days from now, the agency "has still not initiated rulemaking or provided a substantive response" to last year's petition.
The Administrative Procedure Act requires federal agencies to respond to such petitions within a "reasonable" amount of time, the groups explained. Given the urgency of the climate crisis, they argued, DOI's 14-month period of inaction violates federal law.
"We can't frack our way to a safe climate and this lawsuit aims to ensure President Biden's administration heeds the reality that we need to transition the United States away from both the consumption and production of oil and gas."
"Far from living up to his promise to protect the climate, President Biden is actually undermining his commitment to the American public to end fossil fuel leasing," said Jeremy Nichols, climate and energy program director for WildEarth Guardians. "We can't frack our way to a safe climate and this lawsuit aims to ensure President Biden's administration heeds the reality that we need to transition the United States away from both the consumption and production of oil and gas."
As a presidential candidate, Biden vowed to prohibit new oil and gas lease sales on public lands and waters and to require federal permitting decisions to weigh the social costs of additional greenhouse gas pollution. Although Biden issued an executive order suspending new fossil fuel leasing during his first week in office, his administration's actions since then have flown in the face of earlier pledges.
On August 24, 2021, DOI argued that it had no choice but to restart lease auctions due to a preliminary injunction issued by U.S. Judge Terry A. Doughty, a Trump appointee who ruled in favor of Big Oil-funded Republican attorneys general who sued Biden over his moratorium. In a memorandum of opposition filed on the same day, however, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) asserted that while Doughty's decision blocked the implementation of Biden's pause, it did not force the DOI to hold new lease sales, "let alone on the urgent timeline specified in plaintiffs' contempt motion."
Just days after Biden described global warming as "an existential threat to human existence" and declared Washington's purported commitment to decarbonization at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow, the DOI ignored the DOJ's legal advice and moved forward with Lease Sale 257. The nation's largest-ever offshore auction, which saw more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico offered to the highest-bidding oil and gas drillers, was blocked in January 2022 by a federal judge who argued that the Biden administration violated environmental laws by not adequately considering the likely consequences of resulting emissions.
"Interior's delay on our petition to phase down fossil fuel extraction and development is not only unreasonable, it is simply unacceptable."
Despite Biden's pledge to cut U.S. greenhouse gas pollution in half by the end of this decade, the DOI held lease sales in several Western states in 2022, opening up tens of thousands of acres of public land to fossil fuel production.
Moreover, the White House supported the demands of right-wing Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin (W.Va.)—the top congressional recipient of fossil fuel industry cash during the 2022 election cycle and a longtime coal profiteer—to add oil and gas leasing provisions to the Inflation Reduction Act. The DOI has so far announced plans for multiple onshore and offshore lease sales in 2023.
The president's 2021 freeze on new lease auctions was intended to give the DOI time to assess the "potential climate and other impacts associated with oil and gas activities on public lands or in offshore waters." The agency's review of the federal leasing program effectively ignored the climate crisis, however, focusing instead on proposed adjustments to royalties, bids, and bonding in what environmental justice advocates characterized as a "shocking capitulation to the needs of corporate polluters."
The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that about 25% of the nation's total carbon dioxide emissions and 7% of its overall methane emissions stem from fossil fuel extraction on public lands and waters. A 2015 analysis prepared for the Center for Biological Diversity and Friends of the Earth warned that federal fossil fuels already leased to industry contain up to 43 billion tons of potential planet-heating pollution, and those not yet leased hold another 450 billion tons. According to peer-reviewed research, a nationwide ban on federal oil and gas leasing would reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 280 million tons per year.
"It's tragic that climate chaos has raged on Biden's watch," Hallie Templeton, legal director for Friends of the Earth, said Thursday. "People are dying, sea levels are rising, and we are rapidly reaching the point of no return."
"Interior's delay on our petition to phase down fossil fuel extraction and development is not only unreasonable, it is simply unacceptable," said Templeton. "We hope that our lawsuit clears the administration's apparent apathy and spurs the urgent action that this code-red moment calls for."
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Alliance of 60+ Groups Demands Farm Bill That Rejects False Climate Solutions
"There's no way around it—we have to actually cut fossil fuel emissions," said Food & Water Watch.
Mar 16, 2023
Dozens of climate action, Indigenous rights, and public interest groups on Thursday announced an alliance that plans to engage with lawmakers ahead of this year's congressional debate on the Farm Bill, calling on them to pass legislation that rejects carbon offsets, carbon markets, and other policies that perpetuate a planet-heating agricultural system.
Food & Water Watch convened more than 60 groups including the Farmworker Advocacy Network, the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP), all of whom have been disturbed in recent months by the passage of "at least three pieces of legislation that promote carbon offsets and dirty energy, propping up corporate ag interests and factory farming."
As Congress prepares to debate the Farm Bill, which is passed every five years and includes a range of nutrition, agriculture, forestry, and conservation policies, lawmakers must "transition away from false solutions to the climate crisis," said the alliance. "Carbon trading and offsets are inherently flawed and allow fossil fuels to continue polluting. Therefore, related carbon trading corporate-backed schemes have no place in Farm Bill legislation."
The groups are calling for a Farm Bill that will "further biodiverse, regenerative, sustainable agriculture and food systems; reduce fossil fuels and pesticides in farming practices; and promote a community-based food system that is more resilient to climate change."
"Flawed policies promoted under the guise of 'climate smart agriculture' threaten to entrench the polluting status quo, and worsen the climate crisis."
In such legislation, they said, lawmakers must exclude carbon offsets—tradable "rights" that allow purchasers to claim credit for an activity that removes carbon from the atmosphere or prevents emissions. The groups said the Farm Bill should reject:
- Soil offsets, which store carbon in soil and remain "underdeveloped, inconsistent, and unable to accurately account for differences in carbon storage related to specific climates and geographies";
- Forest offsets, which include forest protections that proponents claim prevent future deforestation, but which critics say "mask true emissions reductions by claiming sequestration and biodiversity gains"; and
- Methane offsets, which proponents claim can "tackle the methane emissions from animal waste—typically cow or pig manure—using either separation equipment or anaerobic digestion."
Offset proposals are "incompatible with sustainable agriculture and may drive further consolidation of farms and agribusinesses," said the organizations, adding that the methane offset approach "wrongly supposes that significant methane emissions from farms are inevitable, as well as ignores the litany of co-pollutants from farms poisoning the air and water of nearby environmental justice communities."
As the Center for American Progress (CAP) said in a report about fraud in the market last October, there is mounting evidence that "many carbon offsets do not actually represent permanently removed carbon or avoided emissions."
In some cases, forests targeted by carbon offsets have been logged or burned or, "conversely, were never at risk of being deforested," reported CAP. Some businesses have also purchased 40-year contracts to protect forests, rendering the offset unvalid because carbon can remain in the atmosphere for a century.
"Carbon offset markets are fatally flawed," said Ben Lilliston, director of climate strategies at IATP, on Thursday. "The scientific consensus does not support them. They are riddled with fraud. The economics don't work for anyone, least of all farmers and landowners. The urgency of the climate crisis demands that we put this failed experiment aside, and focus on what we know can benefit farmers and the planet."
Jim Walsh, policy director for Food and Water Watch, said carbon markets and offsets are driven by "wishful thinking" that is "fanciful at best."
"Flawed policies promoted under the guise of 'climate smart agriculture' threaten to entrench the polluting status quo, and worsen the climate crisis," said Walsh. "Real climate action in the Farm Bill means breaking up factory farms, decoupling conservation programs from the private sector to directly serve the public good, and putting a stop to the Big Ag monopolies trampling our climate for private gain."
Food and Water Watch suggested carbon offsets and markets aim to help businesses and policymakers avoid making "real climate progress."
The alliance also said the Farm Bill must not include public funding for methane digester technology that "perpetuates pollution and contamination and continues abuses in dairy and meat farms," conservation programs that include carbon credits sales and trade, the overuse of pesticides, and policies that encourage farmers to produce as much as possible even as the practice depresses prices and allows "agribusiness companies to buy raw materials at far below cost, while farmers struggle to pay mounting bills."
The groups said they plan to attend congressional briefings and meet with lawmakers to urge them to pass a Farm Bill that:
- Respects and uplifts traditional Indigenous knowledge (TIK) in regard to farming and ranching practices;
- Broadens opportunities and support for BIPOC farmers and low-income communities to grow their own food;
- Invests in and improves existing conservation programs to help transition farmers to more ecologically based agricultural practices and systems;
- Broadens opportunities for small and medium-sized farms to access crop insurance and increases safety net funding;
- Emphasizes the importance of building biodiverse, healthy soil;
- Ensures fair competition and treatment in the agriculture sector to ensure better living wages for all farmers and farmworkers;
- Decouples conservation programs from the private sector to directly serve the public good; and
- Tightens and enforces antitrust laws to prevent further monopolization and consolidation of the food system.
"This Farm Bill represents the greatest opportunity in a generation to position American agriculture as a solution to the climate crisis," said Jason Davidson, senior food and agriculture campaigner at Friends of the Earth. "But we cannot do this through carbon markets and offsets underpinned by decades of failure, or through more handouts that further entrench Big Ag's stranglehold on our food system. We need Congress to pursue strategies that support farmers in building a truly regenerative, resilient and equitable food system."
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Rachel Corrie 'Lives On in All of Us,' Say Palestinians 20 Years After IDF Killed Activist
One Palestinian journalist said the slain American activist "became a worldwide symbol of freedom and a source of inspiration for everyone who dreams of a world of justice and peace."
Mar 16, 2023
Palestinian rights activists on Thursday remembered the life and legacy of Rachel Corrie, the American human rights defender who was crushed to death by an Israeli military bulldozer on March 16, 2003 while trying to shield a Palestinian home from demolition in occupied Gaza.
"Rachel was 23 when she was killed. She could have satisfied her conscience by protesting against global injustice in a demonstration in America or by calling for a boycott of the aggressors," Palestinian journalist and activist Ahmed Abu Artema—who is from Rafah, where Corrie was killed—wrote for Mondoweiss.
"But her high sense of morality was not satisfied with these symbolic gestures," he added. "Her conscience would not rest without complete involvement, without standing side-by-side with us. That's why she came to Palestine."
Hanan Ashrawi, a Palestinian politician, scholar, and activist, called Corrie "an icon of resistance, freedom, and self-sacrifice."
"Palestine is forever grateful," she added. "Always in our hearts. Rest in love and peace."
Corrie, who hailed from Olympia, Washington, was a volunteer with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), a Palestinian-led group resisting the Israeli occupation of Palestine through nonviolent direct action.
"No amount of reading, attendance at conferences, documentary viewing, and word-of-mouth could have prepared me for the reality of the situation here," Corrie wrote to family and friends on February 7, 2003, adding that she had "very few words to describe" what she saw in Gaza.
"An 8-year-old child was shot and killed by an Israeli tank two days before I got here," she said.
"I feel like I'm witnessing the systematic destruction of a people's ability to survive," Corrie told a reporter two days before she was killed.
On the afternoon of March 16, Corrie received an urgent call from ISM activists telling her to rush to the home of Samir Nasrallah, a pharmacist who lived with his wife and three children near the Egyptian border in Rafah. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) troops were in the process of destroying homes in the area and ISM activists feared the Nasrallah's residence was next, as it was one of the few houses left standing in the area.
Corrie hurried to the home, clad in a fluorescent orange jacket and carrying a megaphone. As the IDF's American-made Caterpillar D9R armored bulldozer approached Nasrallah's home, Corrie stood in its path and was fatally injured. She was rushed to a nearby hospital, where she died.
Corrie was not the last ISM activist to be killed or seriously wounded by Israeli forces. A month after her death, 21-year-old British student Tom Hurndall was shot in the head by an IDF sniper as he attempted to rescue Palestinian children from an Israeli tank that was firing in their direction. The shooting left Hurndall in a coma; he died nine months later in a London hospital.
IDF officials denied intentionally killing Corrie, despite court testimony from army officers that Corrie and other activists were legitimate military targets who were "doomed to death" for resisting Israeli occupation forces.
An IDF investigation concluded that Corrie had not been crushed to death by the bulldozer, despite an Israeli autopsy that concluded her death was caused by "pressure on the chest with fractures of the ribs and vertebrae of the dorsal spinal column and scapulas, and tear wounds in the right lung."
The IDF called Corrie's death a "regrettable accident" while blaming the ISM activists for their own harm because by "placing themselves in a combat zone."
Efforts in the United States by Corrie's family, activist groups, and U.S. Rep. Brian Baird (D-Wash.) to achieve accountability and justice for Corrie bore no fruit.
While Corrie once wrote that she felt protected by "the difficulties the Israeli army would face if they shot an unarmed U.S. citizen," there were no such difficulties, just as there were no repercussions after Israeli warplanes killed 34 American sailors and wounded 173 others during a 1967 attack on the USS Liberty—an attack numerous top U.S. officials believe was deliberate.
In 2012, an Israeli court ruled against Corrie's parents, who had sued the IDF, with the judge claiming the activist's death was the "result of an accident she brought upon herself."
Former U.S. President Jimmy Cartercondemned the ruling as a confirmation of the "climate of impunity which facilitates Israeli human rights violations."
"Rachel's case was cast aside by Israel's colonial courts. But Rachel won," Abu Artema wrote Thursday. "She became a worldwide symbol of freedom and a source of inspiration for everyone who dreams of a world of justice and peace."
"Israel may have killed her," he added, "but Rachel Corrie lives on in all of us."
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