October, 28 2015, 02:15pm EDT
30,000+ Signatures Supporting Strong Protection From Coal Pollution for Utah Sent To EPA
A coalition of outdoor industry business leaders, clean air and park advocates, and winter sports athletes today announced that a petition with more than 30,000 signatures has been delivered to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 8 Administrator Shaun McGrath urging the EPA to compel strong and fair limits on coal pollution impacting Utah's national parks and communities.
SALT LAKE CITY
A coalition of outdoor industry business leaders, clean air and park advocates, and winter sports athletes today announced that a petition with more than 30,000 signatures has been delivered to Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Region 8 Administrator Shaun McGrath urging the EPA to compel strong and fair limits on coal pollution impacting Utah's national parks and communities.
The EPA must decide on the State of Utah's proposal, which would allow unabated air pollution from Rocky Mountain Power's Hunter and Huntington coal-fired power plants instead of requiring industry-standard pollution controls.
The signatures have been gathered since December 2014 and represent states and communities across the country.
According to Peter Metcalf, founder and CEO of outdoor-equipment brand Black Diamond, the benefits of protecting Utah parks and people from coal pollution are many. "Utah's stunning national parks are part of our state's heritage, our way of life, and a vital part of our economy. They're why so many choose to settle here, to raise families here, to grow old here," Metcalf says. "Utahns deserve the same protections from damaging coal pollution that other states afford to their residents. Protecting our national parks is about protecting our economy and the communities that depend on them."
Pro skier and Salt Lake City local Angel Collinson concurs. "As a professional athlete, I rely on my health, a healthy environment, and a stable tourism economy to provide a platform for my livelihood," Collinson says. "I've always been proud to call Utah my home, but as the years pass I've seen the air pollution threaten not only our Utah communities and national parks, but those in surrounding states."
Utah is celebrated for its iconic national parks, stunning visual scenery, and world-class recreational areas. Arches, Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, Bryce Canyon, and Zion National Parks are an economic engine for the state's economy and the local recreation businesses that rely on the protection of these wild places. In 2014, more than 10 million visitors from around the world visited Utah's national parks and added $730 million dollars to Utah's economy. The tourism industry supports about 132,000 jobs, or about one out of every ten jobs in the state.
Earlier this month, a coalition of more than 100 winter sports athletes, outdoor recreation businesses and brands, and tourism leaders urged the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect national parks in Utah and across the West from haze-causing coal pollution. Citing the enormous role that Utah's national parks play in the state's $12 billion outdoor recreation economy, the coalition called on EPA Region 8 Administrator Shaun McGrath to require Rocky Mountain Power's Hunter and Huntington coal-fired power plants to reduce dangerous coal pollution by installing modern, cost effective, and achievable controls, as EPA has done in states like Arizona, Colorado, and New Mexico. A copy of the coalition's letter can be found here.
Cory MacNulty, Senior Program Manager for the National Parks Conservation Association, says Utah's plan is insufficient. "The proposal sent by the state of Utah to EPA does absolutely nothing to cut the nitrogen-oxide pollution from the Hunter and Huntington coal plants." MacNulty says. "This pollution obscures up to 30 miles of the spectacular scenic landscapes that should be visible through Delicate Arch and from the Island in the Sky viewpoint in Canyonlands National Park. Nearly 2 million visitors each year come to these two extraordinary national parks to experience the magnificent vistas of mesas, buttes, canyons, arches, and spires that sadly are eclipsed most of the time by human caused haze. NPCA is asking EPA, at the very least, to require the same level of pollution controls as has been required for our neighboring states."
Under the Clean Air Act's "Regional Haze Rule", federal and state agencies are required to work together to improve visibility at all "Class I" national parks and wilderness areas, including Utah's National Parks. Utah is one of the last states in the country to address emissions from power plants that pollute skies and shroud the views at national parks.
The Hunter and Huntington plants are responsible for 40 percent of all nitrogen oxide emissions from Utah's electric sector, according to a recently released report. Monitoring studies have also shown visibility at Arches and Canyonlands National Parks is diminished by human-caused haze 83 percent of the time relative to the annual average level of natural haze.
In addition, pollution mapping has demonstrated the haze-causing emissions from Rocky Mountain Power's Hunter and Huntington coal-fired power plants reaches beyond Utah's borders, threatening air quality in national parks as far north as Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, as far south as the Grand Canyon, and east to Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.
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'Outrageous': US Accepts Israeli Assurances on Legal Use of Weapons in Gaza
Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer called the U.S. assessment "absolutely scandalous."
Mar 25, 2024
The Biden administration on Monday said that Israel's use of U.S.-supplied weapons in a war that's killed and maimed more than 114,000 Palestinians complies with international law, a conclusion that flies in the face of multiple court rulings that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza and the assessments of legal and human rights experts around the world.
Referring to a letter from Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said during a Monday press briefing that the Biden administration has "had ongoing assessments of Israel's compliance with international humanitarian law" and "have not found them to be in violation, either when it comes to the conduct of the war or the provision of humanitarian assistance."
U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had until Monday to certify to Congress that Israel is adhering to President Joe Biden's February 2023 memo stating that "no arms transfer will be authorized where the United States assesses that it is more likely than not that the arms to be transferred will be used by the recipient to commit... genocide, crimes against humanity, grave breaches of the Geneva Conventions of 1949... or other serious violations of international humanitarian or human rights law."
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Palestinian American author and political analyst Yousef Munayyer called the U.S. assessment "absolutely scandalous."
US State Department Spokesperson Matthew Miller insisted during a press briefing that Israel has not violated international law in its military operation in Gaza. pic.twitter.com/9OP5xRm0Gx
— The Great Investor (@TheGreatInvest2) March 25, 2024
According to Palestinian and international officials, Israeli bombs and bullets—many of them provided by the United States as part of the $3.8 billion in annual military aid and additional emergency shipments—have killed more than 33,000 Palestinians in Gaza since October 7, the majority of them women and children.
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Experts have pointed to the types of munitions being used by Israeli forces as a major reason why so many Gazans are being killed and injured. These include U.S.-supplied 1,000-pound and 2,000-pound guided "bunker-buster" bombs, which Israel says are necessary to target Hamas' underground tunnels.
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Even the United States military—which since 2001 has killed hundreds of thousands of people during the open-ended so-called War on Terror—avoids using 2,000-pound bombs in densely populated areas due to the tremendous damage they cause.
Regarding the Biden administration's assessment that Israel is adhering to international law when it comes to providing humanitarian assistance to besieged and starving Gazans, journalist Krystal Ball noted Monday that Blinken "admits 100% of the population is being starved yet somehow certifies that Israel isn't blocking humanitarian aid."
WATCH: "100% of the population of Gaza is experiencing severe levels of acute food insecurity. We cannot, we must not allow that to continue."
U.S. Sec. of State Antony Blinken pushes for an immediate cease-fire and more humanitarian aid into Gaza. pic.twitter.com/U1Mme7fqiJ
— MSNBC (@MSNBC) March 21, 2024
"This is fucking outrageous," Ball said on social media as critics pointed out how Gallant publicly declared in October that Israel would commit the war crime of a "complete siege" of Gaza.
The U.S. assessment stands in stark contrast with two major court rulings—one by the International Court of Justice and the other by a federal court in California—that Israel is plausibly committing genocide in Gaza, as well as with findings by at least hundreds of jurists and other experts around the world, including in Israel, that the assault on Gaza is genocidal. Observers accuse Israel of ignoring an ICJ order for Israel to avoid acts of genocide.
On Monday, the United Nations Human Rights Council published a draft report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. The report recommended suspending military aid to Israel in light of its numerous violations of international law.
A growing number of Democratic U.S. lawmakers and human rights groups have urged the Biden administration to immediately cut off arms transfers to Israel, citing its illegal conduct in Gaza, including mass killing and destruction and the blocking of lifesaving humanitarian aid.
Also on Monday, Palestine defenders rallied in Washington, D.C. to protest a visit to the State Department by Gallant and to demand an end to U.S. aid and weapons to Israel. Another high-level Israeli delegation's visit to Washington was canceled Monday after the U.S. abstained from a U.N. Security Council vote on a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza.
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"This is a huge victory for the protection of our public lands," said Friends of the Earth.
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U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper ruled in Washington, D.C. that the BLM did not halt the lease sale even after it acknowledged that oil and gas drilling on the federal lands could result in the same negative environmental and social impacts as the addition of hundreds of thousands of cars to U.S. roads each year.
Moving forward with one of the Biden administration's largest lease sales despite its likely environmental harm, said Cooper, was illegal under the National Environmental Policy Act and other laws.
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The judge found BLM did not complete a sufficiently detailed review of drilling impacts on the greater sage grouse, and relied too heavily on outdated and overly broad analyses of oil and gas drilling in Wyoming.
While the agency has been attempting to "stop the bleeding" of the greater sage grouse, whose population has declined nearly 40% since 2002, the BLM still refused to postpone leasing in a critical habitat for the bird.
The Biden administration also did not adequately explain its analysis of potential groundwater harms, said the ruling.
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"Israel's genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure."
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The United Nations Human Rights Council on Monday published a draft report that found "reasonable grounds to believe" that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, a move that came on the same day as the U.N. Security Council passed a resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in the ongoing war.
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Israel
rejected the report as "an obscene inversion of reality."
According to Palestinian and international humanitarian officials, Israel's 171-day Gaza onslaught has killed at least 32,333 Palestinians, most of them women and children, while wounding nearly 75,000 others and displacing around 90% of Gaza's 2.3 million people. Thousands more Palestinians are missing and believed to be dead and buried beneath the rubble of bombed buildings. Disease and deadly starvation caused and exacerbated by Israel's siege and blockade of Gaza are spreading rapidly.
"Israel's genocide on the Palestinians in Gaza is an escalatory stage of a long-standing settler-colonial process of erasure," the draft report asserts. "For over seven decades this process has suffocated the Palestinian people as a group—demographically, culturally, economically, and politically—seeking to displace it and expropriate and control its land and resources."
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"The ongoing Nakba must be stopped and remedied once and for all."
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- Immediate referral of the situation in Palestine to the International Criminal Court in support of its ongoing investigation;
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