February, 02 2021, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Jennifer Valiulis, St. Croix Environmental Association, (340) 340-773-1989, jvaliulis@stxenvironmental.org
Miyoko Sakashita, Center for Biological Diversity, (510) 844-7108, miyoko@biologicaldiversity.org
Anne Hawke, Natural Resources Defense Council, (646) 823-4518, ahawke@nrdc.org
Legal Action Contests Reopening of Controversial Refinery in U.S. Virgin Islands
Limetree Bay Oil Refinery, Trump-era EPA Challenged for Lax Pollution Standards
WASHINGTON
Community and conservation groups filed a legal appeal today challenging the federal permit for the controversial Limetree Bay refinery on the Caribbean island of St. Croix that started operating this week. The long-shuttered, pollution-plagued Limetree refinery has been one of the world's biggest oil-processing facilities.
St. Croix Environmental Association (SEA), the Center for Biological Diversity, NRDC and Sierra Club filed the petition for review of Limetree Bay's permit with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Environmental Appeals Board. The filing faults the agency for setting lenient air-pollution standards and failing to protect a vulnerable community of color, among other concerns.
"The future of St. Croix should not be as a pollution haven for a dying industry that has caused a climate crisis," said Jennifer Valiulis, executive director of SEA. "The character of our community is based on a lifestyle and well-being that is closely tied to nature and the environment. We want clean air, clean water, a healthy ecosystem, and the ability to create a strong resilient future based in sustainability. Limetree's operation and the permit, as it is currently written, compromise the St. Croix community's ability to achieve that quality of life."
The refinery, located on the island of St. Croix, where 27% of residents live below the poverty line, was shut down in 2012 after a series of massive oil spills and air-pollution releases prompted the EPA to issue a $5.4 million fine and order new pollution controls against then-owner Hovensa. The new ownership group, Limetree Bay Ventures' principal investor ArcLight Capital Partners, has ties to former President Donald Trump, whose EPA leadership helped fast-track approval to reopen this facility.
"Limetree Bay refinery continues to be an environmental monster that Trump officials brought back to life. The Biden administration needs to take another look at this menace to local residents and marine life," said Miyoko Sakashita, oceans program director at the Center. "Restarting this dirty refinery pollutes the air and devastates endangered corals and sea turtles."
Last year's reopening was complicated by delays, corroded equipment, a fire, unscheduled flares, an airborne chemical release and more oil spills. Oil giant BP announced in January that it will delay oil deliveries to the refinery until its problems are corrected and the plant fully restarts. The plant restart was rushed to meet anticipated demand for cleaner, low-sulfur maritime fuel that was required starting last year.
Hurricane Maria hit St. Croix as a powerful category 5 hurricane in September 2017, devastating the island's infrastructure. The island is still recovering today.
"St. Croix is a beautiful island, still recovering from a natural disaster. The last thing it needs is to restart this old refinery, which will belch toxic chemicals into its air and water," said Jane Williams, chair of the Sierra Club National Clean Air Team.
The petition challenges the EPA's unacceptably high limits on air pollution from the refinery while discounting that pollution by ignoring that restarting the refinery is a new source of pollution. The agency failed to adequately address the disproportionate burden that an environmental justice community will bear and it failed to provide multi-lingual access to information. Finally, the appeal challenges the EPA's cursory analysis of the detrimental impact the refinery will have on St. Croix's endangered marine life, including sea turtles and birds.
"What the Trump administration and an oil refinery have been trying here is textbook 'environmental injustice' -- it's indefensible," said John Walke, clean air director for NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council. "A polluting oil refinery can't rise up again like a zombie, in some new incarnation, aided by reckless politicians, with the same old harmful plan. The refinery simply has to follow federal clean air laws, and the Biden-Harris administration should hold them to it."
At the Center for Biological Diversity, we believe that the welfare of human beings is deeply linked to nature — to the existence in our world of a vast diversity of wild animals and plants. Because diversity has intrinsic value, and because its loss impoverishes society, we work to secure a future for all species, great and small, hovering on the brink of extinction. We do so through science, law and creative media, with a focus on protecting the lands, waters and climate that species need to survive.
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UN Chief Warns of Israel's Syria Invasion and Land Seizures
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres stressed the "urgent need" for Israel to "de-escalate violence on all fronts."
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United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres said Thursday that he is "deeply concerned" by Israel's "recent and extensive violations of Syria's sovereignty and territorial integrity," including a ground invasion and airstrikes carried out by the Israel Defense Forces in the war-torn Mideastern nation.
Guterres "is particularly concerned over the hundreds of Israeli airstrikes on several locations in Syria" and has stressed the "urgent need to de-escalate violence on all fronts throughout the country," said U.N. spokesperson Stephane Dujarric.
Israel claims its invasion and bombardment of Syria—which come as the United States and Turkey have also violated Syrian sovereignty with air and ground attacks—are meant to create a security buffer along the countries' shared border in the wake of last week's fall of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and amid the IDF's ongoing assault on Gaza, which has killed or wounded more than 162,000 Palestinians and is the subject of an International Court of Justice genocide case.
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"The Syrian army abandoned its positions in the area... which potentially creates a vacuum that could have been filled by terrorist organizations," U.S. State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller said at a press briefing earlier this week. "Israel has said that these actions are temporary to defend its borders. These are not permanent actions... We support all sides upholding the 1974 disengagement agreement."
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Addressing the assassination of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson and conversations it has sparked about the country's for-profit system, longtime Medicare for All advocate Sen. Bernie Sanders on Wednesday condemned the murder and stressed that getting to universal coverage will require a movement challenging corporate money in politics.
"Look, when we talk about the healthcare crisis, in my view, and I think the view of a majority of Americans, the current system is broken, it is dysfunctional, it is cruel, and it is wildly inefficient—far too expensive," said Sanders (I-Vt.), whose position is backed up by various polls.
"The reason we have not joined virtually every other major country on Earth in guaranteeing healthcare to all people as a human right is the political power and financial power of the insurance industry and drug companies," he told Jacobin. "It will take a political revolution in this country to get Congress to say, 'You know what, we're here to represent ordinary people, to provide quality care to ordinary people as a human right,' and not to worry about the profits of insurance and drug companies."
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"What you're seeing, the outpouring of anger at the insurance companies, is a reflection of how people feel about the current healthcare system."
"What you're seeing, the outpouring of anger at the insurance companies, is a reflection of how people feel about the current healthcare system," he continued, noting the tens of thousands of Americans who die each year because they can't get to a doctor.
"Killing people is not the way we're going to reform our healthcare system," Sanders added. "The way we're going to reform our healthcare system is having people come together and understanding that it is the right of every American to be able to walk into a doctor's office when they need to and not have to take out their wallet."
"The way we're going to bring about the kind of fundamental changes we need in healthcare is, in fact, by a political movement which understands the government has got to represent all of us, not just the 1%," the senator told Jacobin.
The 83-year-old Vermonter, who was just reelected to what he says is likely his last six-year term, is an Independent but caucuses with Democrats and sought their presidential nomination in 2016 and 2020. He has urged the Democratic Party to recognize why some working-class voters have abandoned it since Republicans won the White House and both chambers of Congress last month. A refusal to take on insurance and drug companies and overhaul the healthcare system, he argues, is one reason.
Sanders—one of the few members of Congress who regularly talks about Medicare for All—isn't alone in suggesting that unsympathetic responses to Thompson's murder can be explained by a privatized healthcare system that fails so many people.
In addition to highlighting Sanders' interview on social media, Congressman Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) pointed out to Business Insider on Wednesday that "you've got thousands of people that are sharing their stories of frustration" in the wake of Thompson's death.
Khanna—a co-sponsor of the Medicare for All Act, led in the House of Representatives by Congressional Progressive Caucus Chair Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—made the case that you can recognize those stories without accepting the assassination.
"You condemn the murder of an insurance executive who was a father of two kids," he said. "At the same time, you say there's obviously an outpouring behavior of people whose claims are being denied, and we need to reform the system."
Two other Medicare for All advocates, Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), also made clear to Business Insider that they oppose Thompson's murder but understand some of the responses to it.
"Of course, we don't want to see the chaos that vigilantism presents," said Ocasio-Cortez. "We also don't want to see the extreme suffering that millions of Americans confront when your life changes overnight from a horrific diagnosis, and people are led to just some of the worst, not just health events, but the worst financial events of their and their family's lives."
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.)—a co-sponsor of Sanders' Medicare for All Act—similarly toldHuffPost in a Tuesday interview, "The visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies should be a warning to everyone in the healthcare system."
"Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far," she continued. "This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the healthcare to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone."
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Reporters Without Borders' (RSF) 2024 roundup, which was published Thursday, found that at least 54 journalists were killed on the job or in connection with their work this year, and 18 of them were killed by Israeli armed forces (16 in Palestine, and two in Lebanon).
The organization has also filed four complaints with the International Criminal Court "for war crimes committed by the Israeli army against journalists," according to the roundup, which includes stats from January 1 through December 1.
"In Gaza, the scale of the tragedy is incomprehensible," wrote Thibaut Bruttin, director general of RSF, in the introduction to the report. Since October 2023, 145 journalists have been killed in Gaza, "including at least 35 who were very likely targeted or killed while working."
Bruttin added that "many of these reporters were clearly identifiable as journalists and protected by this status, yet they were shot or killed in Israeli strikes that blatantly disregarded international law. This was compounded by a deliberate media blackout and a block on foreign journalists entering the strip."
When counting the number of journalists killed by the Israeli army since October 2023 in both Gaza and Lebanon, the tally comes to 155—"an unprecedented massacre," according to the roundup.
Multiple journalists were also killed in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Mexico, Sudan, Myanmar, Colombia, and Ukraine, according to the report, and hundreds more were detained and are now behind bars in countries including Israel, China, and Russia.
Meanwhile, in a statement released Thursday, the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) announced that at least 139 Palestinian journalists and media workers have been killed since the war in Gaza began in 2023, and in a statement released Wednesday, IFJ announced that 104 journalists had perished worldwide this year (which includes deaths from January 1 through December 10). IFJ's number for all of 2024 appears to be higher than RSF because RSF is only counting deaths that occurred "on the job or in connection with their work."
IFJ lists out each of the slain journalists in its 139 count, which includes the journalist Hamza Al-Dahdouh, the son of Al Jazeera's Gaza bureau chief, Wael Al-Dahdouh, who was killed with journalist Mustafa Thuraya when Israeli forces targeted their car while they were in northern Rafah in January 2024.
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