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environmental protection agency
Republican AGs Urge Supreme Court to Halt Biden Methane Rule
"This is the 23rd pending emergency application—and the third different EPA rule that applicants are currently asking the justices to block on the shadow docket," noted one legal expert.
Aug 27, 2024
Two dozen Republican-led states on Tuesday asked the right-wing U.S. Supreme Court to pause the Biden administration's rule intended to slash methane emissions by nearly 80% over the next decade through new requirements for the oil and gas industry.
Arizona's GOP-controlled legislature and 23 state attorneys general—led by Gentner Drummond, who attended the Oklahoma Gas Association's annual conference on Tuesday—filed the request for emergency action by the nation's highest court after launching the legal battle in March.
The Republican filers claimed in their application that their states "will suffer irreparable harm if this court does not grant a stay" halting the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rule, and the policy's "devastating consequences are contrary to the public interest."
Meanwhile, green groups have welcomed the rule but also pushed the Biden administration to go much further, arguing, as Food & Water Watch policy director Jim Walsh said in March, that "the best way to eliminate methane pollution... is to stop fossil fuel drilling, period. In the midst of a climate emergency, we need to take the actions necessary to stop pollution once and for all."
The GOP states' application details the long process that led to the EPA's latest rule on methane, which is more than 80 times more potent than carbon dioxide for its first two decades in the atmosphere. As Courthouse New Servicesummarized Tuesday:
The EPA began regulating new oil and gas producers in 2016, but the Trump administration rescinded the regulations in 2020. President Joe Biden's EPA repealed the 2020 rules and proposed new standards that would not only reimpose the 2016 standards but also apply those regulations to existing oil and gas sources for the first time.
Biden's standards prohibit all flaring for certain wells, forcing any gas to be recovered, collected, and used for a beneficial purpose. Natural gas pumps will have a zero-emissions standard.
As CNN Supreme Court analyst and University of Texas law professor Steve Vladeck noted, "This is the 23rd pending emergency application—and the third different EPA rule that applicants are currently asking the justices to block on the shadow docket."
"In all three of these cases, the *only* ruling by a lower court was a summary ruling by the D.C. Circuit denying emergency relief; there's been no other litigation," Vladeck explained on social media. "And in all three of those cases, those rulings came from unanimous *and* ideologically diverse D.C. Circuit panels."
In addition to Arizona and Oklahoma, the states behind the request are Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, South Carolina, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
The U.S. Supreme Court's right-wing supermajority has a history of being hostile toward environmental regulations, including with its June ruling in Ohio v. EPA, which was about a policy designed to protect people downwind from smog-forming pollution.
Earthjustice senior vice president Sam Sankar warned at the time that "the court's order puts thousands of lives at risk, forces downwind states to regulate their industries more tightly, and tells big polluters that it's open season on our environmental laws."
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Documents Reveal Plan to Fight PFAS Regulations With Industry-Backed Research
"They're trying to undermine the EPA's science, make it sound like there's uncertainty where there isn't, and make it sound like there's disagreement within the scientific community where there's not," an expert said.
Aug 27, 2024
An industry-friendly research group has set forth plans to bolster legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency's PFAS regulations for drinking water by conducting what experts say is biased research, The Guardianreported Tuesday.
Documents obtained by the newspaper show that the Ohio-based research group Toxicology Excellence for Risk Assessment (TERA), led by controversial toxicologist Michael Dourson, aims to publish peer-reviewed papers by the end of 2024 that can help industry legal challenges to drinking water rules that the EPA finalized in April.
Dourson, some of whose research funding comes from industry groups, sent a fundraising email in July laying out his plans. "Can we count on your group to make a tax-deductible donation to get our team to publish a set of papers by the end of 2024?" he asked.
TERA organized a conference in October at which a pro-industry plan for challenging the EPA's PFAS regulations was laid out—to attack the statistical methods used by the agency and emphasize scientific uncertainty—a conference document obtained by The Guardian shows.
Current and former EPA experts who viewed the email and the conference document sharply criticized Dourson's approach to research on PFAS, which are a set of roughly 16,000 synthetic compounds linked to cancer and a wide range of other serious health conditions.
Maria Doa, a former EPA risk assessment manager who's now a director at the Environmental Defense Fund, told The Guardian that TERA's plans were "not a valid approach to science."
"They're trying to undermine the EPA's science, make it sound like there's uncertainty where there isn't, and make it sound like there's disagreement within the scientific community where there's not," she said.
Experts compared the effort to undermine PFAS regulations with industry-funded science to similar efforts used by the tobacco industry in decades past.
"This is out of the playbook and it's a lot of the same quote-unquote scientists and same hired guns," Erik Olson, a director at the National Resources Defense Council, told The Guardian.
Penny Fenner-Crisp, a former EPA water division manager who worked with Dourson, told The Guardian that she was astounded by the straightforward bias on display in the documents.
"In my 22 years spent in three regulatory programs I came to understand the games [the industry] plays, but this one astonished me because it's unusual to be so blatant," she said.
The EPA regulations set a limit of 4 parts per trillion on two of the main types of PFAS, and up to 10 ppt for other types. Gourson, who previously worked for the EPA but has since shifted his approach and, as he puts it, learned to "honor industry's knowledge," has argued that the limits should be far higher. He and other scientists, some of whom have industry ties, published a study in December that supports a higher limit for a main type of PFAS.
The legal challenges to the EPA's water regulations come from water utilities and chemical manufacturers. At least one lawsuit was brought in part by the American Chemistry Council (ACC), a lobby group that represents companies such as 3M and DuPont, which developed PFAS in the mid-20th century for use in consumer and industrial products, and reportedly hid knowledge of its toxic impacts and widespread distribution.
In the leaked email, Dourson said his forthcoming papers will be published in the first issue of a new journal that aims to "support" the legal challenges to PFAS regulations.
The stakes of the legal cases against the EPA's water rules are extremely high, and not just because of the direct impact they will have on hundreds of millions of Americans who may already have toxic PFAS in their drinking water. A victory for industry could also discourage further regulation of chemicals in drinking water.
"This is pivotal," Betsy Southerland, a former director of science and technology at the EPA's water division, told The Guardian, speaking about the legal defense of the PFAS rules established in April. "If a court strikes this down… then the EPA will say the bar is too high to ever regulate using the Safe Drinking Water Act."
Southerland toldThe Wall Street Journal in May that Dourson "produces biased science that cherry picks data."
Dourson was named to lead the EPA's chemical safety division in 2017 by then-President Donald Trump but withdrew himself from consideration for the position following criticism over his ties to industry. The New York Times at the time published emails Dourson had exchanged with the ACC that showed a close relationship.
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'Public Health Emergency': Report Calls for Multi-Agency Action to Address PFAS Crisis
"We're at a tipping point, where the next administration must act decisively to avert a public health catastrophe that could define the next decade."
Aug 15, 2024
Environmental Working Group, a research and advocacy nonprofit, released a roadmap on Thursday calling for a comprehensive government program to address the PFAS contamination crisis facing the United States.
The EWG roadmap details the agency-by-agency response the group says is needed to deal with the environmental and public health threat posed by the nearly ubiquitous presence of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), which are linked to many cancers and other serious health conditions.
EWG's plan involves not just steps that should be taken by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) but also the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the departments of Agriculture, Defense, and Health and Human Services, and several other federal agencies.
Scott Faber, EWG's vice president of government affairs, said in a statement that PFAS contamination was "an unfolding disaster that demands immediate and unprecedented action."
"We're at a tipping point, where the next administration must act decisively to avert a public health catastrophe that could define the next decade," he said.
The contamination crisis from the “forever chemicals” known as PFAS is far from over, despite the Biden-Harris administration’s strides combating PFAS pollution. EWG has identified steps the next administration should take to build on successes so far. https://t.co/BQUUNnUTdI
— EWG (@ewg) August 15, 2024
EWG commended the Biden administration for the steps that it's taken to deal with the PFAS contamination crisis. The White House put forth an eight-agency PFAS plan in October 2021 and has implemented key parts, most notably by setting strict national limits on PFAS in drinking water. That rule, finalized in April, faces legal challenges from industry groups.
PFAS are set of roughly 16,000 synthetic compounds that were developed by chemical companies for use in a wide range of products. They can enter the human body—where, as "forever chemicals," they accumulate in bones and organs—through drinking water, food, the skin, or the air. Most Americans have PFAS in their blood.
Reporting by Sharon Lerner, a ProPublica journalist who previously worked at The Intercept, has indicated that 3M and DuPont, two of the major PFAS producers, knew about the dangers and widespread distribution of PFAS but hid them from the public.
In April, the EPA designated two of the most common PFAS, perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), as hazardous substances under the Superfund law—another move that EWG celebrated.
"But there's much more that must be done," according to the new roadmap, authored by John Reeder, EWG's vice president of federal affairs.
In the roadmap, Reeder, a former EPA deputy chief of staff, called for the agency to double its budget for PFAS—i.e., increase its funding request to Congress—and crack down on industrial discharges, among many other proposals. He also called on the FDA to ban the use of PFAS in food packaging and establish limits on their use in foods. For the Department of Defense, Reeder's plan includes giving defense communities safe water to drink—at least 100 military sites are known to have contaminated water—and end the use of PFAS in firefighting foam.
Such federal action will likely depend on the results of the presidential and congressional elections. Project 2025, a right-wing policy blueprint for a Republican administration, proposes deregulation of PFAS and funding cuts for key EPA functions. Experts inside and outside the agency toldThe Guardian late last month that a victory by Republican nominee Donald Trump would mean PFAS rules would become subject to a great deal of industry influence.
Meanwhile, the scale of the PFAS problem continues to become more clear. Data recently updated by the EPA shows that 7,457 U.S. drinking water locations have PFAS in their supply, putting much of the American population at risk, according to EWG. The EPA has found that there's "no safe level of exposure" to PFOA and PFOS.
"The sheer number of contaminated sites is a red flag that says we are facing a pervasive and devastating crisis," said Tasha Stoiber, a senior scientist at EWG. "More than 130 million Americans are drinking water tainted with PFAS, putting them at risk of severe health issues. This is no longer just an environmental concern; it's a major public health emergency."
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