Blog Posts: Pollution

By Genna Reed

A new review of hundreds of scientific studies surrounding glyphosate—the major component of Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide— sheds light on its effects within the human body. The paper describes how all of these effects could work together, and with other variables, trigger health problems in humans, including debilitating diseases like gastrointestinal disorders, diabetes, heart disease, obesity and Alzheimer’s disease.

Glyphosate impairs the cytochrome P450 (CYP) gene pathway, which creates enzymes that help to form and also break down molecules in cells. There are myriad important CYP enzymes, including aromatase (the enzyme that converts androgen into estrogen) and 21-Hydroxylase, which creates cortisol (stress hormone) and aldosterone (regulates blood pressure). One function of these CYP enzymes is also to detoxify xenobiotics, which are foreign chemicals like drugs, carcinogens or pesticides. Glyphosate inhibits these CYP enzymes, which has rippling effects throughout our body.

Because the CYP pathway is essential for normal functioning of various systems in our bodies, any small change in its expression can lead to disruptions. For example, humans exposed to glyphosate have decreased levels of the amino acid tryptophan, which is necessary for active signaling of the neurotransmitter serotonin. Suppressed serotonin levels have been associated with weight gain, depression, and Alzheimer’s disease.

This paper does not claim to yield new scientific discoveries. Instead, it looks at older studies in a new light. Critics will say the links between glyphosate and health problems made in this paper are purely correlational, but this work is important because it brings all of the possible health effects of glyphosate together and discusses what could happen: something the USDA, EPA and FDA have failed to do.

Just as Monsanto attempted to discredit Seralini’s study on rats fed GE corn, the company called this peer-reviewed journal article “another bogus study” due to its “bad science.” In a classic pot-calling-the-kettle-black scenario, what Monsanto doesn’t mention is that the majority of research showing glyphosate’s safety has been done by Monsanto itself, which could be called bad science as well due to its limited and biased nature.

The authors of the new review call for more independent research to validate their findings, stating that “glyphosate is likely to be pervasive in our food supply, and, contrary to being essentially nontoxic, it may in fact be the most biologically disruptive chemical in our environment.” If the body of independent research on GE foods and the herbicides used with them shows one thing, it is that there are unanswered questions begging for unbiased research. And while these questions remain unanswered, Americans have the right to know how their food was produced – take action to tell your members of Congress to support mandatory GE labeling.

By Scott Edwards

Scott Edwards, co-director of the Food & Water Justice project

While the nation was largely focused on the presidential election in the swing state of Colorado, there was another very important vote taking place in the state in Longmont, a city of about 86,000 people located just northeast of Boulder. On the same day Obama carried Colorado, the citizens of Longmont voted overwhelmingly to ban the harmful practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, as a method of extracting local gas deposits in their community. Longmont’s ban of fracking was nothing short of heroic given the undue influence, massive amounts of money and open threats of financial ruin thrown about by the oil and gas industry and the state’s governor leading up to the vote on November 6^th. 

Each day brings new, irrefutable evidence that fracking is poisoning our communities. Data released just last week shows that 17 percent of the over 2000 fracking chemical spills and releases reported in Colorado resulted in groundwater contamination with cancer-causing chemicals like benzene. None of that, of course, gives the industry or its supporters any pause. In fact, groups like Environmental Defense Fund and the fracking companies have once again shamelessly joined hands and are sharing talking points in Colorado in response to this new evidence. They’re jointly calling for a testing protocol to raise “public confidence” in fracking when the only thing the public can be increasingly confident about is that fracking is threatening their communities and clean water. 

The passing of the ban was the latest step in Longmont’s battle to keep the oil and gas industry from polluting their drinking water and poisoning their community. The next fight will be in the courts, where industry will dispatch its high-priced lawyers to ask a judge to quash the rights of tens of thousands of Longmont residents and allow the big gas companies to do what they want, where they want, without regard for the citizens of the state or the democratic process which enacted the ban in the first place.

On one level, this will be a legal battle about fracking and the devastation it brings to our public health and precious resources. The fracking companies like to pretend that fracking is harmless, but the truth is the fracking “debate” ended in 2005 when the industry deployed their lobbyists and got Dick Cheney and Congress to exempt their inherently harmful gas extraction process from the Safe Drinking Water Act. Their need for an exemption from the one federal law that protects our aquifers was an open concession that they couldn’t engage in fracking without poisoning our drinking water supplies. That fact was just proven with the latest Colorado contamination data. The SDWA free pass added to their exemptions to parts of the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Resource and Conservation Recovery Act, the National Environmental Policy Act and virtually any other public health law with the words “safe,” “clean,” “conservation” or “environmental” in it.

But even all these regulatory exemptions aren’t enough for the industry; they’ll be walking into court any day now in Colorado seeking an exemption from democracy, the last great hurdle in their effort to poison and pollute with absolute impunity.  And that’s the other important aspect of this upcoming case – its about the fundamental rights of people in communities in Colorado, and elsewhere, to decide what they want their towns and cities to look like, what kinds of activities they want taking place next to their schools and playgrounds, how safe they want the water they drink and the air they breath to be.

Whether you’re for fracking or against it, whether or not you’re paying attention to study after study which shows that fracking is having detrimental impacts on ground and surface waters, airways, climate, property values and public health, and regardless of whether you think extreme fossil fuel development is worth the price we’ll all have to pay if fracking is allowed to proliferate even more, the one thing we can all agree on is that we live in a country where voting and the democratic process should count for something. All, that is, except for industry and the bought-and-paid-for politicians who are so willing to sacrifice the rights of their citizens for the profits of fracking companies. 

Just as EDF has lost its way in the fight to preserve our environment, Colorado’s governor, John Hickerlooper, has forgotten who elected him when he recently stated that that he would support industry if they sued his own citizens in Longmont over the fracking ban.  Perhaps Hickernlooper should take a lesson from the authors of Colorado’s State Constitution; they understood the rights of local citizens in ways that the governor doesn’t seem to grasp. This document, written in 1876, grants the people of Longmont and everyone else in the state “essential and inalienable rights,” including the right to enjoy and defend their lives and liberties and protect their property, to seek and obtain safety.  They also understood that these inalienable rights can never be eclipsed by the financial interests of industry. Article XV of the Constitution says that the state can never use its powers to “permit corporations to conduct their business in such a manner as to infringe the equal rights of individuals, or the general well-being of the State.”

Once the will of corporations take over the rights of citizens, we lose the power to determine our own future. When industries get to decide how safe our water and air is, we no longer control our own health and safety. And if the fracking companies who seek to profit in Longmont area allowed to undo the November 6^th fracking ban, we can no longer pretend to live in a democracy.

By Hugh MacMillan

A new report, commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy and conducted by NERA Economic Consulting, touts the supposed net benefits to the U.S. economy of allowing exports of liquefied natural gas (LNG). The study is incredibly out of touch.

The headline that LNG exports are unequivocally good – the more exports the better! – gives a huge gift to the oil and gas industry, and to its backers on Wall Street, but the devil is the details. Look closer, and you see that the narrow economic analysis does the public a disservice. As our Executive Director, Wenonah Hauter, has put it, “NERA’s report not only sweeps under the rug the public costs of more drilling and fracking, it insults us with the argument that the benefits enjoyed by the oil and gas industry and its financiers will trickle down.”

First, LNG exports will mean higher natural gas prices for American consumers, but the NERA report claims that on average, Americans will benefit because the gains will be so large for the oil and gas industry. This is the old “Bill Gates walks into a bar” illustration of lying with statistics.

In essence, the NERA analysis is that, while 10 million Americans would likely pay $100 each, a couple of oil and gas industry executives and banking executives could pocket a couple billion dollars, so if you take an average over everybody, it works out to everyone getting an extra $100. How the net economic benefit is distributed is completely lost. To its credit, the report does acknowledge that those Americans who rely on income from wages “might not participate in these benefits.” That says it all—how many people do you know that don’t make a living from wages, but who instead live off of their oil and gas industry investments? Not many? I didn’t think so.

Second, the NERA report has an appendix called “Factors That We Did Not Include in the Analysis,” but it needs another appendix. Perhaps it could be called: “Factors That We Did Not Include in the Factors-That-We-Did-Not-Include-in-the-Analysis Appendix.” 

LNG exports also mean more widespread and destructive drilling and fracking, but the costs to local communities exposed to this drilling and fracking – the long terms costs of a legacy of pollution – are ignored in the NERA report. These communities will be worse off when the fracking boom goes bust. They will face long term risks to their public water resources. And all of us will bear the escalating costs of global climate change that will come from giving the oil and gas industry its wish, and allowing it to drill and frack for as much fossil fuel as possible, as fast as it can.

Finally, it’s no surprise that more drilling and fracking would be projected to increase GDP, especially given that all the destructive and costly negative impacts are externalized, foisted on to the public and not included in NERA’s calculations. But increased GDP is not a measure of economic welfare.

The Natural Gas Act mandates the U.S. DOE swiftly authorize applications to export natural gas to countries with which the United States does have a Free Trade Agreement. The unbalanced findings of the NERA Economic Consulting report are being used by the U.S. DOE to evaluate whether LNG exports to countries with which the United States does not have a Free Trade Agreement are actually in the public interest. The potential impact on U.S. energy security is also being considered by the U.S. DOE as it decides whether or not to authorize LNG exports.

Our recent report, U.S. Energy Insecurity: Why Fracking for Oil and Natural Gas is a False Solution, exposes the misconceptions, falsehoods and misleading statements behind the oil and gas industry’s claims that modern drilling and fracking can deliver U.S. energy security. We show that the 100 years of natural gas is a dangerous mirage. There are a lot of threads to the industry’s claims that are unwound in our report, but above all else, the industry’s plans to export shale gas, America’s supposed ticket to energy security, are the most revealing. The only thing the industry seeks to secure is its bottom line. NERA’s report, commissioned by the U.S. DOE, moves them one step closer.

The U.S. DOE will be making an enormous mistake if it adopts the unbalanced and shortsighted conclusions of this study. The agency must not allow the oil and gas industry, and its Wall Street backers, to write federal energy policy to benefit its bottom line at the public’s expense.

The oil and gas industry will simply extract as much natural gas as possible, as fast as possible, for maximum profit, while fighting tooth and nail to prolong America’s destructive dependence on fossil fuels. Then, once U.S. natural gas is gone, the global oil and gas industry will simply convert the export facilities back to import facilities and bring in foreign sources of fracked natural gas to feed the entrenched U.S. dependence.

It is not too late for the United States to avoid going down this self-destructive path. Long-term U.S. energy security and independence can only be achieved by getting off of fossil fuels, but the country needs to act now to deploy existing energy efficiency and renewable energy solutions, invest in public transportation systems to reduce energy demand, and invest in future technologies that build on these proven solutions.

The U.S. DOE will be considering public comments on the NERA report until mid-January, and Food & Water Watch will be working with allies to urge the agency to reject the unbalanced and shortsighted economic study. Food & Water Watch will also be calling on you in the coming weeks to make your voices heard.

By Wenonah Hauter

Kathy Phillips, Assateague Coastkeeper and Executive Director, Assateague Coastal Trust. Photo by Meaghan Morgan-Puglisi.

Kathy Phillips is a real heroine. She’s standing up to Perdue, a company responsible for a large percentage of the pollution pouring into the Chesapeake Bay and surrounding waterways. Kathy is braving the anger and malice of a powerful corporation that wields power in her community. While all Maryland agriculture combined contributes only 0.35% to the state’s Gross Domestic Product, with chicken contributing only a fraction of that number, the poultry industry in particular wreaks havoc not only on the environment, but also on its contract growers. Contract growers earn on average less than $20,000 a year.

A single Perdue farm generates hundreds of tons of animal manure a year, far beyond what can ever be properly and responsibly used by contract growers to fertilize crops. As a result of all this excess waste, damaging amounts of nutrients and other pollutants are impacting the Bay and other waterways around the country.

Enter Kathy Philips. Kathy and her husband, Jeff, who has taught in Worcester County Maryland for more than 30 years, moved to the Eastern Shore from Silver Spring, Maryland in the late 1970’s. They were both surfers and wanted to spend their lives near the ocean that they love.  Kathy directed the Eastern Surfing Association for 15 years. During this time she and Jeff, who is still an enthusiastic surfer, saw the Bay, as well as their local waterways, continue to deteriorate. As watersport enthusiasts, they spend much of their free time on waterways in Maryland, and they have seen first hand how the Chesapeake Bay, the largest and most productive estuary in the United States, is impacted by the onslaught of factory farm waste. Kathy’s particular focus has been on the Pocomoke River and water quality there. She’s worked tirelessly with the Assateague Coastal Trust (ACT) to protect the Coastal Bays and the Pocomoke from agricultural pollution.  

In 2010, Kathy stepped forward to be a plaintiff in the case brought by Waterkeeper Alliance against Perdue and one of its contract growers, Alan and Kristin Hudson. The suit seeks to put a stop to the pollution found pouring off the farm and hold Perdue liable for the discharges. For several decades, Perdue and other poultry industry integrators have been hiding behind the men and women who accept all of the risk for growing chickens, while Perdue sucks up the profits.

Unfortunately, throughout the nearly three years of litigation, Perdue has been using the contract grower involved in the suit as a “human shield.” Rather than taking responsibility for the chicken waste their business produces, they suck up the profits and hide behind their contract growers. Poultry-processing companies, known as integrators, ruthlessly control every step of chicken production from providing the chicks and feed to monitoring them on an almost daily basis. Contract abuses abound for the growers—Perdue, Tyson and the other integrators use production contracts to keep the cost of raising chickens low and to manage the supply of birds needed in the slaughter plants they own. The integrators don’t invest any capital in the factory farm facilities or equipment necessary for growing birds. Growers assume all of the debt and financial risk for building the warehouse-like barns, while Perdue walks away with the profits.

Perdue’s abuse of contract farmers goes beyond their refusal to take responsibility for their own waste. It goes to unconscionable contracts, economic inequity, inappropriate uses of drugs and horrendous working conditions. Perdue, and the other mega-meat companies like it, is the biggest threat to family farming in the United States and around the world.

When this case was filed in 2010 Perdue was enjoying $4.6 billion in sales while Alan Hudson, the contract grower involved in the litigation, was driving a school bus to make ends meet. If Perdue really cared about contract growers like the Hudsons, they’ve had the opportunity for almost three years now to stand up and say, “This is our waste and our problem.” Instead, they’ve chosen to once more hide behind the false guise of the family farmer and hold the Hudsons out as the only ones responsible for the mess created by Perdue’s own industrial chicken empire. Perdue owns the chickens, the feed, and the profits. The Hudsons, apparently, own Perdue’s waste—and Perdue is fighting hard to keep it that way.

We should all thank Kathy Philips for being brave enough to call Perdue out for their pollution of our waterways.

By Wenonah Hauter

Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

This week, Food & Water Watch and Friends of the Earth filed a joint lawsuit to force the Environmental Protection Agency to preserve the integrity of the Clean Water Act as it turns 40 years old this month. Represented by the Columbia Law School’s Environmental Law Clinic, we are suing for the removal of the water pollution trading provisions that are part of the 2010 plan to clean up the Chesapeake Bay watershed.

This cap-and-trade plan for water, known as the Bay total maximum daily load or TMDL, is being promoted by both the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, both of which view the program in the Bay region as a national model that would be replicated in watersheds across the nation. But if this scheme is allowed to move forward it will allow new and increased pollution discharges into the Chesapeake Bay watershed under a complex system of market-based offsets and pollution trading that we believe is illegal under the Clean Water Act.

Pollution trading violates the fundamental concept that the Clean Water Act is built upon, which is that pollution is illegal and industries don’t have a right to poison our shared waterways. Ironically, this evisceration of the Clean Water Act is taking place as the landmark piece of legislation that was passed during the Nixon Administration is about to have its 40th anniversary. It is built on the premise that we should strive to eliminate water pollution from our lakes, rivers and bays. Water pollution trading schemes are a disastrous substitute for proven means of regulating harmful chemical discharges into our waterways.

And we should be clear that the Clean Water Act (CWA) has been an enormously successful piece of legislation. In 1972, two-thirds of our nation’s waterways were unsafe for fishing. Chemicals and wastewater were indiscriminately dumped into our waterways. Today, according to EPA about one-third of our nation’s waterways are unhealthy. Obviously there is more work to do, but why would we allow such an effective piece of legislation to be replaced by a scheme that essentially legitimizes pollution?

The water pollution trading that is being promoted in the Chesapeake Bay is based on buying and selling unverifiable pollution credits. It turns what is now illegal under the CWA into the right to pollute. It’s essentially an “entitlement” program for the financial services industry and polluters.

The federal plan for the bay that includes trading is based on the total maximum daily load of pollutants that can be discharged and still allow a water body to meet water quality standards set by the states under CWA. These pollutants come from energy facilities, factories and wastewater treatment plants and those harder to control nonpoint sources like many of the Bay’s agricultural operations.

The TMDL is, in the simplest sense, a rationing plan. It seeks to allocate pollution loads to our waterways among the many sources of pollution in the Bay. The TMDL can be an effective tool to reduce pollution, but it must be developed and implemented consistently with the goal to eliminate the biggest threats to the Bay watershed – nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment.

As a practical matter, the trading of pollution credits is inherently fraught with problems.  In this case, EPA is allowing trading without setting clear and enforceable minimum limits on trading activity, including providing safeguards to prevent fictitious or overstated pollution reductions from being used as offsets.

The “pay-to-pollute” trading program allows financial middlemen to identify and purchase nitrogen and phosphorus “credits” from industrial agriculture operations in the watershed that attest to reducing their pollution levels in the future. These unverifiable credits are then aggregated and bundled together, and sold to power plants, wastewater treatment plants and other “point source” polluters who are either unable or simply unwilling to meet their CWA permit limits.

Many states have tried to implement nutrient trading schemes around the country, but there is no documented, successful nonpoint-to-point source trading program implemented in any watershed in the United States.

And, we must look at this trading scheme in context. Rather than regulating pollution, it is part of an on-going effort spurred by the financial services industry of using the market to allocate costs to the environment, rather than using the performance-based indicator of meeting a regulated standard.

But, in the wake of the largest financial crisis in 75 years, one both created and spread by the irresponsible behavior of the financial service sector, the argument that free market-based principles should replace traditional environmental regulation is wrong minded. It represents a financialization of nature and the transferring of the stewardship of our common resources to private business interests. It makes the responsibility of caring for our natural resources secondary to the economic interests of the few.

Leaving the health of the bay to this trading scheme is reckless and it is a recipe for disaster.

By Nisha Swinton

Over 1,000 people were arrested while protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline in front of the White House. Photo by Shadia Fayne Wood.

This past year saw the highly visible airing of concerns surrounding the Keystone XL (KXL) pipeline project. A broad group of citizens opposed KXL, citing the climate change impacts of extracting and transporting Canadian tar sands oil and the (not unlikely) possibility of a toxic tar sands oil spill over the environmentally sensitive Sand Hills region of Nebraska or above the Ogallala aquifer, a critical source of drinking water for the Great Plains.    

In at least a temporary victory for this broad group of concerned citizens, President Obama punted Keystone’s approval. Yet, tar sands oil remains a threat to communities and essential resources, not just along the proposed path of KXL, but in other parts of the country as well. There is reason to believe that New England is especially at risk.

Remember the 2010 Michigan oil spill? If that’s not ringing a bell, here’s a refresher: in July 2010, a pipeline operated by Enbridge Energy Partners — the U.S. branch of Enbridge Inc., Canada’s largest transporter of crude oil — ruptured near Talmadge Creek, a tributary of Michigan’s Kalamazoo River, spilling 1,148,413 gallons of tar sands oil. The National Transportation and Safety Board (NTSB) attributed the spill to pipeline corrosion and “pervasive organizational failures.” Further, NTSB suggested that Enbridge was aware that the section of the pipeline that ultimately burst was vulnerable, and failed to act on the information.

State and local officials were unprepared for what happened when the tar sands oil entered the river. The usual spill response methods — applying skimmers and booms on the surface of the river — were of little use because the heavy, viscous oil sank and spread along the bottom of the river. The spill contaminated some 36 miles of the Kalamazoo River, about 80 miles upstream from where the river empties into Lake Michigan. Fluids used to dilute the tar sands oil had become separated after the spill, meaning that toxic vapors containing benzene and polycyclic hydrocarbons escaped into the air, and thus the heavy oil sank.

According to a sample of Michigan residents, over one third of those living in impacted communities relocated due to local air pollution in the wake of the spill. Many were exposed to toxic vapors and reported troubling neurological, respiratory and gastrointestinal problems.

Now, the same company may have designs on New England. In 2008, there was buzz that the company was pursuing a “Trailbreaker” project that would have run Canadian tar sands oil through the aging Portland-Montreal pipeline, which stretches 236 miles across northern New England from Montreal, Canada to Portland, Maine.

Enbridge now claims it is no longer pursuing “Trailbreaker,” but Enbridge is seeking permission to change the direction of flow ­— from westbound to eastbound ­— of a key section of its pipeline network, potentially to bring tar sands oil east. It seems that the company’s piecemeal approach to bringing this dirtiest of oils east is tailored to avoid public outcry of the scale that has stalled KXL.

New England must be vigilant, and not allow this to happen. A tar sands oil spill along the path of the Portland-Montreal pipeline would be disastrous.

The pipeline crosses many of northern New England’s major rivers including the Missisquoi, Black, Connecticut and Androscoggin. The aging pipeline also passes through the Crooked River watershed, the source of drinking water for one tenth of Maine’s population and a major tributary of Sebago Lake, the source of Portland, Maine’s drinking water. A threat of a spill of tar sands oil would also loom over New Hampshire’s White Mountains, the Missisquoi National Wildlife Refuge, renowned freshwater fisheries and countless other cherished places.

The risk is simply too great. Piping toxic tar sands through New England would be a bad deal for everyone but Enbridge.

By Wenonah Hauter

This ad will appear in the news section of tomorrow’s print edition of the Charlotte Observer. For the full-sized ad, click on the image above.

Dear Governor Cuomo,

True leaders help us forge solutions to difficult problems. And nowhere are new solutions needed more than in our energy sector, because we are currently using dirty fossil fuels at an unsustainable pace. Oil and gas extraction uses and abuses our precious freshwater resources, which are becoming scarcer and more polluted, thanks in large part to our reliance on fossil fuels. It’s a vicious cycle, and we need true solutions.  

But instead, Governor Cuomo, you seem poised to issue regulations that would pave the way for even more dirty energy development—the development of shale gas reserves in New York State through hydraulic fracturing (or fracking). Opening up New York to fracking won’t happen without a fight—one that might cost you the White House in 2016.

When you arrive in Charlotte tomorrow for the Democratic National Convention, you’ll see we took out a full-page ad in the Charlotte Observer to remind you that your decision on fracking will have repercussions way beyond New York, way beyond tomorrow. And we aren’t the only ones that think so. Over 100 grassroots, environmental and community groups nationwide endorsed our ad, all of them telling you that there is no safe fracking, and that the road to the White House is not lined with drilling rigs.

Governor Cuomo, Democrats in your own state have said that drilling could harm your presidential ambitions. Now, at the convention, you’re hearing from progressives around the country that this is an election issue. What will it take for you to listen to your base instead of the oil and gas industry?

People are angry that your administration shared the draft regulations with the oil and gas industry weeks before they were made public. This will remind voters of the time Dick Cheney met with energy officials in 2005, where they developed the so-called Halliburton Loophole, which exempts the oil and gas industry from key federal environmental legislation like the Safe Drinking Water Act and provisions of the Clean Air Act. Backroom deals with the oil and gas industry will not serve you in your pursuit of higher office.

Now, billionaire Michael Bloomberg has given his tacit endorsement of your rumored plan to sacrifice the Southern Tier of New York to the oil and gas industry, so long as New York City isn’t affected. His foundation also gave the Environmental Defense Fund $6 million dollars to pave the way for the development of so-called “safe” fracking, even though we know there is no such thing.

Why is Bloomberg supporting fracking? He says we need to move away from coal, and that wind and solar aren’t viable. This is a classic industry talking point, and it’s a cop-out. As Bill Maher recently said on his show, stating that wind and solar aren’t viable is like saying 100 years ago that cars aren’t going to replace horses.

It might be tempting to take cover behind prominent individuals and groups who have given in to the oil and gas industry’s tired refrain that shale gas development is inevitable. But true leaders look past the naysayers and those who have long since compromised their ideals to work within the game as defined by entrenched political interests. True leaders find real solutions.

So, Governor Cuomo, should you go forward with fracking, Wall Street billionaires and industry-funded non-profits will not provide you the political cover you’ll need to withstand the ire of committed grassroots groups who are fighting the oil and gas industry profiteers. We need leaders who can make the tough decisions that would forge the cleaner energy alternatives we need. Groups across the country are looking at New York to see whether you will provide that leadership or whether you will open New York to fracking. .

Fracking is an issue that is not only widely felt; it is deeply felt. Governor Cuomo, if you frack New York, we will remember in 2016.

By Genna Reed

herbicide-resistant weeds take over tractor

Like a ticking time bomb, the USDA’s GE crop “rocket docket” is on track for approval, which will result in an explosion of new genetically engineered crops. Once the public comment period ends on Sept. 11, the USDA could decide to approve three new GE seeds and advance nine others through to the final step of the process. The most concerning of the bunch – with evidence of adverse agricultural and environmental impacts mounting – are two 2,4-D tolerant soybean, and Monsanto’s dicamba-tolerant soybean. 2,4-D, short for 2,4-Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, was a primary ingredient in Agent Orange, which continues to wreak havoc on human health nearly four decades after it was used in the Vietnam War. 

This month, a study done by the Weed Science Society of America (WSSA) showed that waterhemp in Nebraska has become resistant to 2,4-D. Waterhemp notoriously is one of the most difficult weeds to eradicate in corn and soybean fields in the Midwest. Some individual waterhemp plants have developed resistance to up to four different herbicide families. WSSA’s results indicated that after 10 years of treatment with 2,4-D, even the highest doses of the chemical were unable to control half of the resistant waterhemp plants from one native-grass seed field. Read the full article…

By Mitch Jones

Earlier today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that it is awarding over $7 million in grants to organizations and state agencies across the country to develop water quality trading, or cap-and-trade for nitrogen and phosphorous pollution. Under the guise of controlling pollution, the government is actually trying to give people the option of buying and selling the “right” to pollute.

This is a complete waste of taxpayer dollars.

Water quality trading is nothing new, although the government is pushing to make it the dominant way that we try to control pollution in our waterways. In fact, over the past 20 years, few if any trading schemes have delivered positive results. Delmarva Poultry Industry, Inc., the trade industry for the poultry industry in the Chesapeake Bay watershed, knows the real effect of water quality trading. In their June 2010 newsletter, they described the idea as “a program … to help farmers earn money while providing polluters with the opportunity to increase their pollution to the Chesapeake Bay and its tributaries.” And taxpayers subsidize it all. 

Water quality trading is really just a way for the government to avoid regulating pollution in our waterways while turning over its responsibilities to financial interests. Wall Street bankers are looking for new opportunities to create big bonuses for themselves, and they are turning their sights to our common resources. In awarding $7 million to help make this possible, the USDA is selling out our resources to the Wall Street casino. If you like what they did with the housing market, just wait ‘til you see what they do with our water. 

By Scott Edwards

Scott Edwards, co-director of the Food & Water Justice project

Sadly, irrational legislative proposals coming out of the House have become so commonplace these days that they’re rarely something to write home about. But every so often there’s one that makes such little sense that you just can’t help but scratch your head and set pen to paper if, for nothing else, a little bit of self-administered therapy. Such is the case with the “Farmer’s Privacy Act of 2012,” recently introduced by Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R – W. Va.). The Bill, H.R. 5961, seeks to prevent the Environmental Protection Agency from flying over large-scale livestock operations as part of their effort to enforce the Clean Water Act against some of the biggest polluters of waterways in the country.

Rep. Capito’s effort to ground EPA arises out of some recent grumblings in the Midwest and in West Virginia where the Agency has been conducting flyovers to monitor Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) for water pollution violations. These mega-meat factories amass thousands of animals in small areas to lower production costs and increase integration with meatpackers and chicken processors. These industrial operations have hidden behind the guise of the “family farm” in order to avoid regulation for years. The truth is that meat production in the U.S. is dominated not by family–owned farms, but by giant agribusinesses like Perdue, Smithfield, Tyson and a handful of others. Among the meat industry, four companies control 66% of pork, 58% of chicken and 83% of beef processing. Their lobbyists in DC and throughout the states wield a considerable amount of political influence on both sides of the aisle while the companies profit enormously off the environmental and human health impacts on our communities, and from not paying a fair price to small and independent livestock producers.

Just last month EPA suddenly abandoned its plan to gather even the most basic information from the over 20,000 highly polluting, and largely unregulated, meat factories in the United States. In the preamble to its now discarded proposed information gathering rule, also known as a 308 rule, EPA seemed to be on the right path to finally fulfill its mission to “protect human health and the environment” from the impacts of these facilities. It noted that CAFOs generate around 300 million tons of manure each year, triple the amount of bodily wastes from all the people in the country. Almost all of this waste is held in open lagoons and/or dumped on adjacent lands where it flows into our rivers and seeps into our groundwater. They also confirmed that manure from these massive operations contain more than 40 diseases, including tuberculosis, salmonellosis, infant diarrheal disease and giardiasis, which can be transferred to humans through dirty water. These diseases, the preamble noted, are in addition to the massive amounts of nutrients, heavy metals (including arsenic) and antibiotics that pour into our surface and drinking water supplies on a daily basis from this irresponsible industry.

You would think that this dire, documented list of industry ills would have been enough to warrant some kind of determined Agency response. But the proposed information gathering process was more concerned about “burdens” on the polluters than protecting U.S. citizens. Under its most forceful option, it was only going to require industry to submit information related to the name of the CAFO owner, the location, whether the CAFO had a Clean Water Act permit, the number of animals and the amount of acres of land available for land application of manure to grow crops. Environmental groups around the country submitted comments lambasting EPA for its lackadaisical approach to the data gathering and encouraging them to finally amass the information needed to properly regulate the industry and protect our waterways. As weak as it was though, it apparently was not weak enough to satisfy the White House which, according to rumors, ordered EPA to abandon the plan.

So now EPA isn’t going to gather the information it needs from CAFOs and House politicians are seeking to stop the agency from being able to enforce even the minimal laws under the Clean Water Act to protect our waterways. Capito’s bill won’t allow EPA to fly over CAFOs unless the agency gets written permission from them. In fact, the bill goes so far as to stop EPA from using “aerial or satellite images, regardless of whether the images are publically available.” In other words, EPA can’t even look up a CAFO on Google Earth.

While EPA is charged with enforcing our environmental laws, Rep. Capito wants to stop them from being able to do so by telling them they can’t even go out on patrol. What’s next? Telling town building inspectors that they’re not allowed to drive through communities looking for building code violations? Or how about we tell foot patrol police officers that they can’t walk their beat unless they first get written permission from all the people on the block. Where’s my Pedestrian Privacy Act?

This nonsensical approach to industrial agriculture is not spawned by any “privacy” concerns as the bill’s title suggests. It’s meant to continue to allow polluters to continue their polluting ways. It’s Rep. Capito’s attempt to replace our right to clean water with an industry right to poison our waterways in pursuit of profits. Industrial ag already owns our watersheds as they continue to pollute with immunity; Rep. Capito now wants them to own our airways too. She should be a little more honest about her bill and call it what it really is: the We Don’t Care About Clean Water Act.