What the men didn’t know was that they were about to be swept up in a stunning wave of targeted yet imprecise immigration enforcement. At the time, the Trump administration claimed it was after violent criminals who posed serious threats — so the men, who had no criminal records, were shocked when they were arrested and transferred to Stewart Detention Center, a privately owned ICE facility notorious for allegations of abuse and neglect.

The Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the night’s arrests as a successful collaboration between the sheriff’s investigations unit, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Georgia State Police. The operation’s primary goal, as the sheriff’s office put it in a May 13 press release posted on Facebook, was to serve warrants against 11 people for crimes against children.

Through interviews, press statements, and emails concerning Sarabia and Mendez’s case, The Intercept found a gulf between how the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office presented the operation to the public and what actually happened. Rather than serving existing criminal warrants, local authorities conducted traffic stops, arrested people without licenses, and sent information about the detainees to DHS. Only then, after the men were in custody, did the federal agency issue warrants for their arrest.

Ronald Jordan, a lieutenant at the Colquitt County Sheriff’s Office, told The Intercept in a statement that 19 people were arrested across Moultrie on the night of May 12, and that DHS placed immigration detainers on 13 of them.

“The 13 detainers issued by DHS were received after the subjects were taken into custody,” Jordan wrote.

Georgia State Patrol and DHS did not respond to a request for comment.

“The people we’ve spoken with so far were randomly pulled over or profiled and just arrested on the spot, either for not having a driver’s license or for no charge at all,” said Meredyth Yoon, an attorney with Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta who has been investigating the May 12 operation. “That’s not a targeted operation based on people having outstanding warrants.”

There was some effort to serve existing warrants from DHS, the sheriff’s office wrote in its release. But the operation hit a snag when “information regarding the presence of DHS personnel began circulating on social media,” forcing DHS to end the operation early. 

Rather than abandon their efforts entirely, the sheriff’s office wrote, officers shifted to a “concentrated patrol throughout Colquitt County,” during which they arrested people with charges ranging from child molestation to false imprisonment and methamphetamine possession. 

Sarabia and Mendez did not have any such charges — nor did at least three more men arrested and transferred to ICE custody, Yoon said.

According to Jordan, “Only one person on the original target list wound up being detained during the operation.”

The May 12 operation was mired in secrecy and confusion. Yoon told The Intercept she tried to obtain the Colquitt County Sheriff’s incident reports from that night, but a records clerk said there weren’t any.

“They didn’t write any reports in cases that day where ICE was involved, even in cases where the person was arrested by local police and charged locally with a traffic offense,” Yoon said.

Sarabia and Mendez’s arrest bore the classic signs of a pretextual traffic stop, Yoon said. The state troopers cycled through a series of reasons for pulling the car over, all of which Sarabia denies — he had been swerving, he was on his cellphone, he wasn’t wearing a seatbelt — then finally arrested him on a charge of driving without a license and failure to maintain lane.

Though neither man had a criminal warrant, and Mendez was never charged with a crime, the cops detained both men that night at the crowded Colquitt County Jail. 

“At the briefing before the operation, all deputies and troopers were informed that any traffic stop made as part of the operation would have to [be] based upon probable cause,” Jordan wrote in an email to The Intercept. “Abrahama Mendez-Luna [sic] had no criminal charges which make be [sic] believe he was a passenger in the vehicle.”

Sarabia’s family paid a $900 bond, but instead of being released, he was placed on an ICE hold. Yoon sent a letter with two National Immigration Project lawyers urging the local sheriff to release Mendez. “Neither Georgia nor federal law nor the Constitution provides any authority to hold an individual for DHS who has no detainer and is not charged with any offense,” they wrote. 

It was too late: By the time Colquitt County Sheriff Rod Howell received the letter, Sarabia and Mendez were already in ICE custody, en route to Stewart Detention Center.

In the days following Sarabia and Mendez’s arrests, videos of other farmworkers arrested on their way home from work in Moultrie spread across social media. But at the United Farm Workers Foundation, Sarabia’s arrest in particular raised red flags.

Sarabia has been a leader on farmworker advocacy campaigns for the past two years, speaking out about extreme heat conditions on south Georgia farms. In 2023, he submitted testimony to the Department of Labor as part of the UFW Foundation’s comment on a proposed to improve working conditions for laborers on temporary agricultural visas. (That rule went into effect last year, but the Trump administration suspended enforcement of all its provisions on June 20.)

“We’ve had other leaders that have been vocal in the past, but none like Lorenzo. Lorenzo has been our most known and visible leader so far,” said Alma Salazar Young, Georgia state director at the UFW Foundation, the nonprofit arm of the United Farm Workers Union. “I wouldn’t put it past them to target labor leaders, and especially with Lorenzo being front and center of a campaign for heat regulations.”

Related

“They Actually Had a List”: ICE Arrests Workers Involved in Landmark Labor Rights Case

Young pointed to other immigration enforcement actions this year that have targeted farmworkers and UFW leaders, such as the Border Patrol raids in California’s agricultural Central Valley in January. That operation sparked a Fourth Amendment lawsuit against DHS and Border Patrol, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of the UFW and five Kern County residents. In April, a judge granted the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction and barred Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration arrests in the region. In May, The Intercept reported that ICE had arrested 14 farmworkers in western New York, several of whom had been involved in prominent UFW organizing efforts. 

“We’ve seen a sharp increase this year in immigration enforcement operations that have targeted immigrant workers, especially in rural areas,” said Zenaida Huerta, government affairs coordinator at the UFW Foundation. The backlash against that increase — recent polling shows that less than a quarter of Americans support deporting immigrants who haven’t committed any crimes — appeared to have some effect on the administration’s priorities: On June 12, Trump vowed to stop dragnet roundups of farmworkers. 

Whether the administration adheres to that promise remains to be seen, but it didn’t arrive in time for Abraham Mendez Luna. At an immigration court hearing on June 25, Mendez requested voluntary departure to Mexico, where he’ll be reunited with his wife and children. Since he didn’t receive a deportation order, Mendez hopes his choice will allow him to return to the U.S. one day.

Sarabia, a husband and father of two who has been in the U.S. for nearly a decade, is fighting his deportation. At a recent hearing, the judge agreed to postpone Sarabia’s pleadings until August 19 to allow him more time to find a lawyer.

“Even though he’s not a citizen of the U.S., I do consider him to be a model citizen,” said UFW Foundation’s Young. “He works hard, takes care of his family, and we think he has a pretty good chance of winning his case. But we don’t really know.”

The events in Colquitt County underscore the risks of deputizing state and local police officers to act as immigration enforcement agents, legal advocates told The Intercept. The 287(g) program, which has become increasingly widespread as the Trump administration enacts its mass deportation agenda, offers states and municipalities three models for empowering local law enforcement to carry out immigration operations. Georgia is among the states that have emerged as 287(g) hotspots. 

Government watchdogs have long warned that the 287(g) program lacks oversight policies, making it ripe for abuse. 

Last year, after an undocumented immigrant killed 22-year-old Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia, Republican Gov. Brian Kemp signed a law mandating that local police departments enter into memorandums of agreement with DHS, including through the 287(g) program. 

The Georgia Department of Corrections has held an agreement with DHS since 2020 under the program’s Jail Enforcement Model, which deputizes corrections officers in local jails to identify undocumented immigrants and turn them over to ICE custody. In March, Kemp expanded the state’s collaboration to the Department of Public Safety — this time under the Task Force Model, which allows Georgia State Patrol officers to act as “force multipliers” for ICE. 

Jordan, the lieutenant, said the Colquitt County Sheriff does not have its own 287(g) agreement with DHS, but it acts in accordance with state and federal law.

As those agreements have come into effect, arrests of undocumented immigrants have surged. 

“The Task Force Model is different from jail-based enforcement, because they actually deputize officers to go out into the streets and make arrests,” said Yoon, the Asian Americans Advancing Justice–Atlanta attorney. “We’re still looking into what the training entails, but we’ve been told that it’s a kind of online-based, expedited program — so a little concerning to be deputizing officers to go make immigration arrests with just an online course.”

Tracy Gonzalez, Georgia state director of American Families United, said that the uptick in local law enforcement activities in collaboration with ICE has pushed communities into hiding.

Related

Documenting ICE Agents’ Brutal Use of Force in LA Immigration Raids

“Being undocumented in the U.S doesn’t make you a criminal. It’s a civil violation. It’s no different than getting a traffic ticket,” Gonzalez said. “You have hardworking people that deserve a path to citizenship, and it’s time.” 

Colquitt County is in Georgia’s top region for agricultural production. The estimated 40,000 laborers in the area harvesting food for the rest of Georgia and the United States, working out in the open, are easy targets for ICE raids.

“From California to Georgia, local police departments are increasingly coordinating with DHS and ICE and funneling people into detention through everyday traffic stops or license checkpoints,” said Huerta, the UFW Foundation coordinator. “What we see in this case mirrors what we’re seeing across the country, where farmworkers are being caught in the crosshairs of a system that offers them no protection, no matter how essential they are.”

The post Georgia Police Arrest Farmworkers — Then Get Warrants From DHS appeared first on The Intercept.

The school had said that the students, under disciplinary investigation for participation in sit-in protests earlier this year, had to sign a so-called “Use of Space Agreement” that included a pledge not to protest on law school property if they wanted to be allowed into academic buildings to sit their exams.

“Should you decide not to sign the Use of Space Agreement, you will still be able to take your in-person exams in the law school buildings in which they are scheduled,” Maggie Morrow, the law school’s senior associate director of community standards and processes, wrote in an email obtained by The Intercept. “That would just be the only purpose for which you would have approved access to the law school buildings.”

The 31 law students who received the email were assigned interim “personae non grata,” or PNG, status following peaceful sit-ins on campus on March 4 and April 29.

The school’s new email to students did not offer relief from their broader PNG status; they remained barred from most buildings on campus whether they renounce protests or not.

Related

NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests or Be Barred From Sitting Final Exams

Citing privacy provisions, NYU Law did not respond to specific questions about what serious disciplinary violations the sanctioned students are alleged to have committed or why the school has reversed its decision to bar them from final exams. 

“Universities have the responsibility to ensure that the vast majority of students, who are engaged in studying for and taking final exams, may do so without disruption,” wrote Shonna Keogan, chief communications officer and an assistant dean at NYU Law, in an email to The Intercept. “It is not the case that any student is prohibited from taking in-person exams or accessing student health centers as a result of engaging in protest activity. In cases concerning reports of serious disciplinary violations, some students have been asked to sign a use of space agreement which restates the Law School’s policy prohibiting disruption during the reading and exam period.” 

The letter sent to PNG students with the “Use of Space Agreement” reiterates the total ban from law school buildings with the exception of housing and health centers. It goes on to say, “The following additional exceptions will be granted subject to your signed consent to the conditions of the attached Use of Space agreement.” If students sign, they will be granted “Access to Furman Hall and Vanderbilt Hall for the following purposes related to academic requirements ONLY” — with “in-person exams” listed as one of the reasons.

Keogan also did not address whether students will still have to sign the Use of Space Agreement in order to access academic buildings for the additional exam-related activities outlined in the document, including undertaking review sessions with faculty, printing outlines and notes, and accessing designated rooms for take-home exams. 

On May 5, a group of students and alumni from NYU and Columbia Law School rallied in the rain outside of NYU Law’s Vanderbilt Hall to demand that the school reinstate the PNG students’ full access to campus.

“I think law students across the country are talking about this,” said a first-year student at Columbia Law who helped organize Monday’s protest and asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution. They pointed to a public call to action put out by Harvard University’s Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine coalition as one example. 

“I think this is part of a growing trend of repression, and what it shows is that there’s no level of protesting a genocide that will be respected,” the student said. “I think it shows the importance of standing in solidarity with all students protesting to end the genocide.”

A current NYU law student who didn’t participate in the sit-ins and was not barred from exams said, “We’re at a law school. We’re literally taught to uphold the rule of law, which is in large part founded on notions of due process and freedom of speech.” 

“The administration can’t get themselves out of this mess through these draconian forms of punishment,” the student said. “I feel like the only way out of this is by actually addressing the concerns of the students and recognizing that what students are asking for is reasonable. The only way out is divestment.”

The post NYU Law About-Face: Students Can Take Exams Without Swearing Off Protests appeared first on The Intercept.

“You may not participate in any protest activity or disruptive activity on Law School property,” says the so-called “Use of Space Agreement” sent to the students, which explicitly lays out conditions for being allowed to return to key campus buildings during the school’s “exam period.”

The law students, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid further repercussions from the school, are accused of participating in sit-ins, a time-honored form of nonviolent demonstration that is allowed according to NYU policy. The sit-ins on March 4 and April 29 took place, respectively, at the school’s Bobst Library and outside the office of the law school dean.

“What we’ve seen is a complete violation of our campus norms.”

Barring the students from campus and demanding they refrain from protesting represents a dramatic escalation against NYU students involved in demonstrations against Israel’s war on Gaza — breaking with school policy and upending precedents for disciplinary procedures, said seven of the PNG students who spoke with The Intercept, as well as other NYU students and faculty.

“What we’ve seen is a complete violation of our campus norms,” said Andrew Ross, a sociology professor who was himself barred from campus buildings in December before the school reversed the decision three weeks later. “If you take a step backward and see the walled-off campus spaces and heavily patrolled entrances to buildings, the uniformed security personnel everywhere, this advanced security infrastructure, and all these new rules that have been established on the fly regarding speech and conduct — this is a very, very exceptional violation of every kind of campus norm that we were accustomed to.”

In a statement, Shonna Keogan, a spokesperson for NYU Law School and an assistant dean, said the school was acting in accordance with established policies.

“Protest activity, while permitted, is subject to time, place, and manner restrictions, and must not interfere with the educational activities of other community members or school operations,” said Keogan. “It is not the case that any student is prohibited from taking in-person exams or accessing student health centers as a result of engaging in protest activity.”

“Vague and Arbitrary”

According to emails to the students obtained by The Intercept, they are barred from campus while under investigation for failing to comply with directives from public safety, including to leave the areas of their sit-ins, and of disruptive conduct. NYU conduct policies say any protests at libraries are disruptive, but the law students pointed out that they were protesting outside NYU President Linda Mills’s office on the top floor of Bobst Library.

“The school’s policies are vague and arbitrary enough to be wielded in any situation against any kind of speech the university looks down upon, particularly pro-Palestine speech,” said a law student who received a PNG notice. “The school claims protests are banned in the library, which is conveniently where the main administrative offices, including the Office of the President, are located.”

While at the protests, the students were handed flyers quoting from the “failure to comply” and “disruptive conduct” rules, according to photos reviewed by The Intercept.

“The school explicitly outlines sit-ins as permitted,” said a second student. “But as soon as they don’t like the sit-in or protest happening, they tell people to stop and, when they don’t, they then hand people policies on ‘failure to comply’ with orders. So, in essence they are communicating that they can immediately make any protest they want a violation of the rules based on whether they are amenable to the content.”

“No site or forum is acceptable to the university when it comes to pro-Palestine speech.”

NYU students and faculty pointed to past protest actions that did not result in similar repressive sanctions as evidence that pro-Palestine organizers are being disproportionately punished because of their political beliefs. In 2015, for instance, a group of students staged a die-in in the library over Black Lives Matter but did not face disciplinary consequences.

That same year, students staged a sit-in on the 12th floor of Bobst calling for the university to divest from fossil fuels. Students were granted a meeting with board of trustee members after the sit-in — and the school eventually divested from fossil fuels in 2023.

Related

A Well-Connected NYU Parent Is Trying to Get Students Deported

“The divestment sit-in at the same location in Bobst led to actual divestment from fossil fuels,” said the first PNG student. “There have been dozens of sit-ins in campus libraries since October of 2023, with no punishment meted out. Yet it seems the proximity of our action to the president’s office, and the clarity of our demands, made the university more eager to apply the rules to our group.”

“The truth is that no site or forum is acceptable to the university when it comes to pro-Palestine speech.”

The Law Student Sit-Ins

The PNG law students were themselves protesting NYU’s decision to suspend a group of 13 undergraduate students and three graduate students in December. The suspended students had participated in a sit-in protest at the university president’s office in Bobst Library demanding that NYU divest from Israel. For months, NYU’s administration stonewalled organizers who sought to intervene on behalf of the suspended students. Then, on March 4, the law students staged their own peaceful 8-hour sit-in at Bobst in support of the suspended students.

Later that day, Craig Jolley, the associate dean of students at NYU, emailed 28 law students who had allegedly participated in the sit-in to say that the protest violated university conduct policy and they had been referred to NYU School of Law’s executive committee for formal disciplinary review. The email noted the students were prohibited from accessing any university locations for any purpose aside from attending a scheduled class or entering an assigned residence hall.

Students barred from campus after the March 4 protest said the swipe function on their IDs was disabled as soon as they received Jolley’s email. They immediately began encountering issues accessing their assigned residences, health services, gym, and religious centers. Among the group were Muslim students who were denied access to the NYU Islamic Center during Ramadan.

On March 7, Jolley clarified that the barred students should be permitted to access health centers, but with ID swipe disabled, students said access was permitted on an ad hoc basis by campus security officers. After they were stopped and questioned by campus security, at least one barred student missed an appointment for gender-affirming care at the health center — an appointment granted only after getting off a monthslong waitlist. On March 21, the law school notified PNG students they could now access religious centers, provided they email the school outlining specific dates, times, and information on their intended religious practice.

On April 29, a separate group of law school students who had not received PNG notices staged another sit-in, this time outside the law school dean’s office. Two days later, on May 1, three of those law students received PNG notices — and all 31 PNG law students received emails from the school demanding that they renounce protesting so that they would be allowed to return to the campus facilities and sit final exams.

“Making Up Its Own Rules”

The law school’s disciplinary process has historically been autonomous from the broader university, with more “due process” baked into its policies. The law school, nonetheless, appears to not have followed even its own rules in the case of the pro-Palestine protesters: The students say they were never served with the required formal complaints, and the 20-day window for the university to investigate the alleged misconduct expired more than a month ago.

“There’s tremendous inconsistency across the schools, and sometimes even within the schools, about how things are done, and the law school does seem to be making up its own rules right now about how things are done,” said Sonya Posmentier, an English professor at NYU who, along with Ross, was one of two tenured faculty members who received PNG sanctions related to the December sit-in. “Universities have started to make this very erratic, on-the-fly, punitive response to protest really, really commonplace. At this point, there is not one place on campus ‘private property’ where students can protest without fear of pretty draconian repercussions.”

“At this point, there is not one place on campus ‘private property’ where students can protest.”

On April 20, attorneys for some of the law students pressed law school administrators on the decision to impose PNG restrictions — which, as an ostensibly interim measure, violates NYU law school requirements for due process, the students’ lawyers said. The lawyers also said administrators had failed to adhere to the law school policy’s timeline. In response, according to an email exchange obtained by The Intercept, a lawyer with NYU’s general counsel said that the school was conducting only a “preliminary factual inquiry” to determine whether any rule had been violated and determine if a formal or informal disciplinary process was required. According to a policy guide, formal disciplinary processes are reserved for “severe violation of university or Law School policy,” such as “serious violations of academic integrity or threats or acts that imminently endanger members of the community.”

William Miller, the lawyer with the general counsel’s office, wrote that the preliminary investigation into what kind of process to undertake obviates the objection: “The 20-day timeline that you reference in your letter is therefore not applicable.” (Miller did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

Miller said in the email that NYU had retained the firm Latham & Watkins to assist in the investigation of the PNG students — one of the Big Law titans that cut a deal with the Trump administration to carry out millions of dollars of pro bono work.

The Dean’s Office

Another group of law students met with NYU Law School Dean Troy McKenzie on April 28 to demand explanations for their fellow students’ PNG status and raise concerns that the school’s partnership with Latham & Watkins could potentially imperil pro-Palestine students. Students said they felt they were granted the interview because they did not request it under the auspices of Law Students for Justice in Palestine and instead focused the intent of the meeting on student disciplinary proceedings.

Even so, the students said McKenzie did not offer answers.

“He abdicated any sort of agency he had in the decision-making process,” said one law student at the meeting. “We said, ‘We hear you, what can you offer us?’ And he said absolutely nothing.”

That’s when law students decided to stage the second sit-in outside of McKenzie’s office on April 29. It lasted around four hours. (McKenzie did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)

On May 1, some students who participated in the second sit-in received notice that they were being investigated for “particularly egregious” conduct. The students bristled at having their conduct called “egregious,” noting that the protesters left the office area before 5 p.m. when it closed. Another three students were assigned PNG status.

Related

Trump Administration Texted College Professors’ Personal Phones to Ask If They’re Jewish

The 31 total PNG students then received an email that their interim access restrictions would continue unless they signed the “Use of Space” agreement that said they cannot access the academic buildings where their final exams are held unless they pledge not to participate in protests at the law school. Exams, which count for 100 percent of a student’s final grade, start Monday.

One law student and pro-Palestine organizer who was declared PNG in March noted that some students’ pro bono work — including deportation defense and civil rights lawsuits — is carried out in a building that they are now unable to access unless they sign the agreement.

“Not being able to put our full energy and do client meetings,” said the student, “as an official legal services provider is not only impeding our ability to comply with our professional responsibilities as legal representatives but also putting our clients’ lives at risk.”

Targeting Leaders?

As of May 2, nearly 300 NYU students, alumni, and community members, as well as groups like the graduate student union, NYU Law Latinx Law Students Association, and NYU Law Jews for Palestine, signed an open letter to the administration expressing concerns over the school’s indefinite use of PNG status with no due process.

Ross, the sociology professor, noted that the use of disciplinary actions seems to be part of a national strategy to target leaders in pro-Palestine movements on campus.

“The point of the suspensions is to take out student leaders, to withdraw them from the field of deployment, and they’ve been very successful at doing this,” said Ross. “At NYU, the ranks of student leaders have really been depleted by this strategy over the last year.”

“While some of the responses have been inconsistent and seemingly random,” he said, “I do think they have been aimed overall at targeting the leaders.”

Correction: May 3, 2025, 6:14 p.m. ET
This story has been updated to correct an errant reference to which students recceived May 1 letters accusing them of “particularly egregious” conduct; it was not the three who received PNG notices.

Update: May 5, 2025
This story has been updated to include a statement from New York University received after publication.

The post NYU Demands Law Students Renounce Protests or Be Barred From Sitting Final Exams appeared first on The Intercept.

Nestled deep in the woods of the Missouri Ozarks, Draeger was used to seeing an explosion of weeds and shrubs in the warm months at the home he’s shared with his wife, Brenda, for more than 30 years. He didn’t think much of using Roundup to keep them at bay.

Then he was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. According to a lawsuit filed by the Draegers in 2022, Jimmy had a chemotherapy port installed in his chest, developed neuropathy in his hands and feet, and lost control of his bowels, coordination, and sexual function. He became clinically depressed, vision-impaired, and unable to bathe without Brenda’s help.

Related

The Playbook for Poisoning the Earth

Monsanto, the agrochemical company behind Roundup, was to blame for Jimmy’s lymphoma, the Draegers contended. In November 2023, a jury agreed. Bayer, which acquired Monsanto in 2018, was ordered to pay the Draegers and two other plaintiffs a combined $1.56 billion in damages. (A judge later cut the payout for punitive damages, reducing the total awards to $611 million.)

The Draegers’ case is one of more than 160,000 Roundup lawsuits filed against Monsanto or Bayer since 2015, when the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer classified glyphosate, a key ingredient in Roundup, as “probably carcinogenic to humans.”

Most of the lawsuits hinged on failure-to-warn claims: the allegation that Monsanto, and later Bayer, failed to adequately notify customers of glyphosate’s potential cancer risk. Bayer has paid roughly $11 billion to settle these claims while denying any wrongdoing.

Now, the Environmental Protection Agency is considering a Bayer-backed rule that could significantly curtail the lawsuits.

Enter the EPA

Unlike the WHO, the EPA — which, headed by Trump appointee Lee Zeldin, has already announced massive regulatory rollbacks — does not consider glyphosate to be a likely human carcinogen.

“EPA’s cancer classification is consistent with most other international expert panels and regulatory authorities,” EPA Associate Administrator for Public Affairs Molly Vaseliou said in a statement to The Intercept. “EPA does not agree with IARC’s conclusion that glyphosate is ‘probably carcinogenic to humans.’”

Last August, 11 industry-friendly red states, led by Nebraska and Iowa, submitted a 436-page petition asking the agency to amend its labeling rules under the Federal Insecticide, Rodenticide, and Fungicide Act, or FIFRA. The proposed rule change would explicitly prohibit states from labeling pesticides and herbicides with warnings about cancer, birth defects, and reproductive harm if those notices contradict the EPA’s risk assessment.

The states made clear that their ultimate goal is to thwart future lawsuits against pesticide manufacturers. Their petition argued that recent court rulings have created a “gap in FIFRA’s regulatory framework” that the proposed rule change would plug.

In January, in a move initiated by the Biden administration, the EPA took a first step of accepting public comment on the rule-making petition, with a deadline of March 24 — though this step is exploratory and does not mean a new rule will be issued. Still, the EPA’s decision could have disastrous consequences if Donald Trump’s second administration is as friendly to the chemical industry as it was in his first.

“It’s telling of the lengths that pesticide manufacturers will go to make sure that nothing interferes with their profit margins,” said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity. “There’s a reality that the industry itself generates much of the data, and they say it’s safe, and then EPA approves that determination.”

“If we’re not limited to the industry-created data set,” he said, “they see it as a larger threat to their ability to control the universe of science and data that go into the pesticide regulatory review process.”

Warning Labels

The EPA petition follows in the path of other efforts at both the state and federal level to shield Bayer from civil liability.

Last year, state legislatures in Florida, Idaho, Iowa, and Missouri introduced bills that would make pesticide manufacturers immune to failure-to-warn lawsuits if their product labels match EPA assessments. And House Republicans introduced similar language in the discussion draft of the 2024 Farm Bill.

Though all the bills failed, allies of the chemical industry are expected to redouble their efforts this year. Advocates expect at least 21 states to introduce pesticide immunity legislation in 2025. The Florida Senate already has.

Bayer itself bankrolled the push, spending nearly $8.5 million to lobby the federal government in 2024, including to advocate for the “uniformity of pesticide labeling” under FIFRA.

FIFRA already prohibits the sale of “misbranded” pesticides, which includes requiring state health warnings to conform with EPA-approved labels.

“We are very pleased to see the EPA and several state Attorneys General take this step to reinforce that any state labeling requirements inconsistent with EPA’s own findings and conclusions regarding human health, such as a pesticide’s likelihood to cause cancer, constitute misbranding,” Bayer said in a statement to The Intercept. “It reinforces the urgent need for a solution to this issue created by the litigation industry.”

The raft of litigation over Roundup, however, has not always ended badly for Bayer. Federal appeals courts disagree on whether the FIFRA misbranding statute trumps state laws that may require manufacturers to go farther in adequately warning consumers about their products.

The 9th and 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled in plaintiffs’ favor in recent years, finding that failure-to-warn claims against Bayer in state courts are consistent with FIFRA’s intent; the 3rd Circuit, meanwhile, found the opposite. The split could set the stage for a Supreme Court battle.

The EPA rule change proposed in the states’ petition aims to remedy the circuit split by explicitly classifying labels as “misbranded” if they include health warnings that exceed the EPA’s risk assessment.

The agency’s position on glyphosate has been mired in controversy for decades. In 1991, the EPA mysteriously changed its classification from “suggestive evidence” of glyphosate’s carcinogenic potential to “no evidence.”

Related

Emails Show Monsanto Orchestrated GOP Effort to Intimidate Cancer Researchers

Since then, documents released in Roundup litigation have shown Monsanto cozying up to EPA regulators, ghostwriting scientific papers on glyphosate’s safety, and actively working to discredit journalists and WHO.

In 2015 — the same year the international body’s cancer bureau classified glyphosate as a probable human carcinogen — The Intercept reported that the EPA had overwhelmingly used Monsanto’s own research to conclude that glyphosate was not an endocrine disruptor.

In 2016, an internal EPA analysis noted an association between glyphosate exposure and an increased risk of non-Hodgkin lymphoma in four epidemiological studies, The Intercept reported. The EPA analysis was never made public. Instead, the agency drew from industry-backed studies in 2016 to conclude that glyphosate was “not likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

“The industry itself generates and pays for much of this data, so that is very different of course than peer-reviewed, hypothesis-based, independent science,” said Hartl, of the Center for Biological Diversity. “That creates an inherent tension and conflict of interest.”

“EPA’s long-standing practice is to seek input from a variety of stakeholders and use the best available science,” said Vaseliou, the EPA public affairs official. “EPA evaluates information from all kinds of sources — pesticide companies, other governments, academia, and the published scientific literature.”

Related

How Pesticide Companies Corrupted the EPA and Poisoned America

In 2020, during the periodic pesticide review process mandated by FIFRA, the EPA issued an interim decision to reregister glyphosate with a risk assessment that did not identify “any human health risks of concern.” But in June 2022, in a separate case from the FIFRA ruling, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals vacated the EPA’s assessment, noting the decision had been made without following the agency’s own cancer guidelines, and ordered the EPA to reevaluate its findings.

The new analysis is still forthcoming.

“In accordance with the court’s decision related to human health, EPA is currently updating its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate to better explain its findings and include the current relevant scientific information,” said Vaseliou. “EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same.”

Trump’s MAHA Promise

How the EPA decides to proceed with the glyphosate petition will in many ways be a canary in the coal mine for this administration’s approach to chemical regulation.

While Trump’s first term was marked by severe deference to industry, his recent rhetoric has promoted Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again,” or MAHA, agenda.

In a February executive order, the president pledged to eliminate “undue industry influence” and “establish a framework for transparency and ethics review in industry-funded projects” — the same reforms that advocates have long said would strengthen the EPA’s glyphosate review.

Kennedy is a longtime critic of the pesticide industry; in an October YouTube video, he railed against the country’s agriculture policy for “tilting the playing field in favor of more chemicals, more herbicides, more insecticides” and promised to “ban the worst agricultural chemicals that are already prohibited in other countries.” As a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council, a leading nonprofit environmental law group, he took Monsanto to task, helping secure a multimillion-dollar settlement in a Roundup cancer lawsuit in 2018.

There are indications, of course, that the MAHA promise is a smokescreen.

In 2017, Trump’s EPA rejected a proposed ban on chlorpyrifos, a pesticide linked to increased cancer risk. He appointed former American Chemistry Council executive Nancy Beck to oversee toxic chemical regulation. Beck is once again slated to take a senior EPA position; Lynn Dekleva, another ACC lobbyist who fought the EPA’s efforts to regulate formaldehyde, will now run the agency’s Office of Chemical Safety and Pollution Prevention.

Vaseliou said, “Your questions regarding Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva are insulting and unfounded. This is yet another question based on false accusations that left propaganda also known as media take as gospel. President Trump made a fantastic choice in selecting Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva to work at EPA.”

On March 12, Zeldin, Trump’s EPA chief, announced the agency would begin rolling back 31 environmental regulations — “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen,” he said — including rules aimed at preventing disasters at hazardous chemical facilities and restricting the industrial pollution of mercury.

“It strikes me that there’s a very significant tension between what the president has promised relating to the overuse of pesticides in this country versus the other elements of his own administration that reflexively do what industry wants no matter what,” said Hartl. “He’s going to have to decide who he’s going to let down: whether it’s his own supporters that believe in his MAHA agenda or his industry benefactors.”

The post Trump EPA’s Next Move: Making It Harder to Sue for Getting Cancer from Roundup appeared first on The Intercept.

As of January 8, the Palisades Fire is 0 percent contained. Two additional wildfires, the Hurst Fire and the Eaton Fire, are also currently at zero containment as they scorch greater Los Angeles County, burning thousands of acres, destroying over 1,100 structures, and killing at least five people. As hundreds of firefighters race to stop the spread, gusting Santa Ana winds and a landscape desiccated by a bone-dry winter — an anomaly linked to broader climate change trends — aren’t the only obstacles the LAFD is facing. 

In June, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass signed an adopted $12.8 billion budget that cut the fire department’s funding by more than $17.5 million, or around 2 percent of the previous year’s budget of $837 million. It was the second-largest departmental operating cut to come out of the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from the majority of city departments — but not the police. The Los Angeles Police Department received a funding bump of nearly $126 million.

The mayor’s initial budget proposal included a $23 million decrease for the fire department — a more drastic reduction than what the LA City Council finally approved. (The outdated $23 million figure circulated widely on social media after the wildfires this week.) The fire department operating budget is about a third of what the LAPD is allocated.

“What is currently happening and unfolding is what we have been warning about,” said Ricci Sergienko, a lawyer and organizer with People’s City Council LA. “The consistent defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences, and these elected officials do actually have blood on their hands. The city is unprepared to handle this fire, and Los Angeles shouldn’t be in that position.”

Other departments that received major cuts included the Bureau of Street Services, the Bureau of Sanitation, and General Services, for an overall budget decrease of nearly $250 million. Funds for rental support, homelessness services, and street lighting were also reduced. 

Only three city councilmembers — Hugo Soto-Martínez, Nithya Raman, and Eunisses Hernandez — voted against the budget last May, noting in a press release that it allocated tens of millions of dollars to fund LAPD positions that would likely remain vacant. That’s because the LAPD has struggled to recruit officers in recent years, even as it continues to request and receive funding for those empty positions.

Since The Intercept and local news outlets reported that the fiscal-year LA fire budget declined by $17.6 million, elected officials have pushed back. LA City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield disputed the budget cuts, telling Politico that the fire department in fact received a $50 million increase in funding this year. The new funds he referenced appear to come from an agreement reached with the firefighters’ union in November for raises and benefits, but are not linked to increased staffing. Those funds have not yet been distributed, according to City Controller Kenneth Mejia. (Blumenfield’s office did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.)

Los Angeles Fire Chief Kristin Crowley tells @NorahODonnell the department was "limited to a certain factor" after a recent $17.6 million budget cut. She had recently warned that cuts would hamper their ability to respond to large-scale emergencies and said the department "did… pic.twitter.com/wK989fEn3q

— CBS Evening News (@CBSEveningNews) January 10, 2025

A spokesperson for Mejia said that the LAFD budget cuts last June included a reduction in sworn payroll, reduced funds for operating supplies, and the elimination of 58 positions. In December, weeks after the new union contract was signed, the Board of Fire Commissioners sent a report to Bass and the City Council outlining how the funding cuts in the budget had adversely impacted the department’s crucial services.

An LAPD spokesperson reached by The Intercept said that they could not respond to questions by the time of publication.

While it’s unclear that any amount of staffing could have fully contained the fires raging across Los Angeles this week, the call for help — and the firefighters traveling in to assist from across California and nearby states — show that any additional capacity in place before the fires sparked could have helped.

The controversial cuts were ostensibly made to help close the city’s budget deficit. Critics, however, have noted that defunding the fire department is a recipe for disaster as the climate crisis brings increasingly devastating fires to the drought-stricken region.

“The Los Angeles City Fire Department (LAFD) is facing unprecedented operational challenges due to the elimination of critical civilian positions and a $7 million reduction in Overtime Variable Staffing Hours,” wrote Fire Chief Kristin Crowley wrote in the December Board of Fire Commissioners report to city officials. “These budgetary reductions have adversely affected the Department’s ability to maintain core operations, such as technology and communication infrastructure, payroll processing, training, fire prevention, and community education.”

The LAFD’s Fire Prevention Bureau, for instance, had six of its roles cut and its overtime hours reduced. Crowley wrote that the decrease in overtime hours created an “inability to complete required brush clearance inspections, which are crucial for mitigating fire risks in high-hazard areas.”

While most departments received cuts, LAPD’s budget continues to bloat, and Mejia has pointed to overspending on police liability claims as one major source of the city’s deficit. The city spent more than double its annual liability payouts budget in the first six months of this fiscal year, with the LAPD leading the spending at more than $100 million in legal settlements. Recent payouts include a $17.7 million settlement with the family of a mentally disabled man who was fatally shot by an off-duty officer inside a Costco, and a $11.8 million payout to a man who sustained a traumatic brain injury in a car accident when an LAPD detective ran a red light.

Diana Chang, Mejia’s communications director, highlighted two forces that are driving a rise in liability payouts, most of which are made from the city’s General Fund rather than department-specific appropriations. Departments are either “not held accountable for liabilities they give rise to,” Chang wrote, or they are “underfunded / understaffed and cannot keep up with the necessary demands and needs of the City.”

Sergienko, of People’s City Council LA, bristled at the use of taxpayer money to fund police abuse settlements. “We’re paying for state-sanctioned violence instead of having money to deal with the climate crisis,” he said. “We just give more money to the police, who then end up costing us more money, due to all of these settlements. It’s a never-ending loop.”

Looking ahead, the LAPD has already requested another increase for the 2025-26 fiscal year. In November, the LA Board of Police Commissioners approved a spending package that included a request for an additional $160.5 million from the city’s budget — an increase of more than 8 percent. Bass is currently reviewing the proposal; she’s expected to unveil the city’s next budget plan in late April.

Bass’s office, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment, has publicly clashed with Mejia over his criticism of the city budget. Last spring, after Mejia called the deductions to public services “short-sighted,” Bass spokesperson Zach Seidl dismissed the remarks as “theatrical exaggeration and doomsday projections.” 

For many Angelenos, that doomsday is now here. The fires burning across the county are already the most destructive in modern LA history, forcing more than 80,000 evacuations with no signs of abating. Whole blocks in the Palisades are leveled. The Eaton fire is eating its way through Altadena, Pasadena and the surrounding communities, taking at least five lives so far.

Related

Stuck in the Smoke as Billionaires Blast Off

Los Angeles is no stranger to wildfires, but a January disaster is unusual. Studies show that climate change is contributing to longer, more destructive fire seasons. Still, in 2020, LA’s then-Mayor Eric Garcetti cut another $500,000 in funds set aside for a Climate Emergency Mobilization Office.

“The impact of this catastrophic event will be felt by our community well past today, but we hope that our City’s coordinated efforts will provide assistance to ensure the smoothest recovery possible,” Chang wrote in a statement. “As always, we support putting resources and meaningful investments toward saving lives through emergency preparedness, wildfire prevention, and serious climate action, and encourage the City’s decisionmakers to prioritize these resources and investments.”

Update: January 10, 2025
The headline of this story has been updated to specify how the city budget cuts affected the fire department. Additional material in the story describes new funds designated to the fire department from a general fund in November for raises and benefits, five months after LAFD’s operating budget was cut by $17.6 million.

The post LA Budgeted Money For Cop Jobs While Cutting Fire Department Positions. Now the City Is Burning. appeared first on The Intercept.

As Hurricane Helene unleashed a torrential downpour over Western North Carolina, Nick, whose story was relayed by a relative and who requested to go by his first name for fear of retribution, realized his single-occupancy cell in the state prison had begun to flood. Then he realized that his toilet no longer flushed.

“My husband told me this morning he’s going to have to go see a therapist because of the things that happened in there.”

For the next five days, more than 550 men incarcerated at Mountain View suffered in cells without lights or running water, according to conversations with the family members of four men serving sentences at the facility, as well as one currently incarcerated man. Until they were transferred to different facilities, the prisoners lost all contact with the outside world.

As nearby residents sought refuge from the storm, the men were stuck in prison — by definition, without the freedom to leave — in close quarters with their own excrement for nearly a week from September 27 until October 2.

“My husband told me this morning he’s going to have to go see a therapist because of the things that happened in there,” Bridget Gentry told The Intercept. “He said, ‘We thought we were going to die there. We didn’t think anybody was going to come back for us.’”

Family members told The Intercept that their loved ones were forced to defecate in plastic bags after their toilets filled up with feces, stowing the bags in their cells until the North Carolina Department of Adult Correction finally evacuated the facility on Wednesday evening.

Related

Video: Climate and Punishment

“There were some minor roof leaks during the storm, but no flooding. The buildings held up extremely well during the storm. Water and electrical utilities that serve the prisons and the communities around them were severely damaged,” said Keith Acree, the head of communications at NCDAC. “When it became apparent that power and water outages would be long-term, we made the decisions to relocate offenders.”

Acree said the generator at Mountain View provided electric power to “essential systems”: “Every single light fixture and outlet is not powered, but there is some lighting and power in every area.” 

He confirmed that incarcerated people went to the bathroom in plastic bags. “Some offenders did defecate in plastic bags,” he said. “That was a solution they devised on their own.”

Loved ones of men incarcerated at Mountain View claimed food rations were scarce, amounting to four crackers for breakfast, a cup of juice or milk, and two pieces of bread with peanut butter for lunch and dinner. Potable drinking water did not arrive for several days. (“The facilities did not run out of food or water,” said Acree, adding that three meals a day were provided along with bottled water and buckets for flushing toilets.)

On October 3, the NCDAC announced it had evacuated a total of more than 2,000 incarcerated people from five facilities in flood-ravaged Western North Carolina, relocating them further east. “All offenders are safe,” stated the press release.

“We had to stay in a six by nine foot cell with feces in the toilet and the room smelling bad,” said Sammy Harmon Jr., a man incarcerated at Mountain View. He told The Intercept he began to develop sores on his legs due to lack of sanitation. 

“I wasn’t doing too good,” he said, “going a week without a shower or water to use the toilet.” 

Family members of the men at Mountain View detailed a slow, confusing, and inequitable response to the devastation wrought by Hurricane Helene. 

The NCDAC’s website says it began to relocate people from a minimum-security women’s prison in Swannanoa and a women’s substance abuse treatment center in Black Mountain on September 30. 

Meanwhile, just half a mile down the road from Mountain View, more than 800 men at Avery-Mitchell Correctional Institution also faced flooding and water outages. They were relocated on October 1, a day before Mountain View. (Craggy Correctional Institution in Asheville was evacuated on October 2, after days of silence from the NCDAC, but did not suffer as dire conditions as the other prisons, according to family members of people incarcerated there.)

“Facilities were prioritized for transfer based on the level of storm impacts to each facility and the information we had about expected restoration of water and power,” said Acree, the state prison system spokesperson. “Avery Mitchell was prioritized above Mountain View due to the nature of its housing areas” — dormitory versus single-cell housing, respectively. “Staff felt that maintaining safety and security in a single cell environment could be maintained effectively for longer than in the open dorms.”

Wendy Floyd, whose fiancé is incarcerated at Avery-Mitchell, said the men lacked drinking water until a delivery arrived by helicopter on Sunday night. The water rations were paltry, Floyd said: “It was basically decide whether you want to drink the water or if you want to wash yourself.”

Avery-Mitchell’s generator kept the power on, but Floyd said that in the absence of running water, the men were also forced to defecate in plastic bags. 

“The conditions that residents in Western North Carolina are currently coping with are much more dire than what offenders in the two Spruce Pine prisons experienced,” Acree wrote. “The populations of the two Spruce Pine prisons are extremely fortunate to now be relocated and safe. That’s so much more than many others in western NC have right now.”

A Two-Prison Town

Spruce Pine, where Mountain View and Avery-Mitchell are located, is one of the many small Appalachian towns decimated by flooding from Hurricane Helene. The most deadly hurricane to hit the U.S. mainland since Katrina, Helene’s death toll has surpassed 200 and is expected to climb in coming weeks, as rescue crews strive to locate hundreds of missing people. 

In the wake of the devastation, dozens of major news reports have highlighted how the flooding of Spruce Pine could impact its quartz mines and disrupt the global microchip industry — but the town’s incarcerated population has gone entirely overlooked.

Family members described nearly a week of a harrowing communications blackout, as they scoured online groups, emailed the governor, and repeatedly called officials to determine whether their loved ones had survived the hurricane and its aftermath. The NCDAC began posting general updates on its website on September 29, though family members felt the communications were insufficient and vague.

Stephanie Luffman said she began leaving comments on NCDAC’s Facebook page, begging for an update on her partner’s whereabouts. 

“I feel like the NCDAC wasn’t going to do anything until I started raising hell,” she said. She considered paying someone in the area to take drone photos of Mountain View, just so she could know if it was still standing. 

“I tried calling everyone in the world,” said Melanie Walters, whose 26-year-old son is incarcerated at Mountain View. Walters said that when she finally managed to reach the voicemail of NCDAC Secretary Todd Ishee, it instructed callers to only leave messages regarding emergencies, not inquiries about missing prisoners. 

“How dare he — it is an emergency when I don’t know where my son is for a week,” Walters said. She eventually learned from Facebook that somebody in the area had seen buses leaving the prison and figured, “Oh thank God, it’s got to be my son.”

Loved ones of the incarcerated also noted their frustration surged when they saw NCDAC’s announcement that Avery-Mitchell had been evacuated first, without any updates addressing the status of Mountain View.

“Avery-Mitchell, you could literally throw a rock and hit it from Mountain View, they’re on the same street,” said Gentry. 

While Mountain View and Avery-Mitchell are both medium-security facilities, Mountain View requires prisoners to stay locked in single cells for up to 23 hours a day; Avery-Mitchell is dormitory-style.

“I just think they didn’t want to deal with the prisoners at Mountain View who were considered higher security risk,” said Luffman. 

“Mom, it was so bad. I can’t even tell you everything that happened. It was just so bad.”

In interviews with The Intercept, sources described several instances of prison guards at Mountain View retaliating against incarcerated people in the aftermath of the storm, including pepper spraying them for yelling and beating an older man for accumulating too many bags of feces. 

“Mom, it was so bad,” Walters recalled her son telling her. “I can’t even tell you everything that happened. It was just so bad. I never want to go back there again.” 

On September 25, one day before Hurricane Helene made landfall, the NCDAC announced that a man incarcerated at Mountain View had died of an apparent suicide. He had already served seven years and was scheduled for release in January 2028. 

“Inside there, you’re a number. You do not matter. You are treated worse than a rabid dog,” said Gentry. “What happened to him in there to make him think there was no other way? I fear that for my husband every day — that he’s just going to give up on coming home.”

The post Hurricane-Struck North Carolina Prisoners Were Locked in Cells With Their Own Feces for Nearly a Week appeared first on The Intercept.

In the year since the disaster, vinyl chloride has also faced heightened scrutiny. But despite a newfound focus on the chemical’s dangers, the market for vinyl products is continuing to grow. Major petrochemical companies are expanding their operations — and the vinyl industry is spending more money than ever before to lobby lawmakers on its talking points.

Vinyl chloride is a key building block for the production of polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, a plastic found in a range of construction materials, medical devices, and household items. For decades, environmental advocates have sounded the alarm over PVC, calling it the “poison plastic”: In addition to vinyl chloride, which is classified as a Group A human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency, PVC contains harmful additives like phthalates and flame retardants. The production process releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases, exposes workers to asbestos and the class of industrial “forever chemicals” known as PFAS, and sends toxic pollutants into front-line communities.

“There’s been growing interest to regulate vinyl chloride, PVC plastic, and its additives at the state level, the national level, and the international level over the last year,” said Mike Schade, a campaign director for Toxic-Free Future, who has co-authored multiple reports on the dangers of producing, transporting, and disposing of vinyl chloride. “We’re definitely concerned that, at the same time as we’re learning more and more about the dangers of vinyl chloride and the chemicals associated with its life cycle, the plastics industry has been expanding in recent years, including the PVC plastics industry.”

Betting on More Plastic

Amid growing calls to phase out fossil fuels, the industry is now betting on plastic — created using petroleum-derived chemicals like vinyl chloride — as a lifeline.

In recent years, OxyVinyls — a subsidiary of Occidental Petroleum — Formosa Plastics, and Shintech have announced billion-dollar plans to expand their PVC plastic operations. Four months after the East Palestine disaster, chemical manufacturer Orbia declared its intentions to build a massive vinyl plant in the United States before 2028.

Most petrochemical operations, including PVC plants, are sited in the Gulf Coast region, where marginalized communities bear the brunt of industrial pollution. Exposure to vinyl chloride is associated with an increased risk of liver, brain, and lung cancer, as well as lymphoma and leukemia. When vinyl chloride burns, it can cause even more harm, releasing a highly toxic class of chemical compounds known as dioxins.

A 2023 Toxic-Free Future report noted that at least four low-income communities of color in Louisiana have been forced to relocate due to contamination from the vinyl plastics industry. This includes Mossville, one of the first towns founded by freed slaves in the South. Toxicology tests conducted by the federal government determined that Mossville residents, living in the shadow of pollution from vinyl chloride manufacturers, had elevated levels of dioxins in their bodies.

That testing was completed in 1998. But the devastation wrought by vinyl chloride is ongoing: In January, the EPA released a risk assessment detailing findings of toxic emissions near a Westlake Chemical vinyl plant in Calvert City, Kentucky. After collecting air monitoring data for more than a year, the EPA determined that emissions exceeded the state’s acceptable levels of lifetime cancer risk.

The findings arrive two months after Westlake made headlines for a different reason: The company is investing $134 million to expand its PVC pipe plant in Wichita Falls, Texas.

Yvette Arellano, founder and director of the grassroots environmental justice organization Fenceline Watch, noted that the Houston area has also seen “massive investments” from petrochemical companies in recent years. The 52-mile Houston Ship Channel is already one of the country’s most polluted areas, home to more than 600 manufacturers of plastics and plastic feedstocks.

Last month, Amnesty International released a report that found the severity of toxic pollution in the Houston Ship Channel amounts to a human rights violation.

“The expansion in the Houston Ship Channel is largely fueled by the plastics industry, including PVC and vinyl,” said Arellano. “We’re talking about a public health threat that’s multiplied because of the cumulative impact of these facilities.”

Increased Lobbying

In 2022, OxyVinyls, Shintech, Westlake, and Formosa collectively released more than half a million pounds of vinyl chloride into the air, according to an analysis of Toxic Release Inventory data by Material Research. But as members of the Vinyl Institute, the leading lobbying group for the PVC and vinyl chloride industry, the four companies are fighting hard to convince lawmakers that PVC is safe and sustainable.

While the group has been active on Capitol Hill for decades, it upped its federal lobbying spend to $560,000 last year. According to disclosures, lobbyists met with lawmakers to discuss topics like the regulation of polyvinyl chloride and the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act, which seeks to reduce the production of single-use plastics. The Vinyl Institute opposes the act, rallying for unproven chemical recycling technologies over source reduction strategies.

At the state level, the Vinyl Institute’s website boasts that it “worked close with state partners to slow down or stop PVC bans around the nation.” Legislation introduced in Maine, California, and New York last year in the wake of the East Palestine derailment sought to ban the use of PVC and other toxic substances in consumer packaging. Maine’s bill quickly died and California’s went dormant; New York’s was referred to the Environmental Conservation Committee earlier this month.

“Our industry is committed to improving our sustainable practices. Over three decades the industry has decreased ambient emissions of vinyl chloride by 87 percent per unit,” the Vinyl Institute wrote in response to questions from The Intercept. “While many unfortunately equate the state of the industry in the 1970s to today, we have made great strides in worker safety and emissions reductions in the five decades since, and part of our state efforts is to ensure lawmakers are making decisions with up-to-date scientific data.”

PVC was also challenged at the international level last year, as the United Nations Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution convened twice to discuss the proposed Global Plastics Treaty. The European Union and dozens of countries have advocated for a PVC ban.

“Our team was on the ground at these meetings,” states the Vinyl Institute’s site, “to educate delegates on the positive impact that PVC products have on human rights, equity and public health around the globe.”

Fenceline Watch has also been an observer at the treaty discussions, pushing for an approach to plastic management that protects human health and the environment. Arellano noted that the United States has taken a more “business-friendly approach” to the discussions — a “complete opposite stance” from small Pacific Island nations, which must contend with huge amounts of the world’s plastic washing up on their shores.

“A ban on PVC would harm developing nations and undermine the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals,” the Vinyl Institute wrote to The Intercept. “We all agree with the overarching goal of eliminating plastic waste, and the Vinyl Institute is present at these meetings to educate the global community on the importance of PVC products in health care and clean drinking water.”

Meanwhile, the petrochemical industry is ramping up efforts to undermine the EPA: In 2023, the Vinyl Institute sued the agency over an order it issued under the reformed Toxic Substances Control Act, or TSCA. The EPA designated 1,1,2-trichloroethane, a potentially carcinogenic chemical used to create vinyl chloride, as a “high priority” for risk evaluation and instructed companies to perform new toxicity tests on birds — something the Vinyl Institute has called “unnecessary,” “unjustified,” and “improper.”

That hasn’t stopped the EPA from putting vinyl chloride itself in its crosshairs. On December 14, the agency announced it had added the chemical to its list of priorities for formal review under the TSCA, a step that could potentially lead to an eventual vinyl chloride ban.

“We really need to be transitioning away from toxic petrochemicals and dangerous petrochemical plastics like vinyl, especially when we know there are viable, safer alternatives,” said Schade. “I think the tide is beginning to turn, and I think the East Palestine disaster this last year was a real wakeup call.”

The post Vinyl Chloride Industry Keeps Expanding Despite East Palestine Disaster appeared first on The Intercept.

Louisiana sued the EPA on December 19, alleging that the federal agency had failed to properly respond to the state’s sprawling Freedom of Information Act, or FOIA, request sent by former state attorney general Jeff Landry.

Court filings note that the public records case is related to another, ongoing lawsuit brought against the EPA by Landry, a staunch advocate for the oil and gas industry who now serves as Louisiana’s governor. Shortly after Landry’s suit was filed, the EPA dropped its probe into the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s permitting practices, which advocates say disproportionately impact Black residents in Cancer Alley.

News that the state has sought to obtain such an array of communications as part of its efforts prompted allegations of intimidation from many of the Black residents who were targeted. It has also raised press freedom concerns for media organizations included in the request, described by FOIA experts as extremely unusual. 

“The Louisiana attorney general’s office protects industry more than they protect the people,” said Sharon Lavigne, a resident of St. James Parish who has long fought industrial proliferation in her community and whose emails were targeted in the request. “Maybe that’s why they got all of these emails, just to see what we’re doing and to see how they can stop us.” 

Landry filed the request on June 29, 2023, just one day after the EPA announced it was dropping its Cancer Alley civil rights investigation. 

The request seeks all records since March 2021 regarding “environmental justice in Louisiana, the Industrial Corridor in Louisiana,” and “the area called Cancer Alley.” It lists six advocates by name, all of whom are Black, as well as the organizations Rise St. James, the Deep South Center for Environmental Justice, and several other community and law groups who have represented Cancer Alley residents.

Due to the expansive nature of the request, the EPA said it would take more than a year to locate and provide all the records. Louisiana then sued to compel the agency to move more quickly.

The Louisiana attorney general’s office declined to answer questions from The Guardian and The Intercept over why it had requested such information, but filings in its FOIA lawsuit accuse the EPA of “prodigiously leaking information to the press” and allowing environmental advocacy groups to hold undue influence on decisions. 

An environmental law group said the attorney general’s accusations of external influence were hypocritical, noting that Landry’s office previously hired petrochemical lawyers to represent the state in its negotiations with the EPA. Those same lawyers were simultaneously representing one of the companies at the center of the EPA’s civil rights investigation, the Taiwanese petrochemical giant Formosa.

Landry’s request specifically seeks records containing mention of Formosa, as well as the Japanese firm Denka. Both companies are at the heart of ongoing campaigns and litigation in the region. Lavigne’s group, Rise St James, has been instrumental in thus far stopping Formosa from building a massive, multibillion-dollar plastics plant in their parish. A Louisiana appeals court recently reinstated Formosa’s air permits, overturning a 2022 ruling.

The request also asks for emails with national and local media including MSNBC, the Washington Post, and The Advocate, specifying nine journalists by name.

“We’re concerned that the State of Louisiana is abusing [FOIA] law to prevent reporters from engaging in newsgathering on matters of public interest.”

The co-author of this article, The Guardian’s Oliver Laughland, was one of the named journalists. “We are deeply concerned by what appears to be an attempt to intimidate journalists and interfere with their ability to report on alarming matters of environmental injustice — in particular, the dangerous toxicity of air in predominantly Black areas of Louisiana,” said Guardian U.S. general counsel Kai Falkenberg. “FOIA is an essential tool for informing the public on the workings of government, but in this case, we’re concerned that the State of Louisiana is abusing that law to prevent reporters from engaging in newsgathering on matters of public interest to readers in Louisiana and around the world.” 

The EPA declined to answer questions from The Guardian and The Intercept, citing ongoing litigation, but it provided the 940 pages of documents already handed to the Louisiana Department of Justice. Further releases are scheduled for February 2.

The documents, many of which were heavily redacted, contain typical requests for comment from several journalists, internal EPA discussions over drafting and scheduling, and EPA exchanges with environmental lawyers and nonprofits, including a list of the attendees at a meeting of leading Cancer Alley advocates.

Public records law in the U.S. dictates that, with certain exemptions, communications by or with local, state, and federal employees must be made available to the public. The law is intended to preserve government transparency.

David Cuillier, director of the Freedom of Information Project, said that requests for communications between the government and citizens, including journalists, are not uncommon. But those requests are typically made by other journalists, law groups, or members of the public — not state governments. 

“It’s totally weird and rare for a government agency to request, one, records from another agency, and, two, all the communications about these advocates and citizens and journalists,” Cuillier said.

Bill Quigley, longtime director of Loyola University New Orleans’s Law Clinic, also noted that “it is not at all common for states to sue the federal government over FOIA disputes.”

In a previous survey, Cuillier and his colleague found that only about 2 percent of public records requests are made by another government agency. Cuillier argued it would be in the best interests of Louisiana’s Department of Justice to be transparent over the FOIA’s purpose. Otherwise, he said, it gives the appearance that the state is “spying on political opponents.”

An environmental group likewise said that the requests, while lawful, would have a chilling effect on local advocates’ efforts — including those not specifically named by the request. The group, which asked not to be named, suggested the records request is an attempt to shift the narrative, framing the EPA as suspect, rather than polluters themselves.

Robert Taylor, an 83-year-old lifelong resident of St. John Parish who leads a grassroots group fighting against pollution linked to Denka’s plant, said it was “frightening” and “horrible” to know the state government had targeted his emails. 

“It’s certainly intimidation. What other reason could there be for it?” Taylor said.

Louisiana’s lawsuit against the EPA’s Cancer Alley investigation is ongoing and expected to advance to the Supreme Court. In a recent hearing, Judge James D. Cain, appointed by former President Donald Trump, rejected the EPA’s motion to dismiss and appears ready to side with Louisiana, citing “the whims of the EPA and its overarching mandate.” Cain, who is also presiding over Louisiana’s FOIA lawsuit, issued a ruling on January 23 temporarily blocking the EPA from enforcing some aspects of civil rights law in Louisiana.

Troy Carter, Louisiana’s lone Democrat in Congress whose district includes the Cancer Alley region, urged the state government to drop both lawsuits against the EPA and its pursuit of records. 

“This would remove any need for these citizens’ private conversations with the government to be disclosed,” Carter said. “The First Amendment protects the right to free speech. The government should not have any appearance of targeting private individuals in a manner that could inhibit freedom.” 

The post “Certainly Intimidation”: Louisiana Sues EPA for Emails With Journalists and Cancer Alley Residents appeared first on The Intercept.

Protesters calling for an end to Israel’s war on Gaza confronted President Joe Biden earlier this week at his first major campaign rally, a Virginia event focused on abortion rights. As Biden spoke in favor of returning the baseline yet crucial protections of Roe v. Wade, demonstrators interrupted him every few sentences, shouting, “Genocide Joe!” and “ceasefire now!” One called out, “Israel kills two mothers every hour!”

In response, other crowd members cheered for the president and chanted, “Four more years!” — a particularly callous response to calls for an end to indiscriminate mass slaughter.

The event crystallized a false choice at the center of Biden’s presidential bid. As a rematch with Donald Trump looms, mainstream Democrats invoke the precarious state of U.S. reproductive rights to scold those who object to Biden based on his unending support for Israel’s genocidal war. Left-wing calls for a ceasefire in Gaza have been framed as a roadblock, one that stands in conflict with Biden’s fight to protect abortion access from further Republican decimation.

But feminists who protest Biden over Gaza — even those who say they will likely not vote for him — are not blind to the dangers of a second Trump presidency. They are not myopic single-issue voters, willing to throw reproductive rights under the bus. Feminists opposing Biden in the name of Palestinian liberation are highlighting the cynicism of a Democratic campaign running on women’s rights at home while enabling the systematic annihilation of women and children abroad.

Humanitarian agencies this month reported a 300 percent rise in the miscarriage rate in Gaza since Israel’s bombardment began. More than 10,000 children have been killed, and there is not a safe place in the besieged strip for a person to give birth. More than half of Gaza’s hospitals are completely shuttered, and the rest are barely functional; cesarean sections are performed without anesthesia. Alongside a lack of clean water, food, and medical supplies, menstrual products are largely inaccessible to Palestinians in Gaza, of whom 1.7 million have been internally displaced. The protester who shouted out “Israel kills two mothers every hour” was citing statistics from a case brought by South Africa this month, charging Israel with genocide at the International Court of Justice.

Apologists for the president are demanding that for the sake of our own imperiled reproductive freedoms, we must disregard the very meaning of reproductive justice when applied to the people of Gaza.

Young voters, in particular, are not convinced. “I think it would be hypocritical of me to use reproductive rights as a way to justify voting for Biden,” said Saba Saed, a young woman from Michigan, when interviewed by CBS’s “Face the Nation” last week. “Biden is aiding and sending military aid to Israel, which is airstriking Gaza and blocking humanitarian aid leading to women there who are pregnant either getting C-sections without anesthesia, not being able to be provided with prenatal care.”

After Saed’s interview clip drew ire from some Biden supporters, she posted a follow-up on X: “Biden caring about reproductive rights,” she wrote, “should be because he believes we need to have them, not because it guarantees votes.”

There can be no doubt that a Trump presidency and a Republican-led Congress would see an end to the shreds of abortion protections currently in place in this country. Just this week, Republicans in Tennessee and Oklahoma introduced travel ban bills that would make it a felony to help a minor leave the state to access abortion care. Nearly 65,000 pregnancies associated with rape occurred in the 14 states that have enacted abortion bans since the Dobbs decision to overturn Roe in 2022.

Biden warning’s that it could get far worse under Trump is as uninspiring as it is gravely real. It is all the more grim coming from a sitting president, who, in his own words, is “not big on abortion” and failed to expand federal abortion protections and provisions to their fullest possible extent in his current term.

The Roe v. Wade decision itself was always limited in its ability to support the bodily autonomy, health, and safety of women, particularly women of color. In the years following the 1973 ruling, Black feminist organizers led the demand for a framework of “reproductive justice” beyond reproductive rights, which encompasses far more than the right to end a pregnancy.

The fight for reproductive justice is the fight to produce, reproduce, and sustain life in conditions of freedom and safety — the very conditions the current administration is rendering impossible, from its own borders to Gaza. Accessing abortion in Palestine was extremely challenging prior to the war; now the challenge is staying alive to navigate any such choices and challenges at all.

Accessing abortion in Palestine was extremely challenging prior to the war; now the challenge is staying alive to navigate any such choices and challenges at all.

Asking feminists to limit their concerns to abortion access in the U.S. is to push a liberal nationalist feminism that simply inverts the Christo-fascism of white women Trump voters. Both are predicated on exclusionary border regimes, scarcity logic, and violence against women.

It’s not a good argument, however true it might be, that Trump would be just as devastating for Palestine. Inconvenient as it may be for his apologists, it is Biden who is currently president and who could at any point choose to be accountable to the vast majority of Democratic voters who want a ceasefire. It is Biden who claims to stand for women’s rights. It is not his protesters who are inconsistent on matters of justice. As Saed, the voter from Michigan interviewed on CBS, tweeted, “Do not blame me, blame Biden.”

The post Dear Biden Apologists: Reproductive Justice Means Fighting for Gaza’s Women and Children appeared first on The Intercept.

When the state of Georgia indicted 61 Stop Cop City activists on racketeering charges last year, it mangled the meaning of “racketeering” beyond recognition. In the indictment, prosecutors cited typical social justice activities, such as “mutual aid,” writing “zines,” and “collectivism,” as proof of criminal conspiracy and raising money for protest signs as grounds for money laundering charges.

Just as it seemed that Georgia Republicans couldn’t push the state’s broad Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, statute any further, GOP state senators introduced a bill on Friday that would significantly expand the reach of the Georgia RICO law, with blatantly repressive designs.

Former President Donald Trump and his allies currently face the highest profile RICO charges in Georgia for attempting to interfere in the 2020 presidential election. Trump’s case, however, is a political outlier when it comes to the increased deployment of RICO charges in recent years, as it takes aim at a truly powerful cohort engaged in the very paradigm of conspiracy. While this is the purported intention of RICO laws — first introduced in 1970 to target mob bosses — recent uses of Georgia’s statute have involved casting Atlanta public school teachers as organized criminals for altering test scores and claiming that the lyrics of Black rap artists can indicate potential violent gang involvement.

The newly introduced Senate Bill 359, or S.B. 359, sponsored by 10 Republican state senators, makes clear that the Georgia GOP intends to continue using RICO as a tool for sweeping criminalization and repressive prosecutions. The proposed law would include low-level misdemeanors, such as “loitering” and placing posters in unpermitted places, as crimes to which RICO charges and hefty enhanced penalties could apply. The bill also includes “political affiliation or belief” as a factor for enhanced penalties in certain circumstances.

S.B. 359 will likely face significant challenges and amendments. Still, the effort serves as a grim harbinger of the far right’s further weaponization of RICO to circumvent legal standards and criminalize whole movements — even disparate activist constellations like Stop Cop City, which has brought together thousands of local and national environmentalists and abolitionists to stop the construction of a vast police training compound atop Atlanta’s crucial forest land.

“RICO is meant to be a narrow criminal statute to address a very specific form of conduct where the puppeteer escapes culpability while the puppets continue to cause serious and often violent harm to the community over the course of years,” Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which is providing legal support for numerous Stop Cop City defendants, wrote in an email. “The proposed amendments to this statute circumvent that intent and are clearly meant to chill political organizing activities.”

The first trial in the Cop City racketeering case was scheduled to begin in early January but has been delayed, ironically enough, over the question of whether 19-year-old defendant Ayla King had her right to a speedy trial violated. King was arrested last March when police raided a music festival hosted by organizers in the Atlanta forest and made indiscriminate arrests based on scant evidence. An hour earlier, and more than a mile away, masked activists had vandalized construction vehicles and materials at the planned Cop City site. King now faces a single charge of violating the RICO law, with a potential sentence of five to 20 years in prison.

Alongside King, more than 20 defendants arrested at the music festival face racketeering charges. Prosecutors have cast other movement participants as part of a “criminal enterprise” for no more than fundraising or posting flyers naming police officers involved in the killing of activist Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán during a raid last January. They are all awaiting trial.

During a public panel last September, veteran Georgia attorney Don Samuel, who is representing a number of activists in the RICO case, noted that the state’s 109-page indictment “doesn’t allege a single racketeering act” but instead names “protected activities” as grounds for the charges. “Aspects of it are extremely unintelligible,” he said.

A malicious prosecution like the Cop City RICO case, given its weakness, has a questionable chance of success in court but nonetheless spreads fear and drains movement energies and resources through lengthy trials. Should a law like S.B. 359 pass, future RICO cases as flimsy and groundless as the one facing Cop City activists could have a better chance of success, as prosecutors could choose from a greater range of low-level violations, newly classified as potential “racketeering acts.”

The specific misdemeanors listed in the bill are telling. “Loitering,” “littering,” “disorderly conduct,” “trespass,” and the unpermitted placement of posters and advertisements are not the typical activities of high-level criminal organizations. They are, meanwhile, common examples of low-level charges faced by activists who take up public space and spread awareness; indeed, they’re the very activities for which dozens of Stop Cop City participants face overreaching charges. Right-wing movements could, as a point of law, face penalties for the same activities — but police and Republican attorney generals are not in the habit of targeting the far right.

Another peculiar part of the proposed RICO expansion is the suggestion that enhanced penalties should be applied when the victim of a so-called criminal enterprise is chosen due to “political affiliation or beliefs.” Unlike race, gender, and sexual orientation, a victim’s political beliefs are not considered relevant under hate crime or other statutes when it comes to enhanced sentencing considerations. Indeed, it would be unconstitutional if they were, as the First Amendment protects political speech — including when that speech targets another group’s political affiliation or beliefs.

“Any law that is written with the words ‘political affiliation or belief’ as contributing factors for enhanced penalties immediately raises serious first amendment issues,” the Civil Liberties Defense Center’s Regan told me. Samuel also noted that “to include ‘political beliefs or affiliations’ within the scope of what we generally consider to be ‘hate’ crimes is inviting First Amendment disaster.”

With such clear flaws, it’s unlikely that S.B. 359 will survive in its originally proposed form. It should be understood, rather, as a statement of intent. The Stop Cop City racketeering case is an example that the right plans to see followed: RICO as a tool for repression, either de facto or in the letter of the law.

The post Georgia GOP Proposes RICO Expansion for “Loitering” Protesters appeared first on The Intercept.

The infamous 85-mile stretch between Baton Rouge and New Orleans is one of the nation’s most polluted corners; residents here have spent decades fighting for clean air and water. That fight escalated in 2022, when local environmental justice groups filed complaints with the Environmental Protection Agency, alleging that the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality had engaged in racial discrimination under the Civil Rights Act. In a watershed moment, the EPA opened a civil rights investigation into Louisiana’s permitting practices. 

But just when the EPA appeared poised to force the LDEQ to make meaningful changes, Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry — now the state’s governor — sued. Landry’s suit challenges a key piece of the agency’s regulatory authority: the disparate impact standard, which says that policies that cause disproportionate harm to people of color are in violation of the Civil Rights Act. This enables the EPA to argue that it’s discriminatory for state agencies to keep greenlighting contaminating facilities in communities of color already overburdened by pollution — such as in Cancer Alley — even if official policies do not announce discrimination as their intent. 

Five weeks after Landry filed his suit, the EPA dropped its investigation, effectively leaving Cancer Alley residents to continue the struggle on their own.

“It was devastating,” recalled Sharon Lavigne, founder of the grassroots organization Rise St. James. For her work spearheading the fight to stop polluters in Cancer Alley, Lavigne is regarded as a figurehead of the environmental justice movement. Now, it appears that Landry’s suit could have a reverberating impact far from her hometown, as the EPA backs down from environmental justice cases across the country.

In Flint, Michigan, advocates say that Landry’s suit has already led to the collapse of their own chance at justice. This month, the EPA dropped a Houston case in the same way, without mandating any sweeping reforms. Attorneys told The Intercept they are concerned about the possibility of similarly disappointing outcomes in Detroit, St. Louis, eastern North Carolina, and elsewhere.

Experts say that the EPA appears to be shying away from certain Civil Rights Act investigations in states that are hostile to environmental justice, due to fears that Landry’s suit or similar efforts could make their way to the conservative Supreme Court. If that happened, the court appears ready to rule against the EPA — a verdict that could not only undermine the agency’s authority, but also significantly limit the ability of all federal agencies to enforce civil rights law.

“The lawsuit does not just challenge the EPA’s investigation and potential result of our complaint,” said Lisa Jordan, an attorney who helped file the Cancer Alley complaint. “It challenges the entire regulatory program.”

“Dystopian Nightmare”

The EPA is tasked with ensuring that its programs act in accordance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits recipients of federal funds from employing discriminatory methods and practices. The agency has never actually withheld funding due to discrimination, but by 2021, a change seemed to be in the air: Under President Joe Biden’s administration, the EPA began to process and pursue over a dozen Title VI environmental justice cases in at least nine states, including Louisiana. 

In October 2022, the EPA issued a letter detailing evidence of racial discrimination in the Louisiana DEQ’s practices, signaling the agency was prepared to issue its second-ever finding of discrimination. A few months later, after more than a year of negotiations, the EPA released a draft agreement that contained landmark reforms. Among other changes, the reforms would’ve required the LDEQ to analyze whether pollution would disproportionately affect people of color when making permit decisions.

Lavigne said she hoped the EPA would “protect us more than our local officials.” EPA Administrator Michael Regan even visited Cancer Alley himself.

Then Landry sued. Referring to the EPA’s pursuit of environmental justice as a “dystopian nightmare,” Landry’s suit argues that the EPA can only enforce the Civil Rights Act in cases where state policies are explicitly racist — and that imposing the disparate impact standard merely ensures that “emissions are affecting the ‘right’ racial groups.” The suit decries the EPA as “social justice warriors fixated on race.”

Gov. Jeff Landry’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment. An EPA spokesperson said they could not grant interviews about the Landry suit since the litigation is still pending, but that the “EPA remains committed to strengthening our civil rights compliance work and to vigorous enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”

Lavigne said she received a phone call from Regan’s staff the day after the EPA backed down and withdrew the draft of the negotiated agreement. They told her the EPA dropped the case “because they were trying to protect the Title VI program.” That response supports previous reporting suggesting that the EPA worried Landry’s suit could wind its way to the Supreme Court, prompting a devastating verdict.

The conservative Supreme Court has already greatly curtailed the EPA’s regulatory authority in recent cases over greenhouse gases and wetlands. And the EPA dropped its case the same week that the Supreme Court gutted affirmative action — a ruling that signaled the court’s antipathy toward the consideration of race by federal agencies. As no state has policies that explicitly announce discriminatory intent, virtually all the EPA’s Title VI cases rely on the disparate impact standard. If a conservative Supreme Court threw out that standard, it would crush the EPA’s ability to pursue environmental justice. 

Jordan, the attorney, told The Intercept she worries the EPA will now only conduct investigations in states that are “relatively friendly” to environmental justice and are unlikely to sue the agency, effectively abandoning the communities that need federal protections the most.

“Other states, like Louisiana and Texas, that are known to be discriminatory in their environmental programs, are the ones that would sue,” said Jordan. The EPA, she added, is “throwing Louisiana communities under the Title VI bus.”

And the EPA’s reversal still might not work in its favor. At a motion hearing on January 9, the EPA said it dropped its investigation due to procedural deadlines, not Landry’s suit. Still, the agency argued that the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana should dismiss the case in light of the dropped investigation. 

“It’s cheaper to move the people.”

Judge James D. Cain Jr., appointed by former President Donald Trump, will soon decide whether the case can continue. During the hearing, he made several statements that showed sympathy to Landry’s arguments. 

“It’s cheaper to move the people,” said Cain, according to a transcript of the hearing reviewed by The Intercept. “Why don’t the EPA just move the people? You’re going to shut the facilities down? I mean.”

Cain continued: “My last check, pollution doesn’t really discriminate based on race.”

“A Slap in the Face”

Whether or not Landry’s suit moves forward, environmental justice advocates are already seeing ripple effects. In August, the EPA abruptly backed down from another investigation — this time near Flint.

Flint’s case was strikingly similar: Plaintiffs alleged the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy, or EGLE, had violated Title VI by issuing air pollution permits to an asphalt plant in a low-income Black community. Residents of the area were already experiencing high rates of hospitalization for asthma when the permit was granted, and air pollution from asphalt plants has been associated with increased risk of asthma attacks.

After months of negotiations and weekly meetings between the EPA, EGLE, and the advocates who filed the complaint, the EPA seemed to be thinking about “a transformational framework for addressing environmental justice issues,” recalled Nick Leonard, executive director of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, which co-filed the complaint with Earthjustice on behalf of residents.

But then, the EPA suddenly withdrew the draft of the negotiated agreement, instead signing a watered-down version that appeared to rubber-stamp EGLE’s policies. In the new draft, EGLE agreed to minor adjustments, such as providing a single air sensor to the community and updating its public outreach materials. The agreement does not require EGLE to conduct cumulative impact analyses, which means the agency still does not have to consider whether it’s issuing permits to polluters in already-polluted areas.

The reversal was crushing to those involved in the case. Nayyirah Shariff, director of the organizing coalition Flint Rising, said that “six months of our life and hundreds of hours” were essentially wasted when the negotiations were torpedoed. Having had childhood asthma herself while growing up in the Flint neighborhood, they called the EPA’s abandonment “a slap in the face.” A letter to EGLE co-written by Shariff and others called the new agreement “unjust and damaging” and warned that “Michigan certainly should not be following Louisiana’s lead.”

Though the EPA’s new agreement with EGLE was not made public until August 10, Shariff and Leonard told The Intercept that the EPA changed course at the end of June, within days of the EPA dropping its Cancer Alley investigation. As with the Louisiana case, the EPA didn’t provide a clear reason for its decision.

Leonard believes the EPA is specifically nervous about taking up litigation that would force state agencies to adopt rules around disparate cumulative impacts. The EPA will likely keep pursuing simpler procedural points, he said, like ensuring easier access to public meetings and translation services. But he fears they’ll no longer pursue more sweeping reforms.

“We were sort of just blindsided by how the conversation changed right around the time the Louisiana case came out,” said Leonard. 

When asked about the EPA’s choice to reverse course on the Flint case and other Title VI investigations in the wake of Landry’s suit, an EPA spokesperson wrote that the circumstances of the Louisiana investigation “do not apply to other pending EPA Title VI complaints.” The spokesperson added, “EPA is moving urgently, with an unprecedented commitment to advancing environmental justice. … The lived experiences of impacted communities must be central in EPA decision-making.”

Ted Zahrfeld, board chair of the St. Francis Prayer Center, one of the groups that sued EGLE and participated in ensuing negotiations, dubbed the neighborhood on Flint’s outskirts “Asthma Alley.”

“This Louisiana decision — or catastrophe, I would call it — happened, and within a few days, the EPA told us: ‘Well, there’s going to be a new agreement,’” said Zahrfeld. St. Francis Prayer Center sits directly across from the asphalt plant and has long been a source of refuge for the community. Now, in light of the EPA’s reversal, Zahrfeld wonders what he will say to people who come through the center’s doors. “What do I tell those parents? What do I tell that kid? The EPA is supposed to be protecting them — what are they doing?”

“A Chilling Effect”

Participants in environmental justice cases in Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, North Carolina, and Missouri all expressed concerns that Landry’s lawsuit had left them vulnerable.

Blakely Hildebrand, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, called Landry’s arguments against disparate cumulative impact “extremely concerning.” Hildebrand spearheaded a complaint around hog operations in Duplin County, North Carolina, which aimed to call the EPA’s attention to biogas, a fuel sourced from hog and other animal waste that pollutes surrounding air and water.

Hildebrand noted that Duplin is “located in the Black Belt, where formerly enslaved people settled — that’s where the industry chose to consolidate its operations.” Some of those breathing the polluted air in Duplin, she added, “have had their land passed down generation to generation, dating back to when their ancestors were emancipated.” This parallels Cancer Alley, where petrochemical plants sit in the footprint of plantations. Now, Hildebrand is not only worried for the Duplin case, but also for “environmental justice work throughout the southeast.”

“There are absolutely concerns based on what we saw in Louisiana,” Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee told The Intercept. Menefee has been part of a Title VI investigation into the growing number of concrete batch plants in Harris County’s Black and Latino neighborhoods, where Black residents are 40 percent more likely to die of cancer than the average Texan.

“When you’re in a red state like Texas, where the state environmental regulatory body has pretty much allowed industry to have free rein …we’re incredibly vulnerable,” said Menefee. “That last line of protection is going to be the EPA.” In November, he told the Houston Chronicle he hoped the EPA “would put the hammer down.”

But on January 2, after nearly a year of negotiations, the EPA announced they were closing the Texas case too. Just like in the Landry suit, the Texas Commission on Environment Quality accused the EPA of overreach, and the case was closed without any changes requiring the state to account for cumulative disparate impacts.

Menefee noted that the Texas regulatory agency recently approved another concrete crushing plant, this time across from a hospital, and again near neighborhoods of color already polluted by concrete plants. He said the agency told hundreds of objecting residents it was “not taking into account race.”

Leonard, of the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, noted that while the EPA’s fears of a Supreme Court decision undermining their authority are well-founded, advocates and attorneys have always known that the agency would face pushback, should it decide to take more forceful action on civil rights enforcement. “They seem to not have been prepared for that inevitability,” he said.

Andre Segura, vice president of litigation for Earthjustice, attended the motion hearing for Landry’s suit on January 9. He said he had the impression that “the Department of Justice is treating this case very seriously,” but like Leonard, he noted that the pushback against the EPA’s efforts should be no surprise. “They’re going to challenge these fundamental tools” of civil rights enforcement, Segura said, referring to industry and political actors. “This is expected.” 

To Shariff of Flint Rising, Cancer Alley is emblematic of environmental justice struggles nationwide, as “a community that has been marginalized and abused for decades.”

“If they can’t get justice? Then it’s just a chilling effect for every other environmental justice community across the country,” they said.

Nevertheless, residents of sacrifice zones say that in the face of the EPA’s absence, they’ll continue the fight on their own.

When Lavigne, of Rise St. James, told EPA staff at the end of June that her community was upset, she was told they’d come down to give an explanation. That meeting never happened. But she did recently get a call from EPA head Regan — to alert her that, despite her objections, the EPA had decided to hand more authority to LDEQ. In the final days of 2023, the EPA announced that Louisiana will now be allowed to issue permits for wells that inject carbon underground, something she and her organization strongly oppose.

Still, Lavigne said she’ll ensure “the community gets what they need,” regardless of the EPA’s inaction. “We’re all we’ve got.”

Correction: February 2, 2024
This article misspelled the name of the Harris County attorney. His name is Christian Menefee, not Chris.

The post The EPA Is Backing Down From Environmental Justice Cases Nationwide appeared first on The Intercept.

Update: January 8, 2024
On January 5, after this story was published, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to hear Idaho’s emergency abortion case.

Less than a week into the new year, a federal appeals court has already issued a pernicious new decision in a Texas abortion case, setting the stage for the far-right’s escalating assault on reproductive rights in 2024.

The conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled on Tuesday that Texas hospitals are not obligated to perform abortions to stabilize a pregnant patient facing a medical emergency. With a similar Idaho case under reconsideration by the 9th Circuit, the rulings tee up a Supreme Court battle on the question of emergency abortion care.

Under the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, hospitals that receive Medicare funding — which is pretty much all hospitals — must perform emergency services, regardless of the patient’s ability to pay. The law has always been deeply insufficient in a disgraceful, life-denying health care system. Ensuring that vulnerable patients are not left to die by emergency rooms for lack of insurance or insufficient funds is the bare minimum; hospitals still chase patients for the unaffordable cost of emergency treatments following discharge. Until recently, however, the federal legislation has served as a weak protection for patients in need of lifesaving abortion care in red states. Now even that is being undermined. 

The aim of the attorneys general in Texas and Idaho is above all to further the Republicans’ draconian agenda by eliminating all possible abortion law exemptions. These cases are prime examples of how the United States’ weak and piecemeal health care system makes such efforts all the more achievable.

Like every attack on reproductive liberties and bodily autonomy, the challenge to EMTALA’s reach in these cases is not only a further threat to the lives of women and other pregnant people: It is also part of an ongoing process by which Republicans, aided by the judiciary, are able to withdraw the already limited provision of essential health care. It must not be overlooked that the federal law in question was initially passed to prevent emergency rooms from “patient dumping” individuals unable to pay for their care. Attacks on reproductive liberties have always also been attacks on the poor.

In its original wording, EMTALA did not include an expansive list of every emergency medical condition potentially covered under its provisions. As such, nothing is explicitly noted about the provision of abortions. Following the fall of Roe v. Wade in 2022, the Biden administration published guidance emphasizing that EMTALA does cover abortion when deemed an emergency treatment, and that the federal law preempts state laws that would otherwise ban abortions in such cases. It takes an extraordinary perversion of logic to conclude that abortion treatment, if necessary to stabilize a patient, would fall outside the blanket law.

So degraded is the legal battle over reproductive rights that lifesaving medicine is the terrain.

But twisted logic is a 5th Circuit specialty. The judges — two appointed by Donald Trump and one by George W. Bush — ruled that should EMTALA conflict with Texas’s severe abortion restrictions, hospitals must follow the state law or face its extreme penalties. Under Texas law, abortions are only permitted if a patient is “at risk of death” or “serious risk of substantial impairment of a major bodily function”; doctors are never required to perform abortions, even if they are lifesaving. The ruling sends a message to health care providers that anything less than near death or bodily destruction will not suffice as grounds for a permitted abortion in the state.

Chris Geidner rightly noted in his LawDork newsletter that the panel’s reasoning involved “sloppy legal work at best, intentionally misleading at worst.” Still, the specious ruling sets up a Supreme Court challenge as to whether emergency abortions that stabilize a pregnant patient fall under federally required emergency health care — so degraded is the legal battle over reproductive rights that lifesaving medicine is the terrain.

Following the 5th Circuit’s decision, the Idaho attorney general wrote to the Supreme Court to urge the justices to take up that state’s case, on which the justices have been sitting for a month, arguing that the Texas ruling “shows” that Idaho is likely to win. So far, the Justice Department has not appealed the 5th Circuit decision, and the Supreme Court has not accepted Idaho’s case, but there’s little doubt that the EMTALA issue will reach the highest court, given the conflicts between state and federal legislation and the 9th Circuit opinion on the Idaho case expected this month.

If the Supreme Court eventually sides with Texas or Idaho, and once again against established law, it will be another lethal judicial decision, harming poor women of color, particularly poor Black women, the most. Anyone can face a life-threatening emergency during pregnancy; pregnancy is a dangerous condition. It is, however, disproportionately poor Black women who are unable to obtain the necessary medical care and checkups that can prevent emergencies in the first place. Now, even federally mandated emergency treatment is under threat.

This is why the fight for true reproductive justice has always been predicated on winning free, robust health care for all, while centrist Democrats have pushed only for an austere baseline of protection and provision. When a health care system provides only bare bones, it is at bare bones that the far right will pick.

The post Far-Right Judges Are Coming for Lifesaving Abortions appeared first on The Intercept.

Reuters is one of at least seven major news outlets that creates and publishes misleading promotional content for fossil fuel companies, according to a report released today. Known as advertorials or native advertising, the sponsored material is created to look like a publication’s authentic editorial work, lending a veneer of journalistic credibility to the fossil fuel industry’s key climate talking points.

In collaboration with The Intercept and The Nation, Drilled and DeSmog analyzed hundreds of advertorials and events, as well as ad data from MediaRadar. Our analysis focused on the three years spanning October 2020 to October 2023, when the public ramped up calls for media, public relations, and advertising companies to cut their commercial ties with fossil fuel clients amid growing awareness that the industry’s deceptive messaging was slowing climate action.

All of the media companies reviewed — Bloomberg, The Economist, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Politico, Reuters, and the Washington Post — consistently top lists of “most trusted” news outlets. They also all have internal brand studios that create advertising content for major oil and gas companies, furnishing the industry with an air of legitimacy as it pushes misleading climate claims to trusting readers. In addition to producing podcasts, newsletters, and videos, some of these outlets allow fossil fuel companies to sponsor their events. Reuters goes even further, creating custom summits for the industry explicitly designed to remove the “pain points” holding back faster production of oil and gas. (Disclosure: Co-author Matthew Green was formerly a Reuters climate correspondent.)

With United Nations climate talks underway in the United Arab Emirates, oil and gas companies have been sponsoring even more advertorials and events with media partners than usual, primarily designed to portray the industry as a climate leader.

“It’s really outrageous that outlets like the New York Times or Bloomberg or Reuters would lend their imprimatur to content that is misleading at best and in some cases outright false,” said Naomi Oreskes, a climate disinformation expert and professor at Harvard University. “They’re manufacturing content that at best is completely one-sided, and at worst is disinformation, and pushing that to their readers.”

Spokespeople for Bloomberg, the Financial Times, the New York Times, Reuters, and the Washington Post told us that advertorial content is created by staff members who are separate from the newsroom, and their journalists are independent from their ad sales efforts (Politico and The Economist did not respond to requests for comment). But the independence of these outlets’ journalists is not in question; what’s important is whether readers understand the difference between reporting and advertising. And according to a growing body of peer-reviewed research, they do not.

“It tarnishes the reputation of that news outlet. So it’s baffling to me why newsrooms are continuing to pursue this.”

A 2016 Georgetown University study, for example, found that advertorials are confused for “real” content by about two-thirds of people. Another study, conducted in 2018 by Boston University researchers, found that only one in 10 people recognized native advertising as advertising rather than reporting.

Michelle Amazeen, the lead author on the Boston University study, found that those who did recognize sponsored content for what it was thought less of the outlet they were reading. “It tarnishes the reputation of that news outlet,” Amazeen said. “So it’s baffling to me why newsrooms are continuing to pursue this.”

Crafting “Climate Narratives”

This year’s 28^th annual U.N. climate negotiations — known as the Conference of the Parties, or COP28 — are currently being held in Dubai, the largest city in the United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s top oil-producing countries. Presided over by Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, the head of the UAE’s state-owned oil company, Adnoc, it is the most industry-influenced COP yet.

Fossil fuel companies are seeking to preserve their business models by promoting carbon capture and storage, hydrogen power, and carbon offsets as viable climate solutions, even though the technologies are on track to do little more than extend the life of the fossil fuel industry. As COP28 president, Al Jaber backed these technologies in the leadup to the summit.

The enormous influence oil and gas executives are wielding at COP28 has thrown commercial partnerships between media outlets and the fossil fuel industry into sharper focus. Climate reporters at every outlet we analyzed have diligently covered the challenges that the industry’s so-called solutions face, but when that reporting is placed alongside corporate-sponsored content touting the technologies’ benefits, it leaves readers confused.

In addition to the Reuters Plus podcast produced this year for Aramco, the New York Times’s T Brand Studio created “the Energy Trilemma,” a 2022 podcast for BP about how high-emitting industries are decarbonizing — but not by reducing the development or use of fossil fuels. Bloomberg Media Studios, meanwhile, created a video for Exxon Mobil touting hydrogen power and carbon capture and storage, or CCS. In the video, Exxon CEO Darren Woods says the company is “ready to deploy CCS to reduce the world’s emissions” but leaves out the fact that the company also plans to increase annual carbon dioxide emissions by as much as the output of the entire nation of Greece — news Bloomberg’s own climate reporters broke.

Reuters Events offered to help corporations hone their “climate narrative” at COP28 via opportunities to secure “exclusive interviews,” seats at high-level roundtables, coverage on the Reuters website, exclusive dinner invites, and a Reuters presence in corporate pavilions at the Dubai expo center where negotiations are held.

The media plays a fundamental role in shaping both policymakers’ and the public’s understanding of climate issues, according to Max Boykoff, who contributed research and analysis to the most recent climate mitigation report from the U.N.-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “People aren’t picking up the IPCC report or peer-reviewed research to understand climate change,” he said. “People are reading about it in the news. That’s what shapes their understanding.”

“Vast Sums of Money”

The fossil fuel industry’s attempts to extend its social license by buying friendly advertorials and other sponsored content date back to 1970, when Mobil Oil Vice President of Public Affairs Herbert Schmertz worked with the New York Times to create the first advertorial. The company proceeded to run these pieces, which Schmertz described as “political pamphlets,” in the Times every week for decades — a program that Mobil Oil extended to dozens of other outlets. A peer-reviewed 2017 study of Mobil and then Exxon Mobil’s New York Times advertorials found that 81 percent of the ones that mentioned climate change emphasized doubt in the science.

The advent of “brand studios” inside most major media outlets over the past decade has supercharged such content programs. Now many publications have staff dedicated to creating content for advertisers, and the outlets market their ability to tailor content to their readership. These offerings come at a higher cost than traditional ad buys, making them increasingly important to for-profit newsrooms facing a crisis in the traditional revenue models. And fossil fuel companies have been happy to pay.

“They wouldn’t be spending vast sums of money on these campaigns if they didn’t have a payoff, and it’s well documented that for decades, the fossil fuel industry has leveraged and weaponized and innovated the media technology of the day to its advantage,” said University of Miami researcher Geoffrey Supran, a co-author of the 2017 advertorial study with Oreskes. “It’s sometimes treated as a historical phenomenon, but in reality, we’re living today with the digital descendants of the editorial campaigns pioneered by the fossil fuel industry — the old strategy is very much alive and well.”

“It’s well documented that for decades, the fossil fuel industry has leveraged and weaponized and innovated the media technology of the day to its advantage.”

As their content marketing about the journey to net zero continues to get bigger and better, oil majors’ investments in fossil fuel development have only increased. A peer-reviewed study comparing oil majors’ advertising claims and actions, published in the journal Plos One in 2022, found that while the companies are talking more than ever about energy transition and decarbonization, they are not actually investing in either. “The companies are pledging a transition to clean energy and setting targets more than they are making concrete actions,” the study’s authors wrote.

Reporters at the publications we reviewed often cover this disconnect between advertising and action. Their employers, however, then sell the space next to those stories for industry-sponsored takes that research shows many readers take equally as seriously.

Taking a page from Schmertz’s book, the WP Creative Group — the Washington Post’s internal brand studio — describes on its website how it goes about “influencing the influencers.”

In 2022 alone, Exxon Mobil sponsored more than 100 editions of Washington Post newsletters. Throughout 2020 and 2021, the Post also ran a series of online editorials for the American Petroleum Institute, the most powerful fossil fuel lobby in the U.S., including a multimedia piece that argued renewable energy is unreliable and fossil gas is a needed complement — talking points that the paper’s news reporters often debunk. During this time, the Washington Post editorial team published Pulitzer Prize-winning climate reporting and expanded its climate coverage.

Over the past three years, the Financial Times has also created dedicated web pages for various fossil majors, including Equinor and Aramco, along with native content and videos, all focused on promoting oil and gas as a key component of the energy transition. In that same period, Politico has run native ads more than 50 times for the American Petroleum Institute; organized 37 email campaigns for Exxon Mobil; and sent dozens of newsletters sponsored by BP and Chevron, the latter of which also sponsors Politico’s annual Women Rule summit.

According to data from MediaRadar, the New York Times took in more than $20 million in revenue from fossil fuel advertisers from October 2020 to October 2023 — twice what any other outlet earned from the industry. That number is due largely to the paper’s relationship with Saudi Aramco, which brought in $13 million in ad revenue during that three-year period, via a combination of print, mobile, and video ads, as well as sponsored newsletters.

The revenue figure does not include creative services fees paid to the Times’s internal brand studio. New York Times spokesperson Alexis Mortenson said that the studio creates custom content for fossil fuel advertisers in print, video, and digital, including podcasts, and promotes it to the New York Times audience via “dark social posts”: advertisements that cannot be found organically and do not appear on a brand’s timeline. Mortenson noted that the Times also allows fossil fuel companies to sponsor some newsletters, provided they are not climate related.

“I feel like it’s really important not to beat around the bush and to just recognize these activities for what they are, which is literally Big Oil and mainstream media collaborating in PR campaigns for the industry,” said Supran. “It’s nothing short of that.”

“Gross,” “Undermining,” and “Dangerous”

Of all the outlets we reviewed, only Reuters offers fossil fuel advertisers every possible avenue to reach its audience. Its event arm even produces custom events for the industry, despite counting “freedom from bias” as a core pillar of its “trust principles,” which were adopted to protect the publication’s independence during World War II.

Since Reuters News, a subsidiary of Canadian media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, acquired an events business in 2019, the distinction between the company’s newsroom and its commercial ventures has become increasingly blurred. Reuters’ in-house creative studio produces native print, audio, video, and newsletter content for multiple oil majors, including Shell, Saudi Aramco, and BP, while Reuters journalists routinely take part as moderators and interviewers and propose guest speakers for Reuters Events.

In a media kit for “content opportunities in the upstream industry,” Reuters Events staff offers to produce webinars, white papers, and live-event interviews for those hoping to get in front of its “unrivalled audience reach of decision makers in the oil & gas industry.” For its Hydrogen 2023 event, Reuters Events produced a companion white paper on the top 100 hydrogen innovators, which it then used to market the event in various other outlets. Topping the list of innovators were key event sponsors Chevron and Shell.

Reuters Events also stages fossil fuel industry trade shows aimed at maximizing production of oil and gas, and it creates digital events and webinars for vendors in the fossil fuel supply chain looking to connect with oil and gas companies. In June, Reuters Events convened hundreds of oil, gas, and tech executives in Houston for Reuters Events: Data Driven Oil & Gas USA 2023, a conference held under the banner “Scaling Digital to Maximize Profit.”

“Time is money, which is why our agenda gets straight to key pain points holding back drilling and production maximization,” the conference website said.

In December 2022, Reuters ran an event sponsored by the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, a lobby group that includes many of the world’s largest oil companies, to discuss the “major part” fossil fuel companies “play in ensuring a sustainable energy transition.” During the event, industry talking points were tweeted directly from the Reuters Events Twitter account.

Other news outlets, including the Financial Times, The Economist, and Politico, have held their own climate-focused events, sponsored by petrochemical majors like BP, Chevron, Eni, and Shell.

“Business-to-business publishers always had an events revenue stream, but consumer-facing news publications didn’t really get into the events business until digital advertising became commodified,” media analyst Ken Doctor said. Now events represent 20 to 30 percent of revenue for some publications. Doctor called them a “thought-leader exercise” for the advertisers. “There are only a few top media brands out there, and if you are associated with any of them, there is a lot of tangential brand building benefit to that.”

“How can we expect people to take our climate coverage seriously after everything these oil companies have done to hide the truth?”

Climate reporters at the outlets we reviewed, who requested anonymity to avoid professional repercussions, described the practice of selling advertorials and event sponsorships to fossil fuel companies as “gross,” “undermining,” and “dangerous.”

“Not only does it undermine the climate journalism these outlets are producing, but it actually signals to readers that climate change is not a serious issue,” one climate reporter said.

Another journalist at a major media organization said the outlet had undermined its credibility by striking commercial deals with oil and gas companies with a long history of casting doubt on climate science. “Where is our integrity? How can we expect people to take our climate coverage seriously after everything these oil companies have done to hide the truth?”

This article was reported in partnership with DeSmog and The Nation.

Additional reporting: Joey Grostern.

The post Leading News Outlets Are Doing the Fossil Fuel Industry’s Greenwashing appeared first on The Intercept.

This was the scene where Columbia students gathered last Thursday for a “peaceful protest art installation” and demonstration organized by the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Hundreds of students demanded that Columbia publicly call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest its endowment from corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid, and end its academic programs in Tel Aviv.

The next day, Gerald Rosberg, chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety, announced Columbia had suspended its chapters of JVP and SJP through the end of the semester, citing an “unauthorized event” that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The announcement quickly drew widespread criticism, including from hundreds of Jewish faculty who denounced the “vague allegations” that served as grounds for the suspensions.

But amid the backlash, StandWithUs, a self-described “non-partisan Israel education organization,” lauded Columbia’s decision. “StandWithUs sent several legal letters to universities like @Columbia, urging them to immediately hold these groups accountable for the hate, fear, and harassment they incite on campus,” the group wrote on social media. “We hope more universities will follow suit.” 

Alongside Israel advocacy groups like the Brandeis Center, the International Legal Forum, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, StandWithUs has spent years trying to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses, often by weaponizing civil rights law. The groups allege that, while the political speech may be protected by the First Amendment, it fosters a campus climate of antisemitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits federally funded programs from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. As students have ramped up pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past month, Israel advocacy groups have escalated a pressure campaign of their own. 

Earlier this month, StandWithUs sent an open letter to thousands of universities addressed to the general counsel and vice president of student affairs, outlining actions colleges could take to ensure compliance with Title VI. The group’s recommendations include requiring student identification cards at protests, monitoring university communication channels for “biased statements about Israel,” and investigating student groups for ties to Hamas. The group has also sent a surge of direct letters urging administrators to clamp down on specific Palestine solidarity campus events. Meanwhile, on November 9, the Brandeis Center filed two Title VI complaints with the Department of Education against the University of Pennsylvania and Wellesley College. (The Brandeis Center also joined forces with the Anti-Defamation League to call on the presidents of nearly 200 universities to investigate their SJP chapters, alleging they could have ties to Hamas that would constitute “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”)

“If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

According to Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, the groups tend to target “pretty mundane examples of pro-Palestine expression … because that’s precisely what these organizations are trying to get rid of.” But as Israel’s military assault over the past month has become “increasingly indefensible for the pro-Israel forces,” it’s spurred a new wave of Title VI threats.

“That’s what’s motivating the strategy to try to raise the stakes of Palestinian expression and organizing by getting universities to try to crack down on it,” said Saba. “If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

Crackdown at Columbia

The Title VI crusade adds even more fuel to the recent punitive actions against Palestine solidarity student groups. 

Since the start of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, students at Columbia have organized numerous protests, vigils, and rallies in a show of support for civilians in Gaza. As part of a nationwide “Shut it Down for Palestine” walkout on November 9, SJP and JVP arranged an art installation and rally.

One day later, the groups were suspended for the unauthorized event and “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” making them ineligible to hold campus events or receive school funding for the remainder of the term. 

While university policy requires students to obtain a permit 10 days before an event, violations of policy usually result in a disciplinary proceeding against individual students, not an outright suspension of an entire organization, according to Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University who has been serving as a faculty advocate for the sanctioned students. 

Franke noted that the organizations were suspended by a newly formed group, the Special Committee on Campus Safety, which was created with no advance notice and did not go through the standard University Senate Executive Committee approval process. Columbia’s website does not contain any mention of the Special Committee before the November 10 announcement, which did not elaborate on the new committee’s members or purview. 

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating.”

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating,” said Franke. Franke has asked Rosberg, the chair of the Special Committee, for more information about the new group and the specific rhetoric that led to SJP and JVP’s sanctioning. She says she has not received a response. 

Additionally, internet archives show Columbia quietly updated its student group event policy some time between June 12 and October 20 to include new language around the sanctioning of student organizations “for failure to obtain event approval and/or not abiding by terms of an approved event.”

“They edited the student conduct rules without any consultation with the groups that normally are required to be consulted,” said Franke. 

Columbia University did not respond to a request for comment.

During her 25-year tenure, Franke noted she’s seen “a lot of demonstrations,” from the Iraq War to 9/11. “All manner of things have been debated, protested, and the university’s structure was able to handle it,” she said. “But somehow, they had to create — without any consultation with any of the responsible governing bodies — a whole new way of dealing with these issues.”

Columbia is one of three private universities that have now sanctioned their SJP chapters in an unprecedented cascade of crackdowns on student organizing around Palestine solidarity. 

Earlier this month, Brandeis University announced an outright and total ban on its SJP chapter, claiming the group “openly supports Hamas.” On Tuesday, George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter from hosting on-campus events for three months.

Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, wrote in a statement to The Intercept that after the group sent letters to thousands of universities, “many responded privately thanking us for the letter or, in the days after receiving it, taking concrete action on their campuses, such as Columbia, Brandeis, and GWU banning SJP for the rest of the semester.” 

She added, “Other schools have notified us that they have launched independent investigations or task forces to address antisemitism. We look forward to seeing the results of those inquiries.”

Changing Standards

At Pomona College in Claremont, California, student organizers have also been challenged by a shifting web of guidelines. Samson Zhang, an editor of a student publication focused on leftist campus organizing called Claremont Undercurrents, noted that new policies seemed to arise in direct response to specific Palestine solidarity campus actions. 

In one instance, 150 students attended a vigil at the student services center. “It was very intentionally organized so that no club claimed it, and the messaging was that it was organized by everybody and nobody,” said Zhang. “That happened Friday, and by Monday they sent out an email with a new demonstration policy that an event is only compliant with the student code of conduct if there’s a specific student club that it’s registered under.” 

And, on November 7 — the day before a planned divestment protest — Pomona President Gabi Starr sent a letter to students and alumni with a reminder of campus demonstration rules. Claremont Undercurrents reported that one day before Starr’s email blast, StandWithUs sent her a letter expressing concern over the event. The letter urged the administration to take immediate action “to prevent discriminatory treatment of Jewish and Israeli students” and specifically noted that the administration has “the right to prohibit masks worn for the purpose of concealing identity.” Starr’s email similarly states that “masks that prevent recognition of individuals pose a challenge to the ability to maintain campus codes of conduct,” adding that students may be asked to remove them. 

In response to inquiries from The Student Life, a campus newspaper, Pomona’s spokesperson said Starr’s mention of masks “was in response to significant concerns related to our own campus — not in response to any outside organization.”

StandWithUs has targeted Pomona before. In April 2021, the Associated Students of Pomona College voted to ban the use of student government funds on items or companies that “knowingly support the Israeli occupation of Palestine” — a move that triggered a swift condemnation from Starr. That same day, StandWithUs sent a letter praising Starr for her statement and calling on her to use “whatever means at your disposal to invalidate this resolution.” Every student government representative that voted in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution that year was then doxxed on Canary Mission, a secretive website that posts public blacklists of Palestinian rights organizers.

One year prior, in February 2020, the David Horowitz Freedom Center wrote to Starr and Pitzer College President Melvin Oliver, claiming that the colleges had violated Title VI by fostering “pervasive, college-sponsored anti-semitism.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Horowitz as an extremist, noting that “the Freedom Center has launched a network of projects giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.” 

“Political Cudgel”

A core ask from groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center and StandWithUs is that university policies adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, or IHRA, working definition of antisemitism, which critics say falsely equates broad criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The IHRA definition found new footing in 2019, when then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “consider” the IHRA definition in Title VI enforcement. 

“IHRA expressly recognizes that criticism of Israel, similar to criticism of other countries, is not antisemitic,” wrote Rothstein of StandWithUs. “And it recognizes that some rhetoric and actions related to Israel do cross the line into bigotry.”

By eliding meaningful differences between critique of Israel and Jewish discrimination, said Saba of Palestine Legal, the groups warp claims of antisemitism into a “political cudgel” to be wielded against students voicing solidarity with Palestine.

The Brandeis Center’s recent Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania conflates disparate events as uniform examples of campus antisemitism. The letter notes recent disturbing attacks against Hillel, a Jewish student organization, including bomb threats and an instance in which a Penn student vandalized the Hillel building and yelled “fuck the Jews.” But the letter also highlights Penn’s “Palestine Writes” literature festival, condemning the September event’s inclusion of speakers “known for their aggressive stance against the Jewish State.”

In November 2022, the International Legal Forum, an Israel-based organization dedicated to “fighting legal battles against terror, antisemitism, and de-legitimization of Israel,” filed a Title VI complaint against the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, after nine student groups banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at their events. In its complaint, the group wrote, “Zionism is an integral and indispensable part of Jewish identity.”

Since its founding in 2001, StandWithUs, which is registered as a nonprofit under the name “Israel Emergency Alliance,” has launched efforts to oppose “anti-Israel bias” in libraries, supported anti-BDS laws, and encouraged supporters to buy Caterpillar stock amid scrutiny over the construction company’s role in Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes. The group recruits annual student fellows to serve as pro-Israel activists on American campuses nationwide and once invited Elvis Costello on a VIP trip in an attempt to convince the singer to change his mind about canceling concerts in Israel.

Last year, StandWithUs filed a Title VI complaint against George Washington University, after assistant professor of clinical psychology Lara Sheehi hosted a brown-bag lunch with a Palestinian professor, leading to a pressure campaign and an internal investigation that turned up nothing. “Many of the statements the complaint alleges were made by Dr. Sheehi were, according to those who heard them, either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented,” the university said in a summary of its findings at the time, adding that Sheehi had “denounced antisemitism as a real and present danger” in classroom discussion. StandWithUs refuted this characterization. In February, Palestine Legal filed its own Title VI complaint against GWU for a “hostile environment of anti-Palestinian racism,” which cites the Sheehi case among others.

“The byproduct of all of this is that you have now a lot of obfuscation about what the meaning of antisemitism is and what constitutes antisemitism, which is very dangerous for Jewish students on campus,” said Saba. “It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students, which tend to come from the political right.”

“It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students.”

Meanwhile, many members of the Jewish community are resisting these groups’ efforts to conflate Judaism and Zionism, noting that their faith inspires resistance to injustice, not blanket support for a regime. 

“A lot of institutions across the country, and also at the university, have pushed this idea of a hegemonic Jewish community that all shares the same political beliefs,” said Rafi Ash, a Brown University sophomore who was one of 20 Jewish students arrested during a November sit-in at an administrative building organized by BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now. “We all have been kind of disturbed by the ways in which a Jewish identity has been twisted in a way that makes it political.”

While the Department of Education is expected to field a new influx of Title VI complaints from organizations representing Jewish students, Saba noted that groups like Palestine Legal have also filed complaints regarding instances of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic discrimination on campuses. The Department of Education has never made a finding of antisemitic or anti-Palestinian discrimination in any of its investigations so far, though that could soon change as the Israel–Hamas war puts Title VI in the limelight. The American Civil Liberties Union has begun to take legal action over the First Amendment rights of Palestinian solidarity protesters.

“We are in touch with many, many, many student groups across the country, and we are seeing a pattern of heightened scrutiny and suppression,” said Saba. “Fortunately, despite the mass suppressive effort, students are continuing to organize, continuing to speak out, and are refusing to be silenced. We’re seeing one of the largest upsurges in pro-Palestine organizing and demonstration that we’ve ever seen.”

The post Student Protests for Gaza Targeted by Pro-Israel Groups for Alleged Civil Rights Violations appeared first on The Intercept.

No children play on the jungle gym here anymore, and no families bustle in and out of front doors. Last year, after mounting concern from the community over Norlite’s air emissions, the Cohoes Housing Authority began relocating all residents of the 70-unit Saratoga Sites complex. The city now plans to raze the homes. 

For more than 30 years, the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, or DEC, has attempted to force Norlite to comply with state environmental laws, issuing the plant hundreds of thousands of dollars in penalties. But even dozens of violations dating back to the 1990s have failed to stop Norlite from polluting. Last year, when New York Attorney General Letitia James and the DEC took the extra step of suing the plant, alleging its emissions endangered the health of the surrounding community, many nearby residents welcomed the escalation. But as the lawsuit plays out, the state has allowed Norlite to remain in operation, even as the plant continues to violate environmental laws — a move that many community members see as a capitulation. 

“We should be able to breathe clean air, and we’re not,” said Ed Sokol, 89, who has lived near the plant his entire life and is active with Lights Out Norlite, a group of former Saratoga Sites residents and local advocates. “This has been going on for years, and it’s about time — if they’re violating all these laws, shut them down.”

Now, Lights Out Norlite is turning to a new constitutional provision — dubbed the “Green Amendment” — in the hopes that it will finally help them do just that.

Passed by voters in 2021, the Green Amendment enshrines New Yorkers’ fundamental and inalienable right to clean air, water, and a “healthful environment” in the state constitution. As an addition to the bill of rights, the amendment grants environmental rights the highest constitutional protections, akin to freedom of speech or religion. 

The state, however, has called on the court to dismiss Lights Out Norlite’s Green Amendment claim entirely — and the attorney general is arguing to limit the amendment’s reach.

“We should be able to breathe clean air, and we’re not.”

The showdown between the state and Lights Out Norlite is one of the first tests of New York’s Green Amendment, and the court’s decision could have reverberations around the country. If the court sides with the attorney general, legal scholars and advocates say that interpretation could topple the amendment’s promise. Since New York is only the third state to enshrine a Green Amendment in its bill of rights — and the first to do so in 50 years — the results of these early cases could impact ongoing efforts to pass similar amendments in more than a dozen states across the country.

Attorney Maya K. van Rossum, founder of the national advocacy group Green Amendments For The Generations, said that the DEC and attorney general “are really trying to just diminish their obligations to protect the environmental rights of the people” with an argument that would “render impotent the New York Green Amendment.” 

But if the court sides with Lights Out Norlite, van Rossum added, the outcome would “provide real inspiration and power for other states that are pursuing this pathway.”

Endless Violations

In Cohoes, a working-class city of fewer than 20,000 residents, Norlite’s emissions have long been a source of concern. The DEC has designated several neighborhoods surrounding the plant as “potential environmental justice areas,” meaning nearly a quarter of household incomes are below the federal poverty level or a high proportion of residents are members of minority groups.

The Norlite facility burns hazardous waste, including waste fuels and used building heating oils, in order to create a popular construction material called lightweight aggregate. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, there are 27 plants nationwide that burn hazardous waste, and Norlite is the only one permitted to do so in all of New York.

For decades, the state has found that Norlite’s process has frequently sent dust, including particles of carcinogenic crystalline silica, into the surrounding area. For violating the conditions of its permit as well as the state’s air pollution control law, the DEC has issued nearly $1 million in fines against Norlite.

In 2020, Norlite came under increased scrutiny for burning a toxic firefighting foam that contained a class of industrial chemicals known as PFAS. Those chemicals don’t easily break down in the environment and scientists have found they are associated with numerous health concerns, including cancers and infertility. After the plant was found to have incinerated more than 2 million pounds of the foam through a contract with the Department of Defense, the state banned incinerating the material.

For Joe Ritchie, 23, who grew up at the Saratoga Sites public housing complex, dust from the plant was a part of everyday life. Small specks would regularly settle on homes and cars in clumps. When he took a paper towel to wipe down his windows, it would turn black. 

Ritchie worries that his former neighbors’ health conditions, including frequent nosebleeds and asthma attacks, could have been a result of living next to Norlite. Across the courtyard from his former house, he points out the home of a neighbor who died from lung cancer just a few months ago; he knows state data shows the area has a higher than expected rate of lung cancer, and wonders how much Norlite may have contributed to those conditions.

The DEC’s monitoring of the plant’s emissions in recent years has found that large inhalable dust particles from Norlite reach Saratoga Sites. “Holding Norlite accountable for its environmental violations impacting surrounding communities, including frontline environmental justice neighborhoods, is a top priority for the Department of Environmental Conservation,” a department spokesperson said in a statement about those results earlier this year.

The state health department said it is aware of DEC’s site monitoring data and supports the agency’s effort to regulate Norlite. In a report on cancer rates and health outcomes in the area released in September, the agency said its review could not prove whether “specific exposures,” like Norlite’s emissions, contributed to health conditions.

“I just want there to be justice for the people of Saratoga Sites, who lived here for generations.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Norlite spokesperson Richard Bamberger pointed to the health department’s recent review. “There is no evidence of any negative health effects from the Norlite facility,” he said. 

Ritchie hopes the case, by invoking the Green Amendment, will finally provide some relief for the community that long lived next door. “I just want there to be justice for the people of Saratoga Sites, who lived here for generations,” he said, “who have been voiceless for forever.” 

Permitting Polluters 

In the months after the state filed its lawsuit, the DEC and Norlite reached an agreement: In exchange for additional monitoring and dust control measures, the plant could continue operating while the lawsuit winds its way through the courts. 

But even after being sued, Norlite has continued to violate state law. In May, emissions of inhalable particles from the site exceeded the state’s air pollution limits and violated the site’s permit. According to the state’s notice of violation, Norlite’s emissions reached levels that the federal government deems “unhealthy,” putting vulnerable groups like children and those with severe health conditions particularly at risk. 

The attorney general’s office said it cannot comment on ongoing litigation and did not respond to questions about how it interprets the Green Amendment. The DEC also declined to comment on the pending litigation. 

Lights Out Norlite has now intervened in the state’s lawsuit, claiming in a legal filing that both Norlite and the DEC are responsible for the incinerator’s ongoing harm to the community. The group alleges that, by permitting the plant to operate and failing to bring it into compliance, the DEC has violated their Green Amendment rights.

So far, the state has vehemently disagreed with Lights Out Norlite’s position. In an August court filing, Attorney General Letitia James argued that the courts cannot order the DEC to enforce applicable laws and regulations against Norlite, even under the Green Amendment. It is solely the DEC’s decision whether and how to enforce the state’s environmental laws — the new amendment does not alter that discretion, the state argued. 

James’s response is not surprising, since it’s the attorney general’s responsibility to protect state agencies, said Nicholas Robinson, a professor of environmental law at Pace University. But, if a judge agrees with the state’s argument, it would be extremely damaging to the amendment’s strength for the people of New York. 

“Once the amendment was passed, the rights of an individual shifted,” Robinson said. He added that the DEC “can no longer permit, under the constitution, an enterprise to cause damage to the environment, or the air quality, or the health of a person.”

The state also argued that the new amendment does not empower courts to compel actions from agencies, such as shutting down the Norlite plant. James said in the filing that though the DEC may ultimately decide to revoke the plant’s permits, the court may not direct it to do so. 

However, legal experts and advocates say the attorney general’s interpretation doesn’t reflect how the courts have interpreted other constitutional rights. For those protections, like freedom of speech or freedom of religion, the state has an obligation not to infringe on them. 

“Yes, the agency has discretion,” said Rachel Spector, a senior attorney with the Northeast office of Earthjustice, an environmental law advocacy organization. “But its discretion has limits. It doesn’t have discretion to violate the state constitution.” 

Already, a separate judge has rejected part of the state’s argument in a previous Green Amendment case. In that case, brought by a group opposing a landfill in western New York, the judge ruled that the amendment could compel the state to take action — and explicitly called out the state’s push to weaken it.

“Indeed, the vigor of the State’s opposition to this lawsuit does not bode well for its enforcement of the Green Amendment,” Judge John Ark wrote in the decision. 

The state has since appealed his ruling.

A National Movement

New York’s attempt to limit the scope of its Green Amendment follows other states, seen as much less environmentally progressive, that have sought to weaken or ignore their own constitutional environmental protections. However, in Pennsylvania and Montana, the only states with similar amendments in their respective bills of rights, recent court rulings have begun to turn that tide. 

Courts have begun to force states to recognize the amendments as meaningful and enforceable, adding momentum to a national movement, said van Rossum, of Green Amendments For the Generations. Most recently, in August, a Montana judge’s landmark ruling found that a state law that prohibited agencies from considering climate impacts when permitting energy projects violated the young plaintiffs’ rights to a “clean and healthful environment” under its Green Amendment. 

Now, 15 other states have proposed similar amendments, according to van Rossum’s count. Though the language of each differs slightly, and their legal interpretations lie with each state’s judges, many are looking to New York to see how its courts interpret the nation’s newest Green Amendment, she said.

“It seems like they’re carving out a position that a change in the constitution doesn’t affect their discretion at all, which is clearly not true.”

The judge is expected to rule on New York’s motion to dismiss Lights Out Norlite’s Green Amendment claims later this year. To those living nearby, the health of the community may hang in the balance. And for others across the country, the decision of New York courts will set an example for how powerful constitutional Green Amendment rights can be — and how strongly states will fight to limit their reach. 

“It seems like they’re carving out a position that a change in the constitution doesn’t affect their discretion at all, which is clearly not true,” said Rebecca Bratspies, founding director of the Center for Urban Environmental Reform at the City University of New York School of Law. “To suggest that their discretion doesn’t need to be rethought and reexamined in light of this profound change in New York law seems to me really misguided.”

The post New Yorkers Voted to Put Environmental Rights in Their Constitution — but the Attorney General Is Fighting Back appeared first on The Intercept.

The petrochemical industry is now pivoting to another solution: “advanced” recycling. The term, also known as chemical recycling, is used to describe a variety of approaches that can supposedly turn even the most hard-to-recycle plastics into “sustainable” fuels or oils and chemicals that can be used in new plastic production.

But a new, 159-page report, released today by Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, casts serious doubt on the technology’s ability to make even a modest dent on the world’s growing plastic burden. In the most comprehensive report on chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. to date, researchers looked at the operations of 11 companies across the country to examine the plastic industry’s claim that chemical recycling can significantly help reduce global plastic pollution.

“The science and data currently available do not support this claim and actually point to the conclusion that chemical recycling would support expansion of plastic production, while potentially causing unacceptable levels of environmental and social harm — as well as impacts on human health — through emissions, waste generation, energy consumption, and contaminated outputs,” the report’s authors write.

The 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste.

Researchers found that, collectively, the 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste. Additionally, it was unclear if many of the facilities were even operating at their maximum stated capacity.

“For a lot of these plants, how much plastic they’ve actually processed is unknown,” Jennifer Congdon, a report contributor and deputy director of Beyond Plastics, told The Intercept. “There’s no requirement for public disclosure.”

Publicly Subsidized Failure

The lack of transparency surrounding chemical recycling facilities is especially concerning given the fact that five of the 11 plants have received public subsidies in the form of federal grants, state tax abatements, low-interest green bonds, or government loan guarantees.

The Brightmark Energy facility in Ashley, Indiana, for example, has received $4.55 million in grants and tax credits, as well as $185 million in tax-free bonds, according to the report’s findings. However, the plant is still operating in a test phase at one-fiftieth of its publicized capacity, four years after breaking ground.

Despite failing to achieve its production targets, Brightmark attempted to expand to Georgia in 2021 to build what would be the nation’s largest chemical recycling plant. The economic development group of Georgia’s Macon-Bibb County inked a tentative deal to provide $500 million in tax-exempt bonds to finance the construction of the plant, contingent on evidence that Brightmark’s Indiana plant was producing and selling product. Brightmark was unable to provide such evidence, and the project was officially killed in April 2022.

“The Brightmark example is really important, because they were not even fully operating and trying to expand into Georgia,” said Congdon. “Georgia said, ‘You show us that you’re actually making product and selling it, and then we’ll give you this money.’ That didn’t happen. When they’re being held to account to actually prove that they’re viable, in this case with Brightmark, it just didn’t work.”

“The math doesn’t work out.”

At the federal level, various incentives exist that could promote the continued expansion of chemical recycling, including the Department of Energy’s $25 million Strategy for Plastic Innovation, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which makes chemical recycling “approaches” eligible for a $10 billion tax credit program, though the report’s authors note that “it is not clear how such approaches are defined.”

“If we’re going to be putting money into projects that are going to address plastic pollution, it should be source reduction strategies,” Congdon said. “I would hope that any public official is doing their due diligence on whether or not they should be using public resources to finance these things. They should actually look into the viability and the pollution before making their choice, and I think the math doesn’t work out.”

A Regulatory Shell Game

Access to public coffers is not the only way the U.S. government has encouraged chemical recycling. Future projects may benefit from a recent spate of state-level laws that have lessened the regulatory burden on so-called advanced recycling. The bills reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing, which faces less stringent environmental guidelines. The American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest petrochemical industry group, has supported the bills with a lobbying push, claiming that solid waste facility permits are often inapplicable to chemical recycling and the change would simply regulate the facilities more accurately.

“There’s an enormous amount of industry-driven hype around chemical recycling and the main reason for that is they don’t want to see legislation at the state or federal level that restricts the production of plastic,” said Lee Bell, policy adviser to IPEN, a network of more than 600 nongovernmental organizations in over 125 countries. “It’s widely agreed that the only way to reduce plastic pollution in a substantive way is to cut production of plastic itself.”

Indeed, the United States’ support for chemical recycling appears to be an outlier in the international field.

At the 2023 Basel Convention, the leading international decision-making body on the movement and disposal of hazardous waste, delegates rejected the inclusion of chemical recycling in global guidance on plastic waste management.

“During the extended negotiations on the matter, over 50 countries objected to the inclusion of chemical recycling in the guidelines on the basis that there was no available independent data to demonstrate that chemical recycling constituted environmentally sound management of plastic waste,” states the Beyond Plastics report. “Despite 50 years of operation of these technologies, no empirical data was presented to demonstrate they met criteria for environmentally sound management.”

Bell, who was a member of the Basel Convention Working Group on the technical guidelines for environmentally sound management of plastic waste from 2019 to 2023, provided more background in an email to The Intercept.

“The Africa region spoke as a group opposing the inclusion of chemical recycling and they represented 54 countries, mainly on the basis that they did not want to become the destination for these technologies, the hazardous waste they create and the toxic emissions they produce, having already experienced the dumping of other wastes from the global north under the guise of ‘recycling,’” Bell wrote. “They were not alone and several other countries also had serious concerns about the lack of data associated with the industry.”

The data that is available about chemical recycling raises serious concerns for public health and environmental risks. A report from the National Resources Defense Council in February 2022 looked at state-level permit data and found that many chemical recycling facilities are permitted to release hazardous air pollutants and “chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects like birth defects.”

The Beyond Plastics report also cites scientific literature that has found “emissions of persistent, cancer-causing compounds from the chemical recycling facilities or their fuel products,” including dioxins, volatile organic compounds, and heavy metals. The authors conducted a 5-mile analysis around each of the 11 plants using the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which found that “eight of the plants are located in areas with lower-than-average levels of income, compared to either state or national averages; and seven have higher-than-average concentrations of people of color than the rest of the state and country.”

“What data we do have raises red flags about this technology,” said Bell. “If we were to see wide-scale scale-up and build-out, we could foresee very, very significant emission impacts and very little to show for it in terms of recycled plastic production.”

The post Unproven “Advanced Recycling” Facilities Have Received Millions in Public Subsidies appeared first on The Intercept.

The sweeping Republican effort to ban books from schools could not succeed solely on the backs of fervid state lawmakers and extremist school board members. Reactionary demands to censor books on topics ranging from Black history to LGBTQ+ existence have been abetted by the timid acquiescence of school districts, superintendents, and others in educational leadership. Now, Scholastic, the world’s largest children’s book publisher, has joined the constellation of parties tacitly aiding the GOP’s suppressive agenda.

For its thousands of book fairs in elementary schools this year, the company has segregated books focusing on a huge array of topics and stories — fiction and nonfiction — that share little in common aside from not centering white, heterosexual experience. Books on Black identity, picture books with LGBTQ+ characters, stories of Indigenous history and migration, among others, have been grouped together in a collection under the cloying title “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice.” School officials can then opt to exclude the entire section from their schools’ book fairs in one fell swoop. As Judd Legum reported, one librarian called the option a “bigot button.”

The policy design bends toward censorship: Librarians are offered the choice to include the collection, but exclusion is the baseline. Book Riot, an independent book industry website, noted that Scholastic is “the de facto school book fair provider”: a billion-dollar multinational corporation that hosts 120,000 book fairs in the United States each year. The scales of power do not weigh heavily on the publisher to bend so readily to far-right pressure.

The company has hardly been restrained in its selections: Titles up for en masse exclusion include nothing so radical as a biography of Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a picture book about the late Rep. John Lewis, a collection of poems by National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman, and numerous kids’ books that dare to show that LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and disabled people exist. In previous years, such titles would have simply been mixed in with other offerings.

Book bans have been a major front in the Republicans’ Christo-nationalist refashioning of the education system. According to a report from PEN America, in the 2022 to 2023 school year there were 3,362 recorded instances of book bans in U.S. public school classrooms and libraries. “Authors whose books are targeted are most frequently female, people of color, and/or LGBTQ+ individuals,” the report noted. In the last two years, 15 states have passed legislation to ban books in all school grades that relate to some mangled notion of critical race theory or anything that challenges racism and introduces gender nonconformity. Similar bills have been proposed in more than a dozen states.

“Because Scholastic Book Fairs are invited into schools, where books can be purchased by kids on their own, these laws create an almost impossible dilemma,” the company said in a statement published in response to criticism. “[B]ack away from these titles or risk making teachers, librarians, and volunteers vulnerable to being fired, sued, or prosecuted.”

The deflection to issues of teacher liability is a cheap abdication. As a powerful corporate enterprise, the publisher could throw its weight behind challenging book bans and defending imperiled teachers who fight for anti-racist education. Instead, it is making the enactment of reactionary laws easier. That a billion-dollar firm has not taken the righteous path comes as no shock.

Scholastic’s decision is all the more feeble given the weaknesses of the book ban laws and removal policies in question. The language of the laws themselves is extremely vague. For instance, Arizona bans “instruction that presents any form of blame or judgment on the basis of race, ethnicity or sex.” Florida is particularly expansive but no more specific, barring “any training or instruction that ‘espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels’ belief in certain ideas about race, sex, color, or national origin.” Arkansas legislation simply states that public institutions are barred from the “teaching or training of divisive concepts.”

The laws’ ambiguity gives the state expansive leverage to reprimand and punish schools, librarians, and individual teachers should a prosecutor choose to apply the law aggressively. The imprecision, however, also gives educators and school officials more ground to push back — especially as fights against these laws continue in federal court.

School districts and educational companies like Scholastic need not jump so readily through right-wing hoops.

Instead, school districts have mostly responded with vigor in removing books from shelves. Teachers and librarians should not, of course, have to risk their livelihoods, and schools should not have to risk losing funding, in order to keep diverse books on shelves. But school districts (those not already under the yoke of extremists) and educational companies like Scholastic need not jump so readily through right-wing hoops. The progressive-lite ring of “Share Every Story, Celebrate Every Voice” does not drown out the fact that the billion-dollar company is offering up censorship on a platter.

The answer to the GOP’s ideological warfare has never been to put our faith in private corporations like Scholastic to maintain kids’ access to diverse reading material, just as Bud Light and Target will not carve the path for trans liberation by market-testing LGBTQ+ inclusivity.

Scholastic Book Fairs are themselves a reflection of an underfunded, unequal public school system, in which a private company sets up shop inside schools to sell to the parents and libraries that can afford to spend the money. “School book fairs are a public display of disposable income,” wrote Book Riot’s Danika Ellis, “it is school-sponsored consumption.”

But for the sheer fact of offering books that tell stories beyond whiteness and gender conformity, Scholastic has — like Disney — drawn the ire of far-right zealots. Legum noted, “In recent months, Scholastic has faced sustained criticism from Brave Books, a publisher created to counter ‘the progressive agenda in so many of today’s children’s books.’” The group plans to offer alternative book fairs to meet more reactionary tastes. Their titles include such dross as “Elephants Are Not Birds,” which teaches children that “boys are not girls,” by failing to understand how the constructs of gender, sex, and, indeed, language and meaning work.

Brave Books are hardly a threat to Scholastic’s near monopoly on school book fairs, but like every corporation erroneously branded “woke,” the publishers’ commitment to social justice, even in its most tepid form, goes as far as it serves profit margins and no further. The “Share Every Story” bundle is a dodge, aiding book bans while keeping the market share for sales of texts celebrating diversity. If the company wants to protect teachers, librarians, and schools from the consequences of rightfully defying book bans, it can throw its money behind getting Christo-fascists out of office, or supporting lawsuits and legislation to stop book bans and protect educators who won’t be coerced out of teaching inclusive titles.

The post Scholastic Makes It Easy to Ban Black and LGBTQ+ Books appeared first on The Intercept.

Head south on state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on the front door is barely legible. But atop that humble three-acre lot lies a leading solution to the global plastic pollution crisis — well, according to the plastic industry.

The facility is home to the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week operations of Braven Environmental, a company that says it can recycle nearly 90 percent of plastic waste through a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis. Traditional recycling is able to process only about 8.7 percent of America’s plastic waste; pyrolysis uses high temperatures and low-oxygen conditions to break down the remaining plastics, like films and Styrofoam, ideally turning them into feedstock oil for new plastic production.

The American Chemistry Council, the country’s leading petrochemical industry trade group, claims that chemical recycling will create a “circular economy” for the bulk of the world’s plastic, diverting it from oceans and landfills. Plastic giants have gone so far as to dub the process “advanced recycling,” but environmentalists say this is a misnomer because the majority of the plastic processed at such facilities is not recycled at all. In fact, researchers have found that the process uses more energy and has a worse overall environmental impact than virgin plastic production. Numerous companies have tried and failed to prove that chemical recycling is commercially viable.

Despite these challenges, lawmakers nationwide are now embracing the technology, thanks to a massive lobbying push from the ACC and other petrochemical groups. As of September, 24 states have passed industry-backed bills that reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing. The change effectively deregulates the process, since manufacturing facilities tend to face less stringent guidelines than waste incinerators.

As one of only seven commercial facilities currently operating in the United States, Braven Environmental is at the vanguard of the growing chemical recycling boom. An Intercept investigation, however, found numerous issues at its Zebulon facility.

A review of meeting minutes, permit applications, and compliance documents reveals that Braven misled the public about the risks of its pyrolysis operation and has potentially endangered human health and the environment through “significant noncompliance” with hazardous waste management regulations. While the ACC has touted Braven as a sustainable success story, documents also show that much of the company’s pyrolysis oil was not converted into useful plastic or fuel — it was disposed of as highly toxic waste.

“Chemical recycling is really a greenwashing technique for burning up a bunch of petrochemicals in a new way, and it’s releasing tons of air pollutants into the environment,” said Alexis Luckey, executive director of Toxic Free NC, in an interview. “What we’re talking about is incinerating carcinogens and neurotoxicants in a community.”

“Hazardous Items, We Have None”

On April 8, 2019, the Zebulon Board of Commissioners held a joint public hearing with the town planning board to gather community feedback on several proposed construction projects. One of the developments on the docket was from a company called Golden Renewable Energy, based in Yonkers, New York. 

Golden Renewable — which changed its name to Braven Environmental in the North Carolina business registry in 2021 — was requesting a special use permit to “locate a refinery and the storage of flammable liquids” on a parcel of land zoned for heavy industry.

According to minutes from the hearing, Meade Bradshaw, former assistant planning director for Zebulon, explained that Braven must show the proposed development “will not materially endanger the public health, safety, or welfare” in order to be granted a special use permit. In response, Ross Sloane, Braven’s business development director, made a series of promises to this effect, painting the company as a safe, family-run operation.

“We’ve never had an incidence in an operation that’s been operating up in New York now for seven years,” Sloane said. “My entire family operates the machine, so I don’t want to lose sleep.”

While Sloane pointed to Braven’s operations in Yonkers as evidence of the company’s safety record, The Intercept’s review of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation records found no indication that the company’s facility in Yonkers has ever been legally permitted to conduct plastic pyrolysis activities.

An air quality permit completed on February 22, 2013, states that the facility’s function was the conversion of vegetable oil to biofuels — a far cry from advanced thermal decomposition of plastic waste. In July 2014, inspectors from the DEC visited the facility and observed plastic waste being accepted and processed without authorization. The company agreed to resolve the violations, pay civil fines, and apply for a modified permit to accept recycled plastics, but the permit was never completed. DEC staff inspected the site again in 2021 and confirmed that Golden Renewable had moved its processing equipment out of state. DEC public records did not contain any additional permit information, and the Yonkers operation is Braven’s only other facility.

Public hearing meeting minutes also show Sloane told the town that Braven does not handle any hazardous materials. “Any kind of material trash, landfill items, hazardous items, we have none,” he said. “We do not contain any kind of hazardous materials. We have nothing that goes into a drain. … It’s all biodegradable.”

This turned out to be false. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database, Braven’s Zebulon facility generated and shipped 9.6 tons of hazardous ignitable waste and benzene in 2021 alone. In March of that year, Braven registered with the EPA as a large quantity generator: a facility that generates at least 1,000 kilograms per month of hazardous waste.

One list of warnings in a Braven air permit application reads like a toxicologist’s worst nightmare: The pyrolysis oil may cause cancer and genetic defects, as well as damage to organs, fertility, and unborn children. Other hazards included being “extremely flammable” and “very toxic to aquatic life” with “long lasting effects.”

Stephanie Hall, a parent of students at a nearby K-12 charter school, voiced concerns about air emissions during the hearing in Zebulon. She pointed out that the Braven lot would be adjacent to a community college and a public housing community, as well as only 780 feet from the charter school.

Sloane offered reassurance that Braven would “have no smells or emissions that are emitted to the air.” But when a planning board member asked for more information, he backtracked.

“It’s not a zero-emission process,” he clarified. “We do have an emission of CO2. It’s the exact same CO2 that comes through in your gas logs at your home.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Michael Moreno, Braven’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, wrote, “Braven strives to operate its Zebulon facility safely, responsibly and in compliance with its permits and regulatory requirements. Any discrepancies found are proactively resolved with the agencies involved.”

Braven’s special use permit application notes that the facility will have an exhaust stack but still characterizes the operation as a “closed loop process where all by products are fully contained without being discharged into the atmosphere.” An emissions test report prepared for Braven in March 2020 contradicts this claim, revealing that, in addition to CO2, the company’s plastic pyrolysis emits air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. The report also found that Braven would emit an estimated 5.14 tons of volatile organic compounds per year. It did not specify which VOCs were present, though known human carcinogens like benzene and styrene are commonly found in emissions from petrochemical operations. On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

Certain industrial facilities must annually report their chemical emissions for inclusion in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Since pyrolysis facilities are classified by the EPA as waste incinerators, they’re required to meet Clean Air Act guidelines but are excluded from TRI reporting requirements. This makes it difficult to assess the full health risks that Braven and other plastic pyrolysis units could pose to surrounding communities. In April, more than 300 environmental and public health organizations filed a petition with the EPA for the inclusion of waste incinerators in the database.

Ilona Jaspers, director of the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, has studied emissions generated from the burning of plastic waste. She called the TRI’s lack of pyrolysis and waste incineration data “a giant loophole.”

“I am all for finding good ways to make plastics into something usable, but the danger of generating air toxics in the process is considerable,” she said. “When we looked at the list of chemicals generated in the emissions of the plastics, a lot of it is not good. It’s kind of terrifying what gets generated when you burn plastics.”

In addition to air pollutants, residents raised the risk of potential water contamination. Hall, a professional engineer with a background in water resources, noted during the public meeting in Zebulon that the building slated to house Braven’s operations was built in 1994, so the lot would not have established stormwater control measures to treat any potential runoff. “You may want to include some sort of sand filter or proprietary stormwater device to help with any incidental spills,” she suggested, since the lot lies near a Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain.

“When that industrial park was developed, there were no regulations for stormwater control,” Bradshaw, the former assistant planning director, told The Intercept. “Because they’re just occupying an existing building … from a site standpoint, it did not need to meet current regulations. But the commissioners, as part of the special use permit, could’ve made that a condition if they wanted to.”

At a subsequent session, the planning board unanimously recommended denial of the permit, based on “lack of evidence and testimony” showing Braven would not endanger public health and safety. But the planning board’s decision was “just a recommendation,” Bradshaw noted, and did not dictate the final decision. The Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to approve the special use permit on May 6, 2019, under the sole condition that masonry screening be conducted around the fuel tanks.

Braven was up and running by March 2020. Four months in, one major company had already bet big on the nascent operation’s long-term success: To further its “corporate responsibility” goals, Sonoco agreed to deliver its waste plastics to Braven for the next 20 years.

Significant Noncomplier

As part of an unannounced hazardous waste compliance inspection, an environmental specialist from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, visited Braven’s Zebulon facility on September 26, 2022. The details of the resulting compliance report paint an alarming picture of a business operating in stark contrast to the health and safety promises made to Zebulon residents three years prior.

Inspectors cited Braven for numerous regulatory violations, including accumulating more than 400 containers of hazardous waste without a permit over the course of two years, as well as failing to “manage waste material in a manner to prevent it from discharging to the ground and storm drain system.”

The report details one incident in April 2022, when Braven sent 31,080 gallons of hazardous waste to a rented warehouse facility about one mile down the road. The transfer was conducted by a local trucking company, not a licensed hazardous waste transporter, and the warehouse was not permitted to receive such waste. The containers, which contained toxic chemicals like toluene and ethylbenzene, were then disposed of by a waste management service, though the transportation manifests for the disposal contained numerous inaccuracies.

The report also states that Braven generates light, medium, and heavy cut oils through plastic pyrolysis but has been unable to find a buyer for the heavy cut oils. As a result, the oil accumulated in a tank until it was eventually discarded as hazardous waste — twice. “The facility has been unable to demonstrate that it has been or can be legitimately used or recycled,” inspectors wrote.

“It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

“There’s very little actual monitoring data from these facilities that are doing plastic pyrolysis,” Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. “It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

Even Braven’s purportedly recyclable products pose substantial risks. In June 2021, Braven announced a “long-term agreement” to supply pyrolysis-derived oils to Chevron Phillips Chemical. The press release did not state outright what the oil will be used as feedstock for, stating only that it will help Chevron “achieve its circularity goals.” However, ProPublica reported in February that one Chevron refinery in Mississippi is turning pyrolysis oil into jet fuel; according to EPA documents, air pollution from the fuel production process could subject nearby residents to a colossal 1 in 4 cancer risk.

The Intercept confirmed that some of the pyrolysis oil at this Chevron facility is indeed supplied by Braven: The chemical name and unique registry number listed in an EPA record obtained by ProPublica matches the details of Braven’s pyrolysis oils found in a North Carolina air quality permit exemption application. Additionally, in July 2022, the EPA published notice in the Federal Register of several new pyrolysis oils manufactured by Braven, including the same one on the EPA record.

Some residents within one mile of Braven were already at an increased risk for environmental carcinogens before the business moved in: One nearby census tract has worse particulate matter and ozone exposure, hazardous waste proximity, and air toxics cancer risk than over 90 percent of the country.

During the town hearing, Sloane had emphasized Braven’s “proactive” safety features; the special use permit application promised “daily inspections.” The compliance investigation, however, noted numerous deficiencies in emergency preparedness, including the absence of a fire extinguisher in the main room where containers of flammable waste were accumulating, some of which were left open and unlabeled.

According to the report, Braven staff admitted that personnel had not conducted weekly inspections, and they were unable to provide documentation that an engineer’s certification had been completed for a hazardous waste tank. Neither safety data sheets for the pyrolysis oils nor an emergency contingency plan had been completed with all required information, and the plan had not been distributed to local emergency authorities.

Additionally, inspectors observed during the visit that oil-contaminated stormwater was being pumped from a containment pit into a storage tote, but the connecting hose was leaking and “dark staining was evident” on the paved area between the pit and the storm drain.

Christopher Serrati, Braven’s manager of operations, told inspectors at the time that the concrete surrounding the storm drain had been “power washed in the past to remove staining.” The report noted an absorbent sock had been placed around the storm drain, and dark staining was present on soil adjacent to the property’s stormwater outfall, indicating hazardous waste may have been discharged to the ground.

Following an assessment period, the North Carolina DEQ cited Braven as a “significant noncomplier” and issued the company an “initial imminent and substantial endangerment order” on April 28, 2023. Braven has not received any state or federal penalties.

“This is an ongoing state lead enforcement matter, and EPA is currently not involved. EPA cannot further comment regarding the facility’s compliance or enforcement activities,” wrote an EPA spokesperson.

As part of a spill remediation plan, the DEQ required that Braven test both stormwater and soil from the contamination sites. Four of the contaminated stormwater samples tested positive for high concentrations of benzene, according to a report submitted to the agency in January. The report notes, however, that Braven believes the high benzene levels can be attributed to oils that were left in the sampling totes.

Top/Left: Braven Environmental received a special use permit to store flammable liquids on Industrial Drive in Zebulon, N.C. Bottom/Right: Birds sit atop a water tower in downtown Zebulon, N.C. Photos: Schuyler Mitchell/The Intercept

“In the past, all waste including dike water was shipped as hazardous waste and therefore, our crew did not realize the new operations and they inadvertently used the old empty oil totes for dike stormwater storage,” wrote Braven. The report states that going forward, “Braven will use only clean totes to store dike stormwater, if any, to avoid any potential hazardous waste conditions for the stormwater totes.” Braven has also installed an oil/water separator for stormwater discharge.

However, Braven’s claim that contaminated stormwater had previously been disposed of as hazardous waste appears to contradict notes in the initial compliance investigation. “Records dated April 2022 documenting shipment of rainwater … were provided after the inspection and document the material was previously disposed of as non-hazardous,” inspectors wrote.

Singla, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the storm drain discharge a “big concern.”

“We know that when there’s spills or leaks from industrial facilities, benzene can contaminate surface water, groundwater especially,” Singla said. “If there’s any built environment over that groundwater, the benzene can migrate up through the soil into indoor spaces and then contaminate the air, and people can be exposed that way.”

Related

How the Plastics Industry Is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World

Another report submitted by Braven in June notes “site-specific groundwater investigations have not been conducted,” though a contractor completed a reconnaissance survey of potential “wells, springs, surface-water intakes, and sources of potable water” within 1,500 feet of the facility and did not observe any apparent water supply wells. The contractor said it also contacted the county for more information on potential water sources in the area but did not receive a response.

In late August, a new remedial action oversight report was posted to the DEQ’s public records database. A state chemist’s review of Braven’s soil samples found “evidence of elevated hexavalent chromium and arsenic” in the site’s underlying soil. The state’s report attributes these findings to “a release of waste,” since the results were above the levels found in background samples. Both arsenic and chromium are considered occupational carcinogens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The state offered Braven two remediation options: complete additional sampling and remove the contaminated soil, or close the impacted areas as a landfill. According to Melody Foote, a public information officer from the DEQ’s Division of Waste Management, Braven completed the additional sampling in late September. The DEQ is waiting for the sampling results and findings report, which is expected in three to four weeks.

Zebulon Commissioner Shannon Baxter called the noncompliance report “extremely disturbing” and noted that the public hearing testimony given in 2019 “appears to be in conflict with how Braven is actually operating.” Baxter was previously a member of the planning board and recommended denial of Braven’s permit in 2019. She noted that her views should not be interpreted as representative of the entire Board of Commissioners.

“I had my concerns as a member of the Planning Board, which is why we voted to recommend denial of the Special Use Permit,” Baxter wrote in a message to The Intercept. “Now, as a Commissioner, I am troubled about how these violations will affect the safety of our Community, especially the students attending school down the road from the Braven facility.”

Aggressive Expansion

A troubled record hasn’t deterred the petrochemical industry from throwing its weight behind Braven in recent months. The company has announced three major executive hires since April, including a chief operating officer, development director, and president and CEO. Heath DePriest, the new COO, previously served in leadership positions at Phillips 66, a petroleum company. A press release notes that CEO and President Jim Simon held roles at the refinery subsidiary of Koch Industries.

In June, Braven announced a new “strategic framework agreement” with another Koch Industries subsidiary, Koch Project Solutions, to “support Braven’s aggressive expansion plans.” The press release cited a new project to be built in the Gulf Coast region, which will allegedly produce 50 million gallons of pyrolysis oil per year.

Braven’s past expansion plans, however, have not materialized. In 2020, the company was the subject of a number of splashy headlines for its plans to invest $32 million in Cumberland County, Virginia, a rural region west of Richmond. Promising the creation of more than 80 new jobs, the project marked the first economic development opportunity for the county since 2009. Braven was slated to break ground in late 2021, but the year quietly came and went, until a sole public update arrived via an article in a Cumberland County newspaper: “Braven No Longer Coming.” The article, published in January 2022, did not explain why Braven had pulled out, and the company declined to comment at the time.

Braven has also been the subject of several legal actions. In 2015, sisters Joan Prentice Andrews and Jane Prentice Goff filed a lawsuit against Golden Renewable in New York, which also named four executives, including co-founders Moreno and Nicholas Canosa, as defendants. The suit claims that the sisters had collectively invested a total of $650,000 in Golden Renewable’s “bio-energy business” after Canosa had given the false impression that the company was “imminently signing a contract” to sell its biofuels to the Pentagon. The suit’s charges included wire fraud, mail fraud, and violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The case was settled out of court and voluntarily dismissed less than one month after the defendants were summoned.

The following year, a New York court ruled that Golden Renewable owed a different plaintiff over $10,000 in a civil debt lawsuit. The company was also released from a New York state tax warrant in 2018 after paying an outstanding balance of $16,522. In January 2020, Moreno was released from another New York tax warrant along with his wife, totaling over $300,000. After stepping down as Braven’s CEO in April, Canosa remains on the company’s board of managers. Moreno currently still serves as Braven’s chief commercial officer.

In April, Braven announced it had completed a financing round led by institutional investors Fortistar, Arosa Capital, and Avenue Capital, where Moreno also serves as senior managing director. While Fortistar and Arosa have investments in the energy sector, Avenue backs businesses in financial distress — or as it calls them, “good companies with bad balance sheets.”

But any bad balance sheets that Braven might have are unlikely to dissuade the numerous major petrochemical companies now banking on chemical recycling. Last year marked the ACC’s highest lobbying spend on record, up to nearly $20 million. That same year, the group shelled out more than $265,000 for Facebook and Twitter ads focused on promoting chemical recycling. One ACC ad effort included the sponsorship of a promotional video specifically for Braven, which features Canosa and Moreno alongside the ACC’s associate director of plastics sustainability.

Dow, Shell, and Chevron have all invested in developing their own plastic pyrolysis technology, while Exxon Mobil launched one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America earlier this year, the first of 13 facilities it says it will launch by the end of 2026. Worldwide, the advanced recycling market is projected to grow by 3,233 percent in less than a decade, from $270 million in 2022 to more than $9 billion by 2031.

As chemical recycling spreads, we know from existing studies that the facilities are most likely to harm communities that are already vulnerable and marginalized.

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both.”

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both,” said Singla, who authored a report for the Natural Resources Defense Council on the environmental justice impact of chemical recycling.

Meanwhile, North Carolina could soon become the 25th state to take up the reclassification of chemical recycling. In April, three Republican state Senators introduced Senate Bill 725, which would amend the state’s waste management laws to explicitly note “solid waste management does not include advanced recycling.”

Braven, the only advanced recycling facility in North Carolina, was already exempt from obtaining a solid waste permit, according to Foote, the public information officer. Foote told The Intercept that since Braven processes “recovered material” — defined in state laws as “material that has known recycling potential, can be feasibly recycled, and has been diverted or removed from the solid waste stream” — it is not regulated as “solid waste.”

There has been one recent development that could slow chemical recycling down. In June, the EPA unveiled new proposed rules under the Toxic Substances Control Act that would establish reporting requirements for 18 substances derived from plastic pyrolysis. The agency would require companies to submit their chemical feedstocks for review so the agency can screen them for “impurities,” including PFAS, dioxins, heavy metals, bisphenols, and flame retardants.

The public comment period ended on August 19. The EPA is currently reviewing responses and is targeting early next year for follow-up action, according to a spokesperson.

The ACC, American Petroleum Institute, and Dow were among those who submitted comments urging the EPA to withdraw the proposed new rules.

“The ACC would welcome the opportunity to meet with EPA leadership to clarify misconceptions about advanced recycling,” the ACC wrote, “and invite Agency officials to an advanced recycling facility for a first-hand sense of their operations.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers from the ACC’s Plastics Division, wrote in a statement, “Progress towards a circular economy can only be achieved with smart, cohesive approaches that avoid inconsistent and conflicting approaches by regulators. … ACC remains committed to working with EPA as a constructive stakeholder in the development of effective, practical, and responsible policies.”

Braven already appears to be pulling from the ACC’s playbook in its efforts to curry favor with state lawmakers. Democrat Deborah Ross, who represents the North Carolina congressional district that includes Zebulon, made a trip to Braven’s facility on August 25.

“I enjoyed meeting and learning from Braven’s innovative leaders and employees this morning in Zebulon,” Ross is quoted as saying in a Braven press release. “I look forward to applying the insights and information I gained during my visit to the important discussions in Congress about advanced recycling technologies.”

The Intercept emailed the compliance report to Ross’s office and asked whether Braven had mentioned the inspection and ongoing remediation efforts before, during, or after the representative’s visit.

“Congresswoman Ross does her best to accommodate invitations she receives from constituents and visits dozens of businesses in her district every year — these tours and constituent meetings should never be interpreted as expressing support for any particular company’s policy positions or business practices,” wrote a spokesperson. “She was not aware of this investigation before touring Braven, nor was it discussed during or after her visit. As a vocal supporter of environmental protections, she takes these allegations seriously and strongly supports NC DEQ’s work to hold companies in our state accountable for harmful waste or activities that threaten our people and our environment.”

The post They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste appeared first on The Intercept.

The changes to public records laws first came to light when North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly released its $30 billion budget on Wednesday, following months of negotiations. The bill includes raises for state employees, cuts to income taxes, and an expanded school voucher program — as well as sneaky language that will deal a major blow to government transparency in the state. 

Buried deep in the 625-page budget is a provision overturning a state law that made legislators’ redistricting communications and drafting documents part of the public record once the new electoral maps became law. 

The repeal of that provision will go into effect in 10 days, dropping a veil of secrecy over a contentious issue that has roiled North Carolina state politics for decades. 

“It’s critical to understand from the public’s perspective how rules related to voting and elections come into being.”

“Electoral maps are the core of representative democracy. It’s critical to understand from the public’s perspective how rules related to voting and elections come into being,” said Brooks Fuller, director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition. “This was a really important carve-out, and it’s very clear from the way that it’s written that the General Assembly thought this was important to North Carolinians. Apparently that’s changed.”

While the state’s public records act grants broad exemptions for messages sent between lawmakers and their staff during the legislative drafting process, one statute included a special carve-out for redistricting. The law noted that “present and former legislative employees may be required to disclose information otherwise protected” by legislative confidentiality laws if that information pertained to redistricting plans that had been enacted.

After both chambers of the Legislature swiftly voted to pass the budget on Thursday, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper announced Friday morning that he would let it go into effect without his signature, citing the bill’s failure to expand Medicaid. While Cooper had initially said he was “strongly considering” vetoing the budget, Republicans hold an overriding, veto-proof majority in both chambers of the Legislature. (The House gained its Republican supermajority after Rep. Tricia Cotham controversially changed her party affiliation in April.)

Additional sections of the budget chip away at the state’s public records act more broadly, stipulating that legislators have sole discretion over whether to “reveal any document, supporting document, drafting request, or information request made or received by that legislator while a legislator.” 

North Carolina lawmakers were already designated custodians of their own records but had to claim a specific exemption in order to withhold requested documents. The new language tightens the legislative privileges that were already in place, granting lawmakers the authority to decide which of their records they want to make public and which they want to destroy or dispose of.

“This is profoundly contrary to the state’s commitment to open and transparent government,” said Sarah Ludington, director of the First Amendment Clinic at the Duke University School of Law. “There is literally nothing to be gained by increasing the secrecy of government actions.”

Supreme Court Case

The move to shield legislative records from the public, particularly those related to redistricting, is especially troubling given the long and heated legal battle over gerrymandering in the state. 

On June 27, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against North Carolina state legislators in a key redistricting case, Moore v. Harper. The suit made its way to the nation’s highest court after Republican lawmakers appealed the North Carolina Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to strike down a gerrymandered congressional map, ruling that it violated the state’s constitution. 

The U.S. Supreme Court case was closely watched by legal scholars, as the petitioners invoked an extreme reading of the controversial “independent state legislature theory” to argue their side.

North Carolina Republicans contended that the United States Constitution grants state legislatures unchecked authority over the administration and regulation of federal elections — even if it entails partisan gerrymandering that flies in the face of judicial rulings. The same theory was also pushed by President Donald Trump’s allies in their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. As House speaker, Rep. Tim Moore led the Republicans’ Supreme Court appeal — a case that bears his name — and now serves as a central figure in the state budget negotiations.

While the Supreme Court decision marked a cautious victory for the democratic process, the North Carolina high court had already reversed its own ruling on the gerrymandering case in April. “Courts are not intended to meddle in policy matters,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote in the majority decision.

The ruling cleared the way for the Republican-dominated Legislature to draw electoral districts that would heavily favor the party. It also spoke to the see-sawing nature of North Carolina state politics: The state Supreme Court struck down the gerrymander in 2022, when it held a Democratic majority. Following the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans flipped the court and proceeded to reverse the decision.

“Our state is so incredibly purple,” said Ludington. “If our state was districted so that our state representatives actually mirrored the voter registrations in the state, we would have razor-thin majorities in both House and Senate at the state level.”

“Whichever party’s in charge, the only way to hold them accountable is to have robust rights of access to documents that show their deliberations.”

Ludington emphasized that the public records changes in the budget are a “transparency and accountability issue” rather than a partisan one. “Whichever party’s in charge, the only way to hold them accountable is to have robust rights of access to documents that show their deliberations,” she said. 

North Carolina’s Democratic Party has also participated in legally dubious gerrymandering over the course of the state’s history. In a major 1993 case, the Supreme Court found that a “bizarre” Democratic-drawn congressional map violated the Constitution as an act of racial gerrymandering because it attempted to combine as many Black voters as possible into a single district across 160 miles. 

Democrats ruled the state Legislature for more than 100 years until 2010, when the Republican Party took control and redrew the electoral maps to give their party an edge. Since then, redistricting has sparked a spate of lawsuits from groups like the NAACP and Common Cause. 

The public records law was broad enough to allow lawyers to get discovery documents for cases like the recent constitutional litigation, but the new changes will restrict everyone’s access to the records, including reporters investigating government wrongdoing.

“Formerly we could use the public records act to compel disclosure of critical public information,” said Fuller, the North Carolina Open Government Coalition director. “Now, we’re totally at the whims of our benevolent legislators, if they choose to be. We don’t have a lot under these new laws that’s going to compel the sharing of information.”

The post North Carolina GOP Hides Redistricting Process From State Public Records Law appeared first on The Intercept.

Before U.S. Forest Service police repeatedly shot Brooks Roberts in May, he was already disabled and required the use of a wheelchair. Now, at 39 years old, Brooks is unlikely to ever walk again: He is paralyzed from the waist down, has limited use of his right arm, and cannot control his bowels. Such is the punishment for being unhoused in America.

In late August, Brooks and his attorneys filed a claim against numerous government agencies seeking $50 million in monetary damages for “extreme suffering” caused by the shooting. According to the claim, Forest Service officers, in conjunction with the Bureau of Land Management, shot Brooks “needlessly and recklessly” on May 19: through his arm and back shoulder, in his armpit and the bottom of his spine, through the middle of his back, and several times in his legs. The officers opened fire when they saw Brooks was carrying a gun — but they were wearing civilian clothing and had not identified themselves as police, according to the complaint.

“Because this incident involved federal law enforcement officers, the investigation was handled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It would be inappropriate for us to provide any additional comments at this time,” the Forest Service said in a statement provided to The Intercept. The FBI declined to comment for this story, citing the ongoing investigation, and the Department of Justice and BLM did not respond to requests for comment.

The obscene multiagency operation began with a devious trick, designed solely to arrest the Roberts family for low-level misdemeanors related to their overstay on national forest land outside of Boise, Idaho.

Police body camera footage shows two undercover Forest Service officers approached the small trailers in which Brooks, his mother Judy, and his brother Timber had lived since they were evicted from their rental home in 2020. The officers said they needed help starting their car, so Timber promptly went out to get his truck and retrieve jumper cables. They then grabbed Timber and forced him to the ground as he screamed for help.

“They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile.”

According to the claim, “Mr. Roberts, hearing his brother’s cries for help, wheeled out in his wheelchair to find what appeared to be his brother being carjacked or robbed. As he approached his brother to save him, officers saw the .22 revolver Mr. Roberts carried and opened fire on him.”

The complaint adds that Brooks did not fire his gun, and he swiftly threw it on the ground, several feet away, when he realized the men were police. “They shot him in the back when he was defenseless and immobile,” the claim states.

Another body camera video of the shooting’s aftermath shows Brooks writhing on the ground covered in blood and mud, crying that he cannot feel his legs, as police continue to pull his arms behind his back to force him into handcuffs.

“I’m sorry,” Brooks can be heard apologizing, “I didn’t know you were cops.”

The shooting is as frenzied and chaotic as it is gruesome, and drenched in what seems to be a disregard for human life. The circumstances that brought dozens of law enforcement officers to ambush an unhoused family over minor misdemeanor charges are emblematic of a social order that turns financial hardship into terminal poverty, and poverty into a crime managed by deadly state violence. “Organized abandonment and organized violence,” as abolitionist scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore has long put it.

“Federal police officers planned in secret to arrest this homeless family on minor misdemeanor offenses by preying on their good graces. Officers knew that the family would help two people that they thought were stranded motorists,” Craig Durham, one of Brooks’s attorneys, wrote me via email. “It’s a shame that in the wealthiest nation on earth, our federal government will expend so many resources to hassle a homeless family, botch an arrest so badly, and permanently injure someone, rather than just help them find a place to live.”

The Robertses were not staying in trailers — which lacked running water, heat in frigid winters, and air conditioning in brutal desert summers — out of choice. They had been trying to find housing since their eviction in 2020, when Judy lost her job of 13 years at a manufacturing plant after being T-boned in a serious car accident.

According to the wrongful shooting claim, the Roberts family tried to find emergency shelter as the Covid pandemic raged but were told all options were full. “For months they moved from place to place across southwest Idaho, encountering law enforcement who told them, again and again, to move on.” A criminal complaint against the three family members for violations relating to their overstay, and against Timber for a further count of disorderly conduct, notes that law enforcement officials had been informing the family of the need to move off forest land since late 2020.

In this country, the poor do not fall through the cracks, because these are not cracks but traps — from which there is no release.

In this country, the poor do not fall through the cracks, because these are not cracks but traps — from which there is no release. In the winter of 2021 to 2022, Judy suffered severe frostbite as the family stayed on BLM high desert land. “Her feet eventually froze to the floor of an old school bus. Hallucinating, she was rushed to the hospital, but doctors could not save her feet,” the claim filing noted. “After a double amputation, she spent several months in physical therapy learning how to walk with prosthetics.”

The following summer, Brooks was injured during an overnight Walmart shift, which left him requiring a wheelchair for mobility. The family was again forced to move by the BLM and set up their trailers further north on Forest Service land. That winter, 26 inches of snow left Judy, Brooks, and Timber snowed in and stuck. Nonetheless, the government continued to charge all three of them with multiple misdemeanor counts related to staying on federal lands.

In February 2023, the family appeared in court, were arraigned on “multiple misdemeanor violations” and granted pretrial release. A warrant was issued for the family’s arrests in May, however, after they “continued to violate numerous federal laws,” and after Timber allegedly shouted obscenities at federal officers and threatened members of the public, according to the government’s complaint. Forest Service and BLM agents then planned their undercover arrest operation, even though the matter was already in the courts. According to Brooks’s wrongful shooting claim, “No agent contacted the Robertses’ appointed attorneys. No agent reached out to see if they would surrender on these charges, as they had before.”

“I got social security disability, which they garnished for nonpayment of tickets for staying too long on forest land. We needed that money to get into an RV place. They should be using their resources to help people find a place to live instead of persecuting them,” said Judy, in a statement shared by Brooks’s attorneys.

“How can we get on our feet when you keep ticketing us to take away our money that we could have used for housing?” Brooks added. “It just makes the problems amplified. If the person is struggling to find a place and then they get arrested, then they really have trouble, because they don’t have the ability to find a place when they’re in jail.”

Like every state, Idaho lacks thousands of much-needed affordable rental homes. Last December, Boise-based organization Charitable Assistance to Community’s Homeless, or CATCH, reported the number of people experiencing homelessness in the city had doubled since 2020. Like the Robertses, a growing number of people who cannot find housing turn to staying on public lands in trailers and encampments. In a Boise State Public Radio report last year, a BLM supervisory field staff ranger said the number of people living on BLM land in Idaho had increased “tenfold, at least” in recent years.

Most national parks have a camping stay limit of two to three weeks. A crucial 2018 federal court decision, however, ruled that unhoused people cannot be punished for sleeping on public land if no shelter beds are available. “The government cannot criminalize indigent, homeless people for sleeping outdoors, on public property, on the false premise they had a choice in the matter,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit decided in Martin v. Boise, a ruling that covers the jurisdiction in which the Roberts family were continuously harassed and punished for their homelessness. 

Durham, the attorney, told me he and his team believe Martin v. Boise applies in this instance and will be using it to defend the Roberts family in the criminal case brought against them by the government.

Local, state, and federal authorities have keenly sought ambiguities and loopholes in Martin, like banning daytime camping and sanctioning certain encampment sites, so that all others can be cleared without providing the sustainable permanent housing that should be a right.

In the summer of 2022, the National Park Service cleared two unhoused encampments from federal land in Washington, D.C., citing “threats to public health and safety.” The action clarified, in no uncertain terms, who does and does not get to count as “the public” in the eyes of our federal government. Similar rhetoric was deployed to defend the brutal killing of Jordan Neely, an unhoused Black man in crisis, on a New York City subway in May; officials invoked a selective view of a “public” deserving safety, from which Neely was violently excluded.

Following Brooks’s shooting, the National Homelessness Law Center called on the Biden administration “to issue an executive order eliminating all federal police activities in their response to homelessness, and instead to mandate a housing- and services-only approach that is rooted in choice, healing, and racial justice.”

In May, the Biden administration announced an initiative to partner with the country’s major cities with the aim of a 25 percent reduction in national homelessness by 2025 — an already insufficient goal that will still be hard to obtain amid soaring housing prices, slashed social services budgets, and the billions more being poured into policing by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“Data clearly show that a police approach is expensive, diverts community resources that could be used for housing, disproportionately harms Black people and other people of color and is overall ineffective at solving homelessness,” the National Homelessness Law Center said in a statement.

The Roberts family’s story is yet another reminder of the consequences of criminalizing poverty and homelessness. Timber took a plea deal and currently awaits his sentencing in jail. After being released from the hospital in mid-August, Brooks joined Judy in a hotel, where they have relied on donations and support from local mutual aid networks.

“They are now right on the verge of being on the streets unsheltered again,” Ritchie Eppink, an attorney for Brooks, wrote to The Intercept. “Because their money is about to run out.”

Correction: September 6, 2023, 5:12 p.m. ET
A previous version of this article said Timber was staying in a hotel with Judy, while Brooks was still in the hospital. Brooks was released from the hospital in mid-August, and Timber is currently awaiting his sentencing in jail.

The post Undercover Federal Police Shot and Paralyzed Unhoused Man in Wheelchair appeared first on The Intercept.