Environmental Justice

"President Biden will unveil an infrastructure plan on Wednesday whose $2 trillion price tag would translate into 20,000 miles of rebuilt roads, repairs to the 10 most economically important bridges in the country, the elimination of lead pipes and service lines from the nation’s water supplies and a long list of other projects intended to create millions of jobs in the short run and strengthen American competitiveness in the long run."

"For eight months a small group of protesters have successfully prevented logging company Teal-Jones from accessing forest on Pacheedaht territory, exposing tensions that can exist at the intersection of Indigenous land rights, economic opportunity and the urgent battle to protect what remains of the province's old growth".

"A mine tailings dam planned for a seismically unstable area of Sumatra’s rainforest would be at high risk of failure, experts warn. The dam’s collapse would be a disaster, they say, releasing a wall of slurry that would engulf and bury Indigenous villages and their inhabitants."

"The White House today [Monday] announced a group of community leaders and green activists to join the Council on Environmental Quality's Environmental Justice Advisory Council. Members include Texas professor Robert Bullard, regarded as the father of the environmental justice movement."

"Donnel Baird kept his coat on while he toured the aging sanctuary. His breath froze on his face mask as he took in the peeling plaster, the dusty basement, the failing boiler that never seemed able to make Bright Light Baptist Church warm."

"A Marathon Petroleum subsidiary was ordered to pay $187 million for trespassing, but in January a Trump official reduced the judgement to $4 million. Now, Biden wants another look."

"Tribal landowners tried for years to get fair compensation for an oil pipeline that cuts across the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota, only to see officials and the courts dismiss their concerns.

"The Biden administration handed environmental justice advocates a major victory on Thursday when it announced it was withdrawing a key pollution permit for an oil refinery in the U.S. Virgin Islands that locals say has long fouled their air and water and endangered their health."

"A former Syngenta scientist alleges lives could have been saved with tweaks to the formulation of weedkiller paraquat".

"The Biden administration is taking the unusual step of making a public accounting of the Trump administration’s political interference in science, drawing up a list of dozens of regulatory decisions that may have been warped by political interference in objective research."

"The world stands on the cusp of a massive shift from fossil fuels to clean electricity, but many are worried that the transition won't be fair. Already, electric cars and efficient heating technologies are showing up disproportionately in wealthy neighborhoods. The U.S. faced a very similar problem almost a century ago with electricity, the energy revolution of that time. Most cities had been electrified by the 1930s, but many rural areas had not, because private electric companies saw little profit in string wires down lonely country roads."