Kids born near fracking sites 2-3 times more likely to develop leukemia: Study

August 21, 2022 / activist360

Exposure to fracking and its effects is “a major public health concern,” said a study co-author.

By Kenny Stancil, Common Dreams (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

Adding further evidence of the negative public health impacts associated with planet-heating fossil fuel pollution, new research published Wednesday found that children living in close proximity to fracking and other so-called “unconventional” drilling operations at birth face significantly higher chances of developing childhood leukemia than those not residing near such activity.

Existing setback distances, which may be as little as 150 feet, are insufficiently protective of children’s health.
—Cassandra Clark, Postdoctoral Associate, Yale Cancer Center

The peer-reviewed study, published in Environmental Health Perspectives, examined the relationship between residential proximity to unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) and risk of acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL), the most common form of childhood leukemia.

Researchers compared 405 children ages 2 to 7 who were diagnosed with ALL in Pennsylvania between 2009 and 2017 to a control group of 2,080 children without leukemia matched on birth year. They measured the connection between in utero exposure to unconventional oil and gas activity and childhood leukemia diagnoses in two exposure windows: a “primary window” of three months pre-conception to one year prior to diagnosis and a “perinatal window” of pre-conception to birth.

Children with at least one fracking well within 2 kilometers (1.24 miles) of their birth residence during the primary window had 1.98 times the odds of developing ALL compared with those whose neighborhoods were free from such fossil fuel infrastructure, they found. Children who lived within 2 kilometers of at least one fracking well during the perinatal window were 2.8 times more likely to develop ALL compared with their unexposed counterparts.

Accounting for maternal race and socio-economic status reduced the strength of these relationships, but only slightly, with the adjusted odds of developing childhood leukemia 1.74 and 2.35 times higher for those exposed to UOGD during the primary and perinatal windows, respectively.

“Unconventional oil and gas development can both use and release chemicals that have been linked to cancer,” study co-author Nicole Deziel, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, said in a statement.

Last summer, Physicians for Social Responsibility uncovered internal records revealing that since 2012, fossil fuel corporations have injected potentially carcinogenic per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or chemicals that can degrade into PFAS, into the ground while fracking for oil and gas—after former President Barack Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency approved their use despite agency scientists’ concerns about toxicity.

The possibility that children living in close proximity to such sites are “exposed to these chemical carcinogens is a major public health concern,” said Deziel.

Roughly 17.3 million people in the United States, including nearly four million children, live within a half-mile radius of active oil and gas production, according to the Oil & Gas Threat Map, a geospatial analysis released in May.

Not only do those people have a greater risk of suffering severe health problems from toxic air pollution, but as the research published Wednesday notes, fracking also contaminates drinking water—creating another pathway of exposure to cancer-linked chemicals.

The new study adds to a growing body of literature documenting the deleterious health and environmental consequences of fracking and other forms of fossil fuel extraction.

Research published earlier this year found that residential proximity to UOGD is correlated with a higher risk of dying early. More broadly, the World Health Organization warned last year that burning coal, oil, and gas is “causing millions of premature deaths every year through air pollutants, costing the global economy billions of dollars annually, and fueling the climate crisis.”

Other recent studies have estimated that slashing energy-related air pollution would prevent more than 50,000 premature deaths and save $608 billion per year in the U.S. alone, while eliminating greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 would save 74 million lives around the globe this century—demonstrating that the “mortality cost of carbon” is astronomical.

“Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.
—Wenonah Hauter, Executive Director, Food & Water Watch

Despite this obvious case for rapid decarbonization, President Joe Biden has yet to use his executive authority to cancel nearly two dozen fracked gas export projects that are set to unleash pollution equivalent to roughly 400 new coal-fired power plants.

The researchers behind the paper published Wednesday hope that their findings will be used to improve public policy, including better regulation of “setback distances”—the required minimum distance between a private residence or other sensitive location and fracking wells.

Setback distances are currently being debated across the U.S., with some communities calling for setback distances to be lengthened to more than 305 meters (1,000 feet) or as far as 1,000 meters (3,281 feet), the authors wrote.

In Pennsylvania, where the study was based, the current setback distance is 152 meters (499 feet), up from 61 meters (200 feet) in 2012. Researchers, meanwhile, observed elevated risks of childhood leukemia from fracking activity within a 2,000 meter (6,562 feet) radius.

“Existing setback distances, which may be as little as 150 feet, are insufficiently protective of children’s health,” lead author Cassandra Clark, a postdoctoral associate at the Yale Cancer Center, said in a statement. “We hope that studies like ours are taken into account in the ongoing policy discussion around UOG setback distances.”

Other critics of fracking have demanded far more extensive federal action, including prohibiting the practice entirely.

As “hundreds of scientific studies and thousands of pages of data have already shown over the last decade,” Food & Water Watch executive director Wenonah Hauter said last year, “fracking is inherently hazardous to the health and safety of people and communities in proximity to it.”

“This says nothing of the dreadful impact fossil fuel extraction and burning is having on our runaway climate crisis,” she added. “Fracking threatens every person on the planet, directly or indirectly. It should be banned entirely.”

Does Supreme Court decision doom power plant rulemakings?

July 3, 2022 / activist360

*Greta Thunberg (weißes T-Shirt und Megaphon mitte-rechts) und Luisa Neubauer (daneben in Grün) im Demonstrationszug von Fridays For Future, Berlin, 24.09.21*

‘Seismic decision’ in landmark climate ruling, CNN says in reporting on decision written by Chief Justice Roberts

By Bud Ward, Yale Climate Connections (CC BY-NC-ND 2.5)

Devastating.” “Hamstrings …” “… a major blow …” “destructive …” a cataclysm …”

And more.

Those are a few of the early terms used by proponents of greenhouse gas emission regulation to describe the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 30 decision in the most significant environmental case of its session … and perhaps since the Court’s ruling in 2007 finding carbon dioxide a public health pollutant subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

In its final decision of this consequential term, the court’s now-familiar six-to-three conservative majority ruled EPA had gone beyond its legal authority by attempting to regulate greenhouse gases through the Obama-era Clean Power Plan. The decision was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, with the three progressive justices dissenting.

But the decision did leave the door slightly ajar to Congress’s outright authorization of such regulations somewhere down the highly uncertain road ahead. Critics of the court’s ruling in West Virginia v. EPA found that option highly unlikely politically and, in any event, nothing to celebrate.

Private sector, market forces, big business left to take climate leadership roles? (to be determined)

“Devastating” is the term the Biden White House used in its initial take on the decision.

Carol Browner, EPA Administrator during the Clinton administration, not surprisingly, used the same term in an interview with CNN, which labeled the ruling a “big blow” to Biden administration climate change ambitions. The decision is expected by many to have implications extending far beyond EPA and climate, affecting rule making by diverse Executive branch agencies (the “administrative state”) on a wide swath of issues.

Upcoming posts coming soon at this site will provide detailed coverage on the court’s ruling; on reactions to the ruling from legal and policy experts; and on what options the federal government, and perhaps some states, might next consider in attempting to reduce greenhouse gas pollutant emissions and atmospheric concentrations.

Forecast ahead: Lots of uncertainty, lots more case-by-case litigation, further doubts over U.S. global role, let alone “leadership,” on climate change.

A law unto themselves

May 29, 2022 / activist360

Why don’t we have any proper system of environmental law?

By David Renton, The Ecologist (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0).

A series of legal rights has emerged in recent years as if from nothing, and each has become thickened with all sorts of rules and exceptions.

It used to be that the only employment law was, in practice, the law relating to strikes. Half a century later, we have a generalised system of individual employment law.

The main book collecting employment law regulations runs to a tightly-printed 3,000 pages and weighs over two kilogrammes.

Extinction

We did not use to have any information law: now we have the Data Protection Act, the Freedom of Information Act, a specialist enforcement body and an appeals tribunal.

Immigration law has grown from a tiny area, the reserve of a few dozen specialists to provisions so complicated that even the judges complain.

“Immigration law is a total nightmare,” said immigration judge Nicholas Easterman in 2017. “I don’t suppose the judges know any more about it than the appellants who come before them.”

But while these areas have grown, environmental law has seen no similar expansion.

In Britain there is still no system of environmental law despite half a century of growing public awareness of environmental degradations, of species extinction and the poisoning of the rivers and seas.

Regulating

We have hints of it: in the criminal law for example, when lawyers defend protesters.

When central or local government makes a decision which has an environmental impact that decision can be judicially reviewed in the High Court.

The First-Tier Tribunal contains an Environmental Chamber which hears appeals by business after they have been fined under regulations dealing with eco-design, single user carrier bags, waste, etc.

But these hints fall short of constituting a proper system of environmental justice, in which the people who pollute and poison our world can, for example, have their property removed from them.

Often the problem is said to be one of “standing”. In other words, that unless and until trees and mountains can sue in their own name, then no-one will be able to restrict the decisions made by government in planning and regulating industry.

Interference

And it is true that this absence hampers lawyers: destroy a creature’s habitat and the harm to them will aways be greater than the second-hand suffering done to the people who care for nature.

Yet, standing is only a part of the problem. Over the past 25 years, the group of charities who have been empowered to bring judicial review cases has widened. But it remains true that most such claims are brought, fought hard, and lost.

Until we can sue and expropriate the worst of the polluters, it is hard to see how business will feel any pressure to change.

The answer is not a cadre of judges willing to be bolder in their application of judicial review. For that is a remedy against government.

And most damage to the environment is done by businesses rather than the state, and if a company pollutes the air or the water or contributes to global warming, the citizen has almost no meaningful redress against them.

More than a century ago, Victorian judges developed the idea of a private nuisance, a harm which happens when one person causes an unreasonable interference to the use and enjoyment of a person’s property.

Neoliberalism

Yet a claim in nuisance cannot only be brough by a landowner. Imagine, the owner of a commercial forest which has been damaged by acid rain. Who would the owner sue?

The time between an act of environmental destruction and its consequences may be protracted. The distance between the release of a pollutant and the harm it causes may be hundreds of miles. What, if the polluter is outside the United Kingdom? Nuisance assumes that pollution is incapable of crossing borders.

After fifty years of growing public consciousness we should have – but no court has actually recognised – a system of economic wrongs – “torts” – done against nature, and a series of remedies including both compensation and confiscation.

Only then would there be the intellectual infrastructure so that claims brought in the name of trees or mountains would have effect. But that would only be the first step. And its creation now would be too late.

The irony is that for the last forty years, we have lived through a political moment – “neoliberalism” – which has been open to the creation of new laws.

Right

Under neoliberalism, the whole of existence is understood as an opportunity for the creation of markets – in water, in housing, in utilities – which require rules and people to enforce them.

No mechanism has been accepted for changing how business behave, except through market creation, and business regulation and reward. The vast majority of people are left out of these dynamics.

Think of the European Union Emissions Trading System (EEUTS), the main policy mechanism of the EU for resisting climate change which was set up in 2005 to use market solutions to prevent global warming.

Although this is “European law”, UK politicians enthusiastically supported these proposals. On Britain’s departure from the European Union, a UK Emissions Trading Scheme was drawn up, closely modelled on it.

The idea was that 10,000 or so factories, power stations, and similar companies responsible for around half the EU’s CO₂ emissions would each be permitted a certain maximum volume of greenhouses gases which they could release. If they wanted to produce more than their cap, they would have to buy the right to produce extra carbon.

Punishment

States give companies a carbon budget which they are entitled to trade. The scheme has therefore worked via a series of subsidies to business – like so much supposed regulation in recent years.

Companies have been provided with an asset – a hypothetical entitlement to produce greenhouse gases – which they can sell on the market.

So, between 2008 and 2015, cement producers were gifted between over 5 billion euros of windfall profits; and this to the European representatives of a commercial sector which produces one in twelve of all carbon emissions worldwide.

The point was not to prevent emissions but to enrich those who held property. An OECD report found in 2018, that the firms within the scheme had on average 16 percent more fixed revenues than they would have had they never been regulated.

The scheme has been widely criticised: initially for oversupplying emissions allowance, causing the price of carbon so low that there was no punishment for polluters.

Cement

It has incentivised false accounting: by rewarding companies which make promises to plant trees – even if there is no prospect of them being planted, or to invest in technology to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, even where that technology does not exist; or by buying up the nominal credits arising from the legacy of old industrial technologies and washing them through the system repeatedly, in order to allow business to keep on expanding.

The verdict on the EEUTS appears to be that it caused a one-off reduction of around ten percent in European carbon emissions but that, despite repeated attempts to tighten it, the scheme has diminishing effect every year.

A fall of ten percent in carbon emissions is not to be dismissed; but the EU’s carbon reduction goal is to reach 40 percent within eight years.

The problem with the EEUTS, and with its British counterpart, is that there is no mechanism for the citizen to complain, say, if a cement company misses its carbon targets.

Polluters

It is left to the same governments to enforce which ignore commercial fraud and money laundering, which prosecute people who are overpaid welfare benefits but refuse to prosecute businesses when they have taken millions in grants to which they were not entitled.

Under the EEUTS and under all the Regulations made over the past 40 years, mere voters are not parties to the litigation; we cannot demand that a business be fined or have its property taken away because of its reckless stewardship of its environmental resources.

Perhaps there is a debate to be a had about whether we as a society truly want to make citizens enforcers. There are things to be learned from the way in which employment law has grown at just the same time that trade union have been weakened, a balance is needed between the law and social movements.

But until we can sue and expropriate the worst of the polluters, it is hard to see how business will feel any pressure to change.