Plastics Are Fossil Fuel Industry’s Plan B. Fenceline Communities Pay the Price.
Just this past January, new studies found huge numbers of plastic particles in bottled water and microplastics in nearly 90 percent of sampled proteins like beef and tofu. These reports follow many others that have found microplastics and nanoplastics in nearly every crevice of our world: clouds and rivers, Arctic sea ice and sea mammals, heart tissue and breast milk and even placentas.
As Alarm Over Plastic Grows, Saudis Ramp up Production in the US
The flares started last December, an event Errol Summerlin, a former legal-aid lawyer, and his neighbors had been bracing for since 2017. After the flames, nipping at the night sky like lashes from a heavenly monster, came the odor, a gnarled concoction of steamed laundry, and burned tires. Thus did the Saudi royal family mark the expansion of its far-flung petrochemical empire to San Patricio County, Texas, a once-rural stretch of flatlands across Nueces Bay from Corpus Christi. It arrived in the form of Gulf Coast Growth Ventures, or GCGV, a plant that sprawls over 16 acres between the towns of Portland and Gregory. The complex contains a circuit board of pipes and steel tanks that cough out steam, flames, and toxic substances as it creates the building blocks for plastic from natural gas liquids.
Judith Enck: SCOTUS Curtails Biden’s Climate Goals
The recent decision from the Supreme Court limits the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from power plants. It’s being described as a ‘gut punch' by some environmental activists. Judith Enck, a former EPA regional administrator, joined Errol to react to the ruling, explain how the Biden administration can move forward despite it and discuss what it means for New York.
Why Canada’s Plastics Ban Is About More Than Litter
Monday’s ban on certain single-use plastics is not just about litter and pollution, shopping bags caught in trees and microplastics floating in the ocean. It’s also about limiting future demand for oil, say academics and researchers.
California Opens Investigation Into ‘Decades-Long Plastics Deception Campaign’
California’s attorney general has announced an unprecedented investigation into the fossil fuel industry — not for its knowledge about climate change, but for its role in causing the global plastics pollution crisis.
‘Enough Is Enough’: California Subpoenas Exxonmobil Over Plastic Pollution
California Attorney General Rob Bonta has announced that his department will be undertaking a first-of-its-kind investigation to determine the role that the fossil fuel and petrochemical industries have played in the escalating global plastics crisis. The California Department of Justice is narrowing down on one company in particular: ExxonMobil, a corporation that’s previously been pegged as being the greatest polluter of single-use plastics in the world.