Why We Fight: In 1996 and Now

Sacrificing Science for Conveneince Pic copyWe found a piece of Downwinder's legacy in a very unlikely place this month – on the desk of TCEQ Toxicologist Michael Honeycutt.

Right before Christmas, the Washington DC-based Center for Public Integrity published a great examination of how the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality goes out of its way to make sure the poisons citizens are being exposed to in the real world hardly ever reach "levels of regulatory concern." It spotlights Benzene, although you could easily find half a dozen other examples of where the state is moving the toxicological goalposts. This regulatory slight of hand is being directed by Honeycutt, the "smog isn't bad for you" guy that tries to provide the technical fig leaf for the blatant political motives behind the TCEQ's downplaying of pollution harms.

In the middle of the article is a photograph of Honeycutt at his desk with various reports splayed out in front of him. According to the reporter, she asked him to pull out some of the documents that have been influential in getting the TCEQ to re-examine the way it analyzes toxic exposures and human health harms. 

And what do you know, right there in front is Downwinders at Risk's own 1996 "Sacrificing Science for Convenience" report – the first-ever critical look at how the state of Texas was officially evaluating toxic exposures, authored by the late great Dr. Marvin Legator of the UT Medical Branch in Galveston and Jim Tarr, a former Texas Air Control Board engineer, who's become an independent consultant, and is in fact quoted in the Center's new article as well. 

This report, later turned into a peer-reviewed journal-published article, was a devastating methodical blow-by-blow examination of how the state's "Effects Screening Levels" (ESLs) for pollution were political tools for regulators to allow massive pollution without concern for any adverse human health effects. It led to an embarrassing Houston Chronicle series several years later that forced the state to revamp the ESL system.

Sacrificing Science CoverThis was the first time anyone had led an scientific inquiry into how the State of Texas regulated toxic exposures. This effort wasn't commissioned by a national or even statewide environmental group, with lots of money and a staff of its own. It was scrapped together by a grassroots group of citizens in DFW.

At the time, Downwinders' energy was aimed only at fighting the burning of toxic waste in the Midlothian cement plants. Such a report didn't directly serve that cause at all. That's why we're so proud of it. In the middle of the longest, most expensive hazardous waste permit fight in Texas history, we took the time and money to pay for a report that would expose a problem every citizen living near a polluter was facing. We looked at the fundamentals and saw a larger need than just our own self-interests in Midlothian. We took the longer view.

We're still doing that.

We're the only environmental group dealing with fracking as a regional air pollution issue –  taking it out of the city-by-city fights we're all accustomed to, and looking at the larger picture of how it adds to North Texas smog.

We're still the only group looking for ways we can disrupt the authority of the state in setting our local environmental  agenda. Over the next few weeks you’ll learn how Downwinders is sponsoring the very first effort to give local officials access to the same computer “modeling” the state uses to build its clean air plans. But this computing power is being used to do things the state is refusing to do – like looking at what pollution control measures work best in DFW. It’s the first time anyone has challenged the state’s exclusive ownership of the region’s air computer modeling.

Next month, you’ll see local DFW doctors and nurses testifying on behalf of cleaner air at public hearings on the state’s proposed new smog plan. They’re being organized by Downwinders in an effort to form a North Texas health professionals speakers bureau to put on the front lines of air pollution controversies. Not just our fights – everyone's fights.

Downwinders is doing work no other group is doing – work that benefits everyone who's being shat on by an industrial polluter – whether its a cement plant, a coal plant, or a gas compressor. Because, just like in 1996 when we published "Sacrificing Science for Convenience"  we see our job as a larger than our own fights. We understand that we're part of a larger citizens movement. One about the distribution of political power, and the autonomy of an individual to decide for themselves what risks to their health are acceptable.

Next Monday, we'll be sending out an e-mail alert that will be jam-packed with January news about state and national clean air hearings, tributes to our local heroes, and on-going local fights. 2015 is going to be another busy year for us. But we need your help to fund our work today and the next three days. We do what we do on a shoestring budget – usually not more than $30-50,000 a year – but we need new shoestrings. We're completely local, which means we're completely dependent on people like yourself who see the value in our work. If we can't put our organizer in the field, a lot of good things that we want to do next year won't happen. And that'll be a shame not only for our own causes, but for the larger cause as well.    

Please click here and give whatever you can.

Anything is truly appreciated – and will contribute to work that has a long shelf life. Thanks.

A Woman of Substance: Theo Colborn 1927-2014

Theo-ColbornSad news came on Sunday that Dr. Theo Colborn had died at the age of 87. 

F. Scott Fitzgerald said there are no second acts in American lives, but he said that well before the woman's movement of the 1970's flourished and allowed an entire generation to experience one. Dr. Colborn's second act just happened to change the entire debate over environmental health. 

Theo Colborn had already retired from her first occupation as a pharmacist, when at age 58, she decided to go back to school in 1985. She got a PhD in Zoology from the University of Wisconsin, with minors in epidemiology, toxicology and water chemistry. She told a PBS film crew that she wanted to get an education so that "maybe I could undo some of the things my generation basically foisted on society." 

After school she began working on clean air issues in Washington DC but then went back to the Midwest to join a comprehensive study on the pollution affecting the Great Lakes. This gave her a chance to review emerging science from a more holistic viewpoint than a specific "reductionist" academic discipline or specialty. She was looking at an entire ecosystem. Although there was lots of new literature on the subject of how chemicals were impacting different species in the Great Lakes region, no one was pooling the research for evidence of possible trends, similarities and effects. She began to use the new tool of computer spreadsheets to do just that…for the very first time.

Her results surprised her and launched a new career that lasted right up until Sunday. What was doing the most harm to Great Lakes animals were not one-off catastrophic events like accidental pipe ruptures that dumped thousands of gallons of industrial poisons into the water, but the long-term, low-level assault by a variety of everyday synthetic chemicals. Their worlds were ending not with a bang, but a whimper. 

Cancer was the big sexy health effect from pollution that everyone was looking for back then, but it was notoriously hard to prove a link between a polluting cause and a cancerous effect. Colborn's research discovered many more subtle, more insidious, impacts from pollution at levels which were officially "below regulatory concern" – first in the biology of animals, then in people. 

Fetuses were particularly vulnerable to these impacts, which affected how hormones could change the shape and function of internal organs, reduce the ability of an animal to behave "normally" in its environment, harm the immune system's ability to respond to routine threats, even warp reproductive systems in gender-twisting ways that seemed to remake males into females and females into males. Such changes weren't necessarily fatal like cancer, but were being passed on from generation to generation until a species could no longer reproduce healthy versions of itself. The biological Xerox machine kept malfunctioning in small and large ways over time until the copies no longer looked like the originals. Because animals had shorter life cycles, you could see the effects of these changes add up much quicker than you could in humans, but Colborn had no doubt that similar effects were occurring within our own species as well. 

This field of research was so new, it didn't even have a name.  In 1991, she and 20 other scientists investigating it gave it one – endocrine disruption. In 1995 she and three others wrote the founding document of this new science, the best-selling book, "Our Stolen Future" chronicling how everyday, ubiquitous man-made chemicals were impacting human development. Not since Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" (another work by another woman who was thinking outside the box) had a single book so challenged the conventional ideas about pollution and its impact. It remains required reading for any environmental activist. 

If you were doing field work around industrial pollution sites in the 1990's, as Downwinders at Risk was in Midlothian with its three cement plants, one of which was the largest burner of hazardous waste in the state of Texas, the book instantly connected the dots between what was coming out of the smokestacks and the strange health effects being reported by local citizens. It was the constant exposure to the toxic soup of dozens of contaminants that could be the explanation behind inexplicable birth defects of almost any animal population being breed near-by, as well as the heretofore unknown health effects among the plants' neighbors. Reading the book, one felt like you'd discovered the Rosetta Stone of environmental health. 

Every article you've ever read about the possible dangers of the plastic packaging additive BPA, or declining sperm counts in males all over the world, or male fish behaving like female fish, can be traced back to Theo Coburn and her peers who founded the field of endocrine disruption. Subsequent science has linked pollution exposure to Parkinson's disease, autism and obesity. Her overarching point was that we are swimming in a sea of industrial chemicals without knowing very much at all about their effect to the human body. That thesis is being proved right almost weekly by scientists, some of whom were not even born when Colborn decided to embark on her second career. 

Her lifetime spanned the maturity of the environmental movement itself, from conservation-minded tree hugging concerns to people-poisoning invasions of the body snatchers health effects. There's no imagining the contributions she could have made had she devoted the first part of her adult life to the cause, but the entire human race is a beneficiary of her decision not to stay a retired pharmacist. She did not go quietly into that good night. She turned the world upside down on her way out. R.I.P. 

The Mansfield Fight Goes National And Industry Gets Worried

Badge of honorWe must be doing something right. 

Last Thursday, Energy in Depth, the national PR arm of the oil and gas industry, singled out Downwinders at Risk for our support of longer setbacks between people and gas industry facilities in Mansfield and other North Texas cities. 

EID calls these setbacks, now passed in DISH, Denton, Southlake and Dallas, "defacto bans" because they require wells and compressors to be anywhere from 1000 to 1500 feet from homes, schools, park and other "protected uses" – to use city zoning lingo.

But of course these setbacks are defacto bans only because industry wants them to benot because there are any technical obstacles to them reaching the gas underneath these cities due to distance. Gas operators can now punch a hole and reach deposits up to at least a mile or two away from where they place their rig on the surface. That's more than three 1500-foot setbacks end-to end.  Operators have to spend more to drill to get that gas, but that's the price they pay for trying to place heavy industry in the middle of residential areas, parks, or near schools – something most cities don't allow when it comes to hazardous waste incinerators, chemical plants or landfills. Part of the problem is the inherent arrogance of the gas industry's position – it wants to pollute like a heavy industry, but it doesn't want to be regulated like one. 

You know the folks in Corporate are getting worried when these things pop up on the Energy in Depth agenda. They understand their much-beloved "Fort Worth model" of less protective 600-foot setbacks and looser regulations in now under organized assault. While the rest of us see a constant barrage of new studies coming out every month emphasizing the dangers to human health of proximity to gas facilities, the industry wants time to stop in 2010, before we knew so much.  But time marches on. And so does knowledge, and then public opinion.

Mansfield is deep into the Shale. It shares a border with Ft. Worth, unofficial headquarters for the Barnett Shale Energy in Depth crowd. A rejection of Cowtown's approach to regulating the gas industry here would be a major setback to the industry. The stakes are high. Just in the last week, two national publications, a subscription-only national newsletter called Environment and Energy Daily, and the Center for Public Integrity, have posted stories on the Mansfield fight. They've hit a nerve. That's why Energy in Depth is writing about it. 

Getting criticized by EID is recognition that the partnership between Mansfield Gas Well Awareness and Downwinders at Risk is having an impact. We consider is a badge of honor. Our only regret is that it came too late to be used in our traditional end-of-year fundraising letter. Because after months of frustration, Mansfield residents are finally getting the attention they and their complaints deserve from their city council and the media. It's a national fracking fight hotspot. That's not an accident. That's good organizing. 

Building Momentum in Mansfield

IMG_2031Good things come in threes. Lance Irwin, Erick Orsak, and Tamera Bounds proved that again on Wednesday night when they led the Mansfield Gas Well Awareness contingent during the Mansfield City Council's "work session" on rewriting the city's gas drilling ordinance.

Combined, they projected just the right mix of competence, skepticism, and experience to combat the "Don't worry, be happy" approach of the Railroad Commission and Texas Commission on Environmental Quality presentations that preceded them in the agenda.

(By the way did you know, that according to Austin, the average response time of a TCEQ inspector responding to a complaint was only 5 hours? Downwinders at Risk is willing to pay $100 to the charity of the inspectors' choice if anyone out there has ever gotten a response that quickly. After almost 30 years of dealing with state environmental agencies, we can't recall a single instance where it took less than a day for an inspector to show up, even when the situation was "urgent.")

By putting the three residents in the same horseshoe as industry, state agencies, and itself, the Council elevated the status of the resident's group beyond anything it had enjoyed in previous rounds of jousting over drilling. Whether that leads to the kinds of substantial changes to the city's drilling ordinance the group is pursuing remains to be seen.

What was obvious after the formal presentations ended and a more informal question and answer period followed was the large disparity in monitoring and self-regulation within the industry. There were at least 10 or 12 gas operators sitting at the table during the event. Conspicuous by its absence was Eagleridge, the source of many complaints in Mansfield and of course, the company that ignited the Denton fracking vote controversy.

But Eagleridge's Chief Operating Officer Mark Grawe was present, in the back of the room, trying to keep a low profile. It didn't work. Let's just say when you get called on the carpet by Stephen Lindsey, the Mansfield Council member whose day job is the "Government Relations and Community Affairs Director" for gas industry giant Quicksilver, you know you're not going to have a good night. As the evening wore on, it was clear Eagleridge was being portrayed as the poor, white trash cousin of the more established players like XTO and Chesapeake. The company lacked the remote sensors, automatic cut-offs, and other kinds of precautions that the rest of the industry reps liked to brag about. By the end of a rigorous cross-examination of Grawe by the residents' group, there was an unacknowledged consensus that perhaps the floor for regulating existing wells needed to be raised in Mansfield so that moving target known as "industry best practices" was updated applied to all.

More ambiguous was the response to the residents' request for a 1500-foot setback to replace the current 600 feet requirement – with a variance that can decreases that distance to 300 feet. Some industry representatives and council members want to frame the problem in terms of incidents and accidents that can be fixed with better equipment, rather than systematic changes that require separating people from heavy industrial activity, no matter how good the intentions are.

Also left hanging was how to better regulate polluting compressors. The city's lawyers, who've written protective ordinances for Dish and Southlake, was more circumscribed with their Mansfield employers. Cities can't regulate pipelines and mid-stream compressors for "safety standards," already addressed by the Railroad Commission they said. Left unsaid was that cities can and have regulated compressors for noise and "odors," otherwise known as toxic chemical exposures.

Bounds presented the city council with what she called a model ordinance that combined the best, most protective aspects of drilling regulations from DISH, Southlake, Dallas, Denton, Arlington and even Fort Worth. Saying these were legal requirements that hadn't been challenged by industry and so were available for adoption by the city, Bounds put the council on the spot by saying Mansfield needed to protect its citizens at least as much as these other municipalities and had no legal excuse for not doing so. Mayor David Cook took note of the work she'd done in compiling the new ordinance and said the city would perform its own side-by-side comparison and come back in January to continue the discussion.

Overall, the mood of the evening was cautious but positive. It was hard not to be impressed by the residents' knowledge and expertise, and everyone was civil in public. Afterwards, however, one of the first things Bounds heard was an industry operator telling her there was no way he was going to accept a 1500-foot setback. There is still plenty of work to be done. But it was a step in the right direction. And there are no big changes without incremental changes first. 

It helped that the media were out in force, trying to identify the next fracking hotspot after Denton. There was a row of TV cameras and local and national print reporters showed up to take notes. Channel 8 had the best coverage of the evening, and if you can get past the paywall, here's the Star-Telegram's take.

As has been noted before, Mansfield is no Denton. It's not even Southlake or Flower Mound. It resembles Ft. Worth more than it does Dallas in terms of politics and attitudes toward the gas industry by the Powers That Be. It has more wells per capita than just about any place else in the Shale. But those are all reasons that make it worth fighting the good fight there. If residents can make their case effectively and change their situation in Mansfield, then there really is hope for everyplace else in the Barnett. Stay tuned.

Make Your Butt A Force for Good Tonight

butts in a chair 2Woody Allen is famously credited with the line that "showing-up is 80% of life." With organizing, it's more like 90%. There are at least two places to be tonight where just your butt in a seat will make a huge, positive difference:

1) Mansfield City Council Work Session on a New Gas Drilling Ordinance, 6 pm, Mansfield Performing Arts Center Workroom, 1110 West Debbie Lane, (near Hwy 287 –  just south of I-20) (map). 

After almost a year of struggle, residents of Mansfield are getting a hearing tonight in front of their city council. Unfortunately, the council, including two members who make a living from the gas industry, are making the  the residents take on the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, the Texas Railroad Commission, 10-13 gas industry representatives, pro-industry state representatives, senators, and Congressman, as well as their own city staff  – all in one evening. They're besieged, and they really need your help tonight.

We have it on good authority that the Mansfield Mayor is using this set-up to "gauge public opinion on the issue" even though members of the public won't get to speak. So it's all about attendance – butts in seats. 

Mansfield isn't Dallas. It isn't Denton. It's not even Southlake or Flower Mound. It's deeper into the Shale, more blue collar, and more pro-industry than any other city that's been challenged over their old drilling ordinance in the last several years. The city has more gas wells now per capita  – over 200 in a city of 60,000 – than just about any other place in North Texas – with a potential for 300 more.  Concerned residents are at a disadvantage in trying to change the status quo.

Just your being there in a seat tonight sends a message you care about this issue. And if you live in Tarrant county or any place else where there's gas drilling in the Metromess, it's in your own self interest to help them in Mansfield. A victory there will make it more possible to win in other places. It will mean less air pollution from their wells and compressors blowing downwind. It will mean the tide is moving further west.

So do yourself, the region, and the cause a favor and show up tonight. You don't even have to speak. You just have to be present to win. 

2) Trinity Toll Road Debate –  6:30 p.m.  at Rosemont Elementary School, 1919 Stevens Forest Drive (map)

State Representative Rafael Anchia is sponsoring this debate over this leftover 20th Century boondoggle that features almost all the major players on both sides of the issues – Michael Morris, Mary Suhm, Patrick Kennedy and Scott Griggs. Again, your presence sends a valuable signal – that you're opposed to this floodplain toll way, and that this will be an important issue in the May Dallas elections. Go and be active members of the peanut gallery – cheer on the opponents, jeer the supporters.

It's particularly important that the public show increased interest tonight as Suhm and Mayor Rawlings conspire to muddy the waters with a new "review" of the plans of the road. They hope to give Citizen Council-backed candidates in the May election a way out of a simpey yes or no answer to the Toll Road – by saying their waiting for the review. You need to make sure they get the message that nobody is falling for that ruse.

Your butt can be a powerful voice for change tonight, or it can sit on the couch. Get out and show-up.

EPA Announces a New Ozone Standard. But Will It Make any Difference In Texas? Not Without a Push.

rick Perry Lasers Eyes Burn EPAOn the day before Thanksgiving EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy went forward with a recommendation to lower the federal ozone, or smog, standard from the current 75 parts per billion (ppb) to somewhere between 65 to 70 ppb, while also agreeing to take public comment on a new standard as low as 60 ppb.

While this might seem like a big step, these are actually the same numbers that have been circulating since George W Bush was president. Since 2008 the EPA's own independent science advisory panel has recommended a national standard in the 60 to 70 range twice – and twice this recommendation has been put on a shelf because of political considerations, most recently in 2011. Now, with the re-election campaign behind them, the Obama Administration has decided to tepidly move forward.

Making the range recommendation it did means that the agency will take comments and mull it over for a year before deciding to issue a specific number in December 2015. There will be at least three national public hearings as part of that comment period – although we don't know the locations of those hearings yet. Once it decides on a particular number for the standard, the Administration most likely will give states until 2025 to comply with it. Or in Texas' case, we should probably say they'll give the state until that year to fail to achieve the standard for the first time. 

According to the EPA,

…the new regulation would by 2025 prevent from 320,000 to 960,000 asthma attacks in children, and from 330,000 to 1 million missed school days. It also estimates that by 2025 the rule would prevent 750 to 4,300 premature deaths, 1,400 to 4,300 asthma-related emergency room visits and 65,000 to 180,000 missed workdays.

Besides saving lives and preventing illness, the effect of the new standard will be to broaden the number of counties brought into "non-attainment" by the EPA across the state, and thus subject them to the same ineffectual TCEQ proposals for cleaning up the air DFW has been experiencing for decades.

Reaction from industry and Austin was predictable and predictably wrong-headed. Over the last 20 years, as the national standard has been lowered to account for the increase in knowledge we have about the human health effects of smog, Texas has never supported any change. Any. Never. It's always argued that lowering the standard wasn't necessary to protect public health and too costly to industry – causing economic calamities that never seem to happen. If it was up to Austin, we'd still be choking at the level of 125 ppb that was in effect up until the mid-1990's.

Of course in recent years, Rick Perry's TCEQ has added a nice Orwellian touch by having its "toxicologist" argue that smog isn't really that bad for you.

Maybe that's why no one has had a lot of confidence in the state's ability to write a new smog plan for DFW that will get levels down to the current 75 ppb standard by the deadline of 2018. That plan is being put in the regulatory pipeline by TCEQ and will be going to public comment itself beginning December 26th (yes, that's right, the day after Xmas) and running through January 30th. They'll be a public hearing on it as well in he next 60 days, probably in Arlington, although details haven't been released.

Although it's called a plan, there's no planning in it. The state proposes to do absolutely nothing to reduce pollution from any major smog source. Nada. No new controls on cement kilns, coal plans or gas facilities. Instead it says that the federal government's new gasoline mix, to be introduced in 2017, will produce enough of a decline in smog to get the region "close enough" to the 75 ppb standard. Never mind that that standard is now medically obsolete according to the EPA, and God forbid the state should require more pollution controls to aim for the lower 65-70 level we all know is on its way. Nope. At last count there were still three local monitors that hadn't even reached the 75 ppb level by 2018 in the state's computer model prediction, and that result relied on a steep decline in oil and gas drilling that may or may not happen.

According to the Clean Air Act, the state is supposed to be requiring major sources of smog pollution in DFW to install all "Reasonably-Achievable Control Measures"(RACM) that could help speed our  compliance with the 75 ppb standard. This would include things like SCR (Selective Catalytic Reduction) on the Midlothian cement plants and East Texas coal plants and electrification of compressors in the Barnett Shale gas patch. However, Austin says those ideas are not "technically or economically reasonable."

The state might have a point – if companies within those same industries weren't already turning to these options voluntarily. For example, Holcim has applied for a permit to install SCR in one of its Midlothian cement kilns. So is Rick Perry's TCEQ saying a multinational cement company operating in the private market with two competitors down the road is installing a piece of pollution control equipment out of the goodness of its bottom-lined heart that's neither technically or economically feasible? Are Holcim's managers a bunch of profit-losing unrealistic treehuggers? Hardly.

Likewise, SCR has been installed on plenty of US coal plants – just not on the oldest dirtiest one in East Texas that need it the most. It's not a new technology at all. Same with electric compressors. In fact, those are required now under some city drilling ordinances. Wouldn't you hear banshee-like howls from the oil and gas industry, much less lawsuits, over those ordinances if that was not a technological or economically feasible alternative? In fact, electrification saves money by reducing the waste of gas product it takes to run conventionally-powered compressors.

This is the ridiculous result of a regulatory agency being an extension of a presidential campaign that promises to be easy on business and tough on the EPA. The order has come down from on high that no new pollution control requirements are to be sought by TCEQ in these smog plans, no matter how silly it makes the state look, or how much dirty air Texas residents have to breathe.

That's why in addition to calling for these kinds of pollution controls in the public comment process, and only having those comments fall on deaf ears in Austin, citizens must also put pressure on the EPA – too often the state's enabler in these matters.

As the ultimate authority on enforcing the Clean Air Act, the EPA can reject the state's plan and send it back to the drawing board with specific recommendations, or substitute a new one of its own creation – like it just had to do with the state's terrible haze-prevention plan that would have taken 150 years to work.

Certainly citizens have to put their case for federal action on the record during the TCEQ public comment period, but then we have to take that case directly to EPA and make them live up to their own regulations. And if they won't, then the next stop may have to be federal court.

If the last 20 years of clean air wars in Texas has taught us anything, it's that it won't matter what new smog standard the EPA sets, or whether the current one is being enforced or not, unless a federal agency or court, prompted by citizen action, make it matter.