By the End of the Year, DFW Won’t Have Any Environmental Reporters

2-08-2007 --- Randy Lee Loftis.News came late last week the venerable Randy Lee Loftis has taken a buy-out and will be leaving the Dallas Morning News sometime in the Fall

When he leaves the newsroom for the last time, he'll be taking the moniker "environmental reporter" with him. Currently, no other DFW media institution funds such a position, and a replacement for him at the News hasn't been announced.

Loftis has been the Morning News' environmental reporter since 1989. He's by far the most experienced journalist still covering the environment in Texas, with his peers in Houston, Austin and Ft. Worth long retired, laid-off or bought out themselves. His career covers most of the modern Texas environmental movement, from the Superfund fight over West Dallas lead smelters, to the epic Midlothian cement kin wars, to current struggles over fracking.

It's hard to believe now, but not so very long ago, it was a seller's market for environmental activists with a good story to tell. Only other newspapers or stations were potential rivals and there was a fierce "Front-Page-like" competition to scoop each other. Because so many pollution problems are linked to corruption, reporters reveled in throwing the spotlight on situations didn't pass the smell tests, toxicologically or politically. Establishment media actually went out on nationwide searches and hired away good environmental beat reporters the same way they would business beat, or cop shop, or city hall reporters. That's how Loftis entered the market in 1989. He came from the Miami Herald, where he'd covered the Everglades extensively. 

1989 was a watershed year for the nation's environmental consciousness. The Exxon Valdez catastrophe occurred. A Bush had declared himself "the environmental president." The 20th anniversary of Earth Day was approaching. It was as if the media had woken up and discovered a whole new category of news after a long sleep through the 1980's. Dallas, as well.

There were a host of local issues. Dixico Manufacturing wanted to burn their lead and cadmium ink wastes in an old incinerator in the middle of an Oak Cliff residential neighborhood. West Dallas families were finding high levels of lead in their attic dust and yards from years of smelter operation. And there were rumors that some cement plants south of town were burning hazardous wastes in place of coal.

Loftis' byline in the DMN archives over the last 26 years chronicles these fights and many, many more. Because of that institutionalized history, advocates never had to dumb down their pitches to Loftis. He already knew why the story you wanted him to cover was significant – or not. More than passing knowledge about the subject also gave Loftis the ability to ask the right questions of officials and industry, while also leaving his readers asking the right questions at the end of his articles.

True beat reporters can do that because they have an insider's knowledge of the subjects they're covering. They know the issues, the personalities, and most important of all, the politics. Beat reporters can explain the story behind the story. All of that kind of information, and that style of coverage, walks out the door with Loftis.

It's not just that youngers reporters don't know any history or background in the environmental subjects they're covering for spot news pieces. It's that their employers are insisting they cover the environment as rinse and repeat spot news, and not as a regular beat. You have to start from scratch every time you have a story to tell. You have to explain the context of why it's a good and/or important story. You have to anticipate the opposition's response and suggest skeptical questioning of it, instead of relying on a reporter's experience to do it for you.

It was only a couple of months ago that we last bemoaned the state of local environmental coverage in DFW. Lack of any established media eyes on problems can make the gap between success and failure much wider. Right now, the state and EPA are at loggerheads over DFW air quality policy. This on-going argument affects what amount of poisons millions will take in with every breath over the next three to five years. It could decide the fate of obsolete coal plants, jumpstart national cement plant modernization, and bring new attention to gas industry air pollution. But unless you have some reporters that can make the fight "sexy" and explain why it could impact your child's asthma, it will not be the public policy debate it should be. 

In light of Loftis' departure, alternative local sources of news become more critical. And we don't just mean the Observer or the Weekly.  This blog and others are now often the only places you can find close to real time information about this or that environmental issue in DFW. That's great for citizen journalism, but it's a sad state of affairs for mainstream media in the nation's fourth largest metropolitan area, which continues to suffer a chronic smog problem, hosts a half dozen Superfund Sites, and is Ground Zero for the fracking boom. 

Recent Studies Highlight the Gap Between 21st Century Science vs 20th Century Regs

N8000055-Coloured_artwork_of_a_doctor_bleeding_a_patient-SPL.jpgImagine writing rules for flying commercial passenger jets that don't consider the impacts of wind, weather, and other flight paths on how they operate.

Now imagine writing rules for how much poison you can breathe, drink, eat, or touch that don't consider the impacts of those poisons in combination with one another inside you, or vastly underestimate the amount of poisons you're being exposed to in the first place.

Both approaches to regulations would be reckless. But whereas one is ridiculous, the other is law.

Two recent studies once again demonstrated how wide and misleading the gap is between current environmental health science and current environmental health regulations.

One survey that included the work of almost 200 published authors coordinated by California Pacific Medical Center Research Institute concluded that combinations of different chemical exposures, even if all of them were within so-called "safe" levels, could increase cancer risks.

“Many [chemicals] have the possibility, when they are combined, to cause the initiation of cancer,” said Hemad Yasaei, a cancer biologist at Brunel University in England, one of the authors of the report. “They could have a synergistic or enhanced effect.” 

But this is not the way that chemical exposures are regulated in the U.S.

Instead, the EPA tests one chemical at a time on lab animals, exposing them to progressively smaller amounts until the chemical no longer causes tumors. The Agency takes that dose, determines the equivalent for humans, and applies what is called a “margin of safety” by declaring that some small fraction of that low dose is safe for people.

This approach reflects the Medieval axiom, “The dose makes the poison." However, it doesn't reflect modern human physiology.

That "margin of safety" is never put to the test as part of an epidemiological study to correlate exposure with safety. It's just assumed. And it's also assumed that the margin will remain the same no matter how man other harmful exposures the body may encounter. This latest meta survey of the data shows that approach to be a wrong-headed assumption.
For example, endocrine disrupting chemicals can actually be more toxic at lower levels depending when a fetus is exposed to them because the human body is attuned to respond to minute amounts of natural hormones such as estrogen and testosterone during development.

Different chemical exposures can affect the body like bird shot. One pellet alone is unlikely to cause you a problem, but dozens or hundreds of pellets will start to add up, effecting different systems, and cause a catastrophic failure.  

"Since each of these chemicals affects different processes that could lead to cancer — bisphenol A makes cells less sensitive to signals to stop reproducing, for example, while atrazine encourages inflammation — it’s plausible that consuming mixtures of these chemicals is riskier than consuming any one individually."

We're living with over 80,000 different synthetic chemicals on the marketplace. This survey only focused on 85. Of those 85, 50 were found to affect cancer-causing processes in the body, even at very low doses.

"We live in a chemical soup,' said toxicologist Linda Birnbaum, director of the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences, who was not involved in the new study. Considering the safety of individual chemicals is a lot like looking at the trees, but missing the forest, Birnbaum said. When doing research to determine chemical safety, 'we’ve got to start thinking more about what reality is,' she said. This could mean sweeping changes in rules about the levels of chemicals considered safe in drinking water, food, and air. 'I’d like to see regulators and policy makers start looking at the totality of the exposure instead of one chemical at a time,” she said. 

Yes, but when will our modeling and testing for human chemical exposure be as sophisticated as our human body's reaction to it in real life?

And what if official estimates about multiple chemical exposures were not only discounted, but the estimates for how much chemical you're being exposed to everyday was vastly underestimated?

Most people don't understand that numbers about the size of toxic releases from industry are generated mostly from estimates based on calculations, not actual measurements at the facility or in the environment. You have a chemical plant or cement kiln, it has x, y and z kind of equipment on it. That equipment is rated by the manufacturer to be X efficient, and therefore government regulators assume it is. There is no real time measuring of pollution for most facilities and most kinds of chemicals. The "emissions calculations" that go into a permit or "tons per year" number are guesses, and may or my not actually come close to describing what's coming out of the facility.

The weakness of that part of the regulatory system was revealed by a Environmental Defense Fund study showing that EPA estimates about the amount of methane coming off gas sites were off by as much as 50%.

Methane is a bad actor in and of itself because it's a greenhouse gas that has 25 times greater impact on global warming than carbon dioxide. But if methane is being underestimated at gas sites, so probably are other, more directly toxic kinds of pollutants, like Benzene.

Almost every time a researcher bores down to look at a specific plant or industry, actually testing the accuracy of the calculations with real world data, they find more air pollution than estimated. It's just a matter of faith or luck that we may or may not be exceeding "safe" levels of exposures, which may or may not be that safe to begin with.

To recap: We're exposed to lots and lots of chemicals. We don't really know how much, or how much is safe for you to be exposed to, and we still have an environmental health testing protocol that's the toxicological equivalent of using leeches. But don't worry, the EPA is "overregulating" industry!

Texas Doctors Tell EPA to “Take on Texas” Over DFW Air Quality. Join Them.

doctor & lung xrayTexas physicians have told the EPA to reject the State of Texas's "do nothing" air plan for DFW, greatly enhancing support for more real cuts in regional air pollution.

STATE CONVENTION RESOLUTION

On May 2nd at its annual state convention, the Texas Medical Association passed Resolution 309 originating with Dallas County doctors, stating,

"That TMA reject the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality's (TCEQ's) 2015 State Implementation Plan (SIP) report and advocate for development of a new SIP report that conforms to the scientific, peer reviewed modeling methods developed by UT Southwestern and University of North Texas experts.

TMA advocates for implementing reasonably available control measures
at the state level capable of meeting national ozone standards, based on the UTSW and UNT validated models.

Although replete with regulatory references, the intent of the resolution is to get the EPA to officially "disapprove" of the current state's anti-smog plan and substitute one that requires "reasonably available" control technologies like advanced air pollution controls on the Midlothian cement plants the East Texas coal plants, and oil and gas facilities. So far, Texas has refused to even consider cuts at these major sources.

Join the Texas Medical Association in urging the EPA to reject the state's air plan. Right now.

1. Send an Email to both the Regional EPA Administrator in Dallas, and the National Administrator in Washington DC, requesting they disapprove the state's air plan because it ignores cuts from major polluters.

2. Add your name to the Change.org petition to EPA to reject the state's air plan for DFW in favor of on of their own.

3. Circulate these links widely.


A new federal air plan for DFW  is the fastest way to get big cuts in air pollution from large polluters. That's why these Doctors support it. You should too.
______________________________________________

LOCAL MEDICAL SOCIETY PRESIDENT SPEAKS OUT

Dallas physicians have been leading the fight for cleaner air within their own organizations for years. Their leadership has a sophisticated understanding of the politics surrounding the issue. They had a strong and articulate presence at the Arlington public hearing for the state plan in January.  

In his June newsletter column, Dr Jim Walton, the President of the Dallas County Medical Society, writes extensively about air quality: 

"Despite two air quality improvement plans (termed State Implementation Plans, or SIPs) written by our state leadership (Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, TCEQ) designed to help DFW meet the 1997 federal ozone standard of 85 parts per billion, neither achieved success by their deadlines.

One key reason for this outcome relates to the State of Texas' 2011 plan for DFW that failed to require new control measures on any major pollution sources, while predicting that the region would see historically low ozone levels. As a result, it became the first state plan for DFW to result in higher ozone levels.

Now the TCEQ has drafted a new plan to try to achieve DFW's compliance with the 2008 ozone standard of 75 ppb. However, once again TCEQ staff has announced that it sees no need to require new control measures on any major pollution sources, even while the Commission's own computer air modeling shows that DFW will remain above the 75 ppb standard by the 2018 deadline.   

With action on this issue, we will be presenting our newly sworn-in colleagues – and ourselves – the opportunity to see that a new State Implementation Plan for DFW can produce cleaner air for seven million of our fellow citizens and patients who desperately need relief from more than two decades of noncompliance. We can and should lead in this very practical and real issue that continues to threaten the health of our community."

 __________________________________________________


NEW RESEARCH COMING SOON

Dallas docs are also generating original research to aid their advocacy.

Dr. Robert Haley, the staff epidemiologist at UT Southwestern in Dallas, is directing a study on the public health impacts of reducing smog in DFW. It's expected to be released in tandem in August with the results from Downwinders at Risk's own Ozone Modeling Project (these are the studies referenced in the TMA's resolution).

Support from the local medical community is critical for the success of our campaign to convince EPA to replace the state's air plan for DFW with one of its own.

Dallas docs are doing their part. Please do yours and let the EPA know there are DFW residents who want the federal government to enforce the Clean Air Act when the State of Texas won't. Send an email to EPA and add your name to the online petition.