Message From the Editor
This will be our final newsletter of the year — thank you so much for your continued readership, interest and support! But before we go, there’s plenty still to share. Including a story about a Texas border town demanding stronger action to tackle cancer-causing chemical pollution. As DeSmog reporters Sharon Kelly and Julie Dermansky write, ten of Laredo, Texas’s schools rank in the country’s top 1 percent of schools where students’ health is most at risk from toxic air pollution, in large part due to emissions from one medical equipment sterilization plant. Read more here. And in an op-ed, Justin Mikulka examines what the infrastructure bill means for hydrogen production and the gas industry. While it includes $9.5 billion dollars to support the creation of a clean hydrogen industry, much of that money is going to support the U.S. fracked gas industry under the guise of “clean” blue hydrogen.Check out Mikulka’s analysis here. Have a story tip or feedback? Get in touch: [email protected].
Thanks,
Brendan DeMelle Executive Director
P.S. Readers like you make it possible for DeSmog to hold accountable powerful people in industry and government. Even a $10 or $20 donation helps support DeSmog’s investigative journalism.
For Edna Ibarra, it was the realization that with every breath her 11-year-old son was breathing in a little more of an industrial carcinogen that drove her to get involved in the fight against air pollution in Laredo, Texas. And her son isn’t the only child exposed to this risk. Close to Ibarra’s home in the La Bota neighborhood of Laredo, you’ll find the Julia Bird Jones Muller Elementary School, a public school attended by roughly 880 kids from kindergarten to 5th grade, almost all of whom are Hispanic. And about 1.6 miles away is a plant owned by Midwest Sterilization Corp — one of the nation’s largest emitters of the carcinogenic chemical, ethylene oxide (EtO). READ MORE The infrastructure bill signed into law by President Biden in November includes $9.5 billion dollars to support the creation of a clean hydrogen industry — but much of the money is going to support the U.S. fracked gas industry under the guise of “clean” blue hydrogen. While being presented as a clean hydrogen plan for decarbonizing the energy system, the main focus of the hydrogen section of the bill is to continue and expand the use of natural gas (that is, methane) in the U.S. economy via what’s known as blue hydrogen. Blue hydrogen is the name for a fuel product that currently cannot be produced on a commercial scale. Hydrogen gets labeled different colors based on how it’s produced. There’s gray, made from fossil fuels, and green, made using renewable energy. READ MORE In July of 2018, an Italian-flagged oil supply ship called the Asso 28 that was crossing the Mediterranean Sea encountered a stalled rubber raft carrying a hundred desperate migrants. Trying to make the dangerous journey from Libya to Europe, the migrants had reached international waters when the supply ship rescued them and its captain opted to take them not to a port of safety in Europe, as required by law, but back to a gulag of migrant detention facilities in Libya where the United Nations and others have documented systematic torture, rape, extortion, forced labor and death. In October of this year, the captain of that supply ship, Giuseppe Sotgiu, paid a heavy price for his decision: an Italian judge sentenced him to a year in prison for violating humanitarian law. The painful irony of this conviction is that Sotgiu is headed to jail for what EU officials have been doing on a far grander scale for several years — pushing migrants back to a place of extreme human rights abuses. READ MORE — ByBelinda Joyner (4 min. read)—I live in Northampton County in the U.S. state of North Carolina, where absentee companies have been polluting for years. My neighbors and I are tired of having our community treated as a dumping ground. This community is my home, it’s where I grew up, and we have been fighting polluters for more than 25 years — a large natural gas pipeline and the nearby Enviva wood-pellet biomass production facility are just two of the most recent developments.
My community is predominantly African American and one in five of my neighbors live below the poverty line, which flies in the face of the promises these same companies have made for decades: that we should accept pollution in return for economic development. I’m here to say that Enviva’s biomass production is no different than the other polluters we have battled and I’m dismayed that the broken promises are no longer just about jobs, but about the environment, too. READ MORE Another time warp of a year is drawing to a close, with the image of Covid-19 booster queues snaking around street corners marking a sombre end to a long 12 months. As the pandemic continues to wreak havoc globally, climate change and its impacts again made waves around the world – with a surge in extreme weather events preventing anyone from looking away. READ MORE Glyphosate Renewal Group is a group of companies working together to call for the renewal of EU authorization for the active substance glyphosate, an agricultural herbicide. According to its website, the GRG’s mission is to “seek the renewal of the EU authorization of the active substance glyphosate in 2022 by joining resources and efforts to prepare a single dossier with all the scientific studies and information on the safety of glyphosate.” It is one of the companies included in DeSmog’s growing Agribusiness database. Read the full profileand browse other individuals and organizations in our Climate Disinformation Database and Koch Network Database | 