News Category: Around Campus

Residents of East Chicago’s Calumet neighborhood are concerned about a hazardous waste facility’s plans to expand. Attorneys representing the East Chicago Calumet Coalition-Community Advisory Group said the state isn’t doing enough to enforce environmental laws and keep residents safe.

Mark Templeton directs the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. He said Tradebe Treatment and Recycling, LLC has had hundreds of permit violations within the past five years — often the same ones. Things like open or leaking hazardous waste containers, improper labeling and unsafe storage.

Templeton said not only has the Indiana Department of Environmental Management failed to make sure Tradebe follows the law, it’s let the company do things without getting state approval first. In fact, he said Tradebe has already expanded its operations.

“IDEM is catching up with what the company had been doing in practice already. That’s not how environmental regulation is supposed to work_,” Templeton said.

In the past, Tradebe has said problems that came out of the pandemic created a backlog of hazardous waste — forcing incinerators to hold on to it longer than what’s allowed.

Tradebe also recently asked to modify its air permit to accommodate a shredding machine it already has. Templeton said this machine can put out particle pollution — which can harm your heart and lungs.

Templeton also has concerns about how the company is using its thermal desorption units — equipment that’s supposed to use heat to remove toxic chemicals from material in the recycling process. He said Tradebe hasn’t properly proved that there’s no oxygen in the process — which means the company could be incinerating the waste instead, putting unknown hazardous chemicals into the air.

Resident Akeeshea Daniels co-chairs the East Chicago Calumet Coalition–Community Advisory Group. She said residents often aren’t told what goes on at facilities like Tradebe and local and state officials don’t seem to care. Meanwhile, people living nearby continue to suffer from things like asthma and cancer.

“They’re still letting people buy homes in this area, still letting people move into this area. These people have no clue what they’re moving into — and some of these people are young and they have young children,” Daniels said.

Among other things, the ECCC-CAG wants to have air monitors installed around Tradebe’s perimeter, for IDEM to respond within three hours of a report about odors or fumes coming from the facility, and for IDEM to set up a satellite office in East Chicago, Hammond or Whiting.

IDEM refused to make someone available for an interview and says that it might take previous violations into account when adjusting a company’s permit.

Continue reading on NPR…

Nick Lubecki has been an urban farmer in Pittsburgh for the last 15 years. The heat has noticeably intensified over that time, with back-to-back summers of sweltering temperatures affecting when he harvests produce at Braddock Farm, a small urban plot nestled next to an operating steel mill that grows vegetables like lettuce, collards, and tomatoes. His current strategy for beating the brutal heat: a wide brim hat and plenty of water. Lately, farming consistently throughout the day has been “significantly more exhausting,” he said. “It’s really hard to keep going.”

Summers are getting hotter everywhere, and that is especially true in cities including Pittsburgh, which this year has seen more than four times the number of days over 90 degrees Fahrenheit than it does in a typical year. That’s due in part to the urban heat island effect, in which a city’s infrastructure traps heat, making it hotter than in neighboring suburbs. To combat the growing health risks for outdoor workers like Lubecki, scientists and designers are developing a slate of new fabrics to counteract extreme heat. But worker-safety specialists and labor advocates are concerned that commercializing wearable technologies—even with the best of intentions—may end up aggravating existing issues with worker exploitation.

To cope with climate change and stay healthy outside, humans need adaptations, and heat-reflecting textiles have the potential to play a crucial role. Such solutions are “super important to not only show that there’s some really cool technology that’s resulting from this need,” said Enrique Huerta, legislative director at Climate Resolve, a nonprofit that advocates for equitable climate solutions, but also that there is “a need to deploy it responsibly. That’s really, really important to highlight.”

As a century-old power plant on the shores of Lake Michigan shuts down, some residents and activists are warning the region’s water supply could be at risk.

Over the next few years, Northern Indiana Public Service Company, or NIPSCO, is retiring the 130-acre Michigan City Generating Station, which has been burning coal for electricity for nearly a century.

It’s also cleaning up decades of coal ash byproduct. But advocates say the coal ash NIPSCO plans to leave on the site puts groundwater and Lake Michigan in danger of contamination in Michigan City and beyond…

“Rules like these in which hundreds of millions, billions of dollars are at stake, as well as public health and the environment, those are often litigated,” said Mark Templeton, who leads the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at University of Chicago.

Templeton says there’s been a lot of regulatory back and forth during the past three presidential administrations over the coal ash rule currently in place, which came after a 2008 spill in Tennessee.

“More than a billion gallons of coal ash waste basically breached and flooded 300 acres nearby, went into local waterways, the Tennessee River, killed lots and lots of fish,” Templeton said. “There were lots of workers involved in cleaning up that massive spill and many of those workers later have developed complications which they attribute to exposure.”

Templeton says as more coal fired plants go offline, it’s key to remember how climate change and more extreme weather might affect leftover coal ash – especially since so many generating stations are located near waterways.

“We’re seeing 100-year flood events occur a couple times a decade. The engineering needs to take this into consideration,” he said…

Continue reading at wttw…

The Biden administration and the nation’s top miner’s union agree that a clean, healthy future means a future without coal, and we need to bring coal communities along with us during this transition. As members of Congress and the administration identify the needed investments to clean up and revitalize coal communities, we shouldn’t let the companies that have benefitted and continue to benefit from mining and combusting coal off the hook.

For decades, coal mining and combustion has permeated communities with harmful pollution.

Continue reading on The Hill…

By Valentina Ruiz Leotaud

For the US to move away from coal, it is important to leverage the social cost of carbon as a tool for making key government decisions about coal mining and cleanup while remaining mindful of environmental justice and coal communities as the transition to other sources of electricity pans out.

This is according to Mark N. Templeton, director of the Abrams Environmental Law Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School, whose essay “Accelerating and Smoothing the Transition Away from Coal” is part of a recent book titled The US Energy and Climate Roadmap, published by the UC’s Energy Policy Institute.

According to Templeton, despite positive sentiment towards renewables, it is important for people to recognize that coal still makes up about a quarter of US electricity generation, that it is projected to make up about 15% of power in 2050 and that 40% of the coal mined in the country is extracted from federal land.

This means that there are people still employed in this sector – a little over 50,000 – and that abrupt measures can have a significant impact on families and communities, particularly in small towns where mines tend to be major sources of wages.

“We have an obligation to work with coal communities and help them through this transition,” Templeton said in a media statement. “One thing I’ve suggested is that there might be opportunities to leverage the geography of coal: Abandoned mines, which have associated cleanup and reclamation needs, are often located close to where the workers are already, so former miners could potentially be employed in making sure that those sites are dealt with safely and responsibly. Cleaning up abandoned mines also helps to ensure that those communities have clean water in the future.”

In the expert’s view, it is also important for Congress to urgently consider shoring up and expanding the use of the Abandoned Mine Land fund to cover more recent and future mine closures. He points out that, at present, the fund does not have enough money to deal with the most severe environmental damages that can occur from coal mining.

“We also need to make sure that coal companies who are at risk of bankruptcy are required to secure financial assurance from independent entities outside of the industry for their environmental liabilities so that if the coal companies go bankrupt, funds will still be available to pay for cleanup costs,” Templeton said.

Continue reading at Mining.com…

By Dino Grandoni

It was supposed to be the “trial of the century.” Now the case won’t even get its day in court.

The dismissal of a landmark, youth-led climate lawsuit late last week is a sign of how hard it will be to use the courts to solve a problem as big as climate change.

That’s a wrench in the plans of environmental advocates and their Democratic allies who are frustrated with Congress’s failure to pass major climate legislation — and have increasingly turned to the court system to stop what they see as the pressing ecological and economic crisis of rising global temperatures.

“From the outset, it was a big ask,” said Michael Burger, executive director of Columbia Law School’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. “Courts simply do not have it in their power in the United States to command the entire energy system,” he added.

In Friday’s 2-to-1 decision, a panel of federal appeals court judges in Oregon threw out a lawsuit brought by nearly two dozen children and young adults against the U.S. government, my colleague Brady Dennis reported.

The 21 young people and the advocacy group representing them in court, Our Children’s Trust, sought to compel the government to cut its support for fossil fuels and drawn down greenhouse gas emissions. They originally filed their case in 2015.

But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit ruled that even though the plaintiffs “made a compelling case that action is needed” to cut emissions, the young people ultimately did not have the legal standing to bring the case, known as Juliana v. United States.

This is the second loss for environmental advocates in a much-watched climate case in as many months. In December, ExxonMobil won its legal battle with the state of New York over accusations the oil and gas company misled shareholders about the financial risks of climate change to its bottom line.

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“Courts are still going to have a very vital role to play” in climate change, said Mark N. Templeton, a University of Chicago Law School professor specializing in environmental law. But he added: “The judges seem to think there are limits on this.”

Continue reading on the Washington Post…

By Sylvia Carignan

From his seat on a sun-worn wicker couch, Shaun Hoolahan reaches down to the corgi panting at his side and tells her to roll over. Bessie flips belly-up, exposing a pink, golf ball-sized lump on her chest.

“Tumors,” he said, pointing out the spot on the dog’s front left paw where a cancerous toe was amputated. “She’s got them all over her body.”

For years, grass wouldn’t grow on some parts of his two-acre property, and Bessie used to spend lots of time lying in the dirt in his yard, Hoolahan said. “I could fertilize, water, and just nothing would grow there,” he said. “The more I started to dig into it, the more concern I had.”

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In 1980, it made sense for Congress to give the EPA’s Superfund program “a big stick and a lot of deference,” persuading intransigent companies to move toward quick cleanup, said Mark Templeton, an attorney at the University of Chicago who works with residents in East Chicago, Ind., who are also living with a lead smelter’s environmental legacy.

“Now that we’re three-plus decades into it, I think there are definitely times where there are real important questions about whether EPA has selected a protective remedy or not. And it can be very concerning when residents are, or feel like they are, excluded from getting the kind of cleanup that they deserve,” Templeton said.

Continue reading on Bloomberg…

By Sarah Reese

As cyanide and ammonia flowed down the east branch of the Little Calumet River in mid-August toward the Burns Waterway and Lake Michigan, boaters swam in the waterway, surfers rode the waves near its mouth and grandparents swam with their grandkids in the lake.

It wasn’t until days later that any of them learned they might have been exposed to toxic chemicals.

The releases from two outfalls at ArcelorMittal Burns Harbor the week of Aug. 11 killed about 3,000 fish and kept visitors away from Indiana’s newly designated Indiana Dunes National Park for more than a week.

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The Clean Water Act authorizes penalties of up to $50,000 per day per violation, said Rob Weinstock, an attorney at the University of Chicago Law School’s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic.

Continue reading on the Times of Northwest Indiana…

By Adam Thorp

Jose Garcia has been fishing in Bubbly Creek for a decade. On a recent fall Sunday, the welder from Chicago Lawn pulled a fair-sized carp off one of the five fishing lines he’d set up on its banks.

On a good summer day, Garcia said, he could catch 10 to 15 carp from the waterway in Bridgeport and McKinley Park. “It’s not the cleanest place in the world, but what are you going to do?” he added.

That’s a question the Army Corps of Engineers has been trying to answer. Now, help finally may be on the way for the creek, whose foul history was memorialized in “The Jungle,” Upton Sinclair’s expose on the Chicago meatpacking industry.

“It is constantly in motion, as if huge fish were feeding in it, or great leviathans disporting themselves in its depths,” Sinclair wrote of Bubbly Creek in his 1904 novel. “The creek looks like a bed of lava; chickens walk about on it, feeding, and many times an unwary stranger has started to stroll across, and vanished temporarily.”

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The plan recommended in the draft study by the Corps would lay down a new, healthy creekbed above the rotting sediment. New plantings on the bottom of Bubbly Creek and along the riverbank would restore the base of the ecosystem and begin to improve water quality. Those plants, and woody debris spread in the creek, would provide habitats for returning animals.

There are other legal avenues to a cleaner Bubbly Creek according to Mark Templeton, a University of Chicago law professor. Templeton’s Abrams Environmental Law Clinic advocates for better water quality in Bubbly Creek and the rest of the Chicago River.

The Illinois Environmental Protection Agency is considering renewing a permit that allows Chicago to continue unloading its sanitary sewers into the Chicago River. The new permit could demand stricter rules, Templeton said.

Continue reading on the Chicago Sun Times…

By Arielle Duhaime-Ross

The Chicago river isn’t known for its fish — in fact, quite the opposite. It’s been a dumping ground for everything from industrial waste to 800 pounds of human waste from Dave Matthews’ tour bus. But thanks to cleanup efforts, there are now fish in the river. And they’re at the center of a lawsuit that’s pitting the state of Illinois against the Trump Organization.

The lawsuit, filed in August, revolves around Chicago’s Trump Tower. For years now, the building has been taking in close to 20 million gallons of Chicago river water each day to cool its air conditioning system.

“We’ve stocked almost 300,000 native Illinois fish in this system, so if you’re pulling that water in faster than our fish can swim, those fish can get killed in that system,” says John Quail, director of watershed planning at Friends of the Chicago River, one of the environmental groups involved in the state’s lawsuit. “So that’s one big concern of ours.”

The Trump Organization didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. But shortly after the lawsuit was filed, it told reporters that it was “disappointed that the Illinois attorney general would choose to file this suit,” adding that, “one can only conclude that this decision was motivated by politics.”

That analysis doesn’t square with the facts of the case, says Mark Templeton, a law professor at the University of Chicago and one of the lead attorneys overseeing the lawsuit.

“They’re the second largest withdrawer of water from the Chicago River, and they are the only one of the top 15 who are not complying with the law,” he told VICE News. “So they can call it politically motivated if they want to, but it is environmentally motivated.”

Continue reading on VICE News…