Links are at the end.
‘Gasland’ driller will pay millions for new water system in Dimock
Sometimes the good folk win one, eventually. Dimock, PA is the town featured in Gasland, Josh Fox’s HBO documentary about environmental damage perpetrated by fracking operator Cabot Oil & Gas.1 The documentary aired in 2010, exposing fracking-induced pollution of much of the town’s water supply — you may recall excerpts from the film showing residents setting their tap water or a local creek aflame — less than two years after the Houston-based company began operating in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale fields.
Now, after more than a dozen years of gaslighting by the company along with a profound unwillingness on the part of Pennsylvania elected officials and state agencies to protect residents and hold corporations accountable for the damage they do, Cabot has pleaded no contest to more than a dozen felony and misdemeanor charges, and will build a public system providing clean water to residents.2
Attorney General Josh Shapiro spoke after the hearing Tuesday at Susquehanna County Court of Common Pleas in Montrose, saying 14 years was too long for residents to wait for clean water.
“There were failures at every level,” he said. “The local elected officials where someone would normally go, ignored them. The regulators whose job it is to set the boundaries for industry to operate in, failed.”
Shapiro charged Houston-based Cabot Oil and Gas in June 2020 after recommendations from a grand jury found that the company “failed to acknowledge and correct conduct that polluted Pennsylvania water through stray gas migration.”
The company’s plea stems from violations of the state’s Clean Streams law, as well as illegal industrial discharges. The grand jury report also said the company’s “long-term indifference” to the damage it caused warrants penalties that rise beyond technical violations.
So there’s that. Elsewhere, though, energy companies and others continue to take advantage of compliant elected officials and captured regulatory agencies to sicken and kill people, usually poor people and often people of color.
The Cumulative Toxic Assault on Braddock
We’ve made previous reference to the town of Braddock, PA, and the environmental violence wreaked upon its residents.3 (Braddock is some 300 miles from Dimock in the opposite corner of the state, just a few miles from Pittsburgh, and the town mayor for 13 years is now state’s senator-elect.4)
Pennsylvania’s definition of an environmental-justice area is one that is upward of 30 percent minority and more than 20 percent low-income. Braddock qualifies as both. There are dozens of fossil-fuel power plants that are disproportionately located in census tracts where people of color are more than 30 percent of the population—and this is true for minorities at every income level, according to a recent report from the environmental watchdog group Food & Water Watch.
The reach and scope of Braddock’s toxicity is emblematic of what it means to suffer environmental injustice in the U.S., where people of color, and with limited resources, bear the brunt of pollution. The public health threats that come with carrying that environmental burden intersect with other urgent policy issues challenging the life and growth of Braddock, including the economy, schooling, and even reproductive justice.
. . .
Braddock is both running and dying on the fumes of steel, the primary source of both employment and smog in this small city of less than 2,000 people. The U.S. Steel complex in the Monongahela Valley region is a sprawling ecosystem of manufacturing facilities located just outside of Pittsburgh, which include the Edgar Thomson mill in Braddock, the Irvin Plant in West Mifflin, and the Clairton Coke Works. Throughout history, U.S. Steel, which today has its official world headquarters in Pittsburgh, has produced the bulk of the materials used to build and fortify buildings (and weaponry) across the globe. However, the steel industry’s center of gravity had shifted overseas by the 1980s, when U.S. Steel began shuttering many of its operations in the region, draining Braddock of its economic livelihood in the process.The city that was once defined by its steely resolve is now defined by poverty and pollution. The region’s long legacy of pumping iron, steel, oil, and coal out of its mountainous terrain has extracted a huge toll on the lungs of the people living there—and the air hasn’t completely cleared despite a huge reduction in those manufacturing and extractive operations in recent years.
That Bloomberg story was published in 2018; since then, the air quality has improved in Braddock and the Pittsburgh area generally to the point that it occasionally meets EPA clean air standards. The community was able to forestall a U.S. Steel plan to set up a fracking operation on its property just outside Braddock, and the EPA levied a small fine on the company5. But the air is still bad much of the time, the community still suffers high rates of adult and childhood asthma, and the steel plant still spews fine particulate pollution beyond a radius that community members consider safe, and that they associate with cancers and an infant mortality rate that remains unconscionably high, not only in Braddock but in vulnerable communities across the country.6
Cherokees ask US to make good on promise: a seat in Congress
As with many a treaty between the US and Native Americans, the former have for going on 200 years been violating one affording the Cherokee Nation a seat in Congress.7 It’s the same treaty in which the Cherokee were forced to give up their homeland in exchange for land in Oklahoma, precipitating the forced and deadly march along the Trail of Tears. The delegate proposed by the tribe is a former Obama administration advisor on Native American affairs, Kim Teehee, who in response to questions about the legal proprieties of seating her noted that the treaty “is already the law of the land.”
Throwing Muses, “Purgatory Paradise;” World Party, “Best in Show;” The Sugarcubes, “Here Today, Tomorrow, Next Week.”
And that, comrades, is all we got. Be well, take care.