Citibank has until March 15 to provide more information on orders to freeze funding. More details on that front were shared today, however, in a court filing in a lawsuit raised by Climate United—one of eight NCIF awardees whose funding was suddenly frozen.
In a motion opposing a request for a temporary restraining order forcing Citibank to unfreeze the funds, Citibank argued that it plays only an administrative role in managing accounts.
According to Citibank, it cannot be liable for freezing the funds because it’s legally required to follow instructions from the EPA and the Department of the Treasury, and those agencies ordered Citibank “to pause all further disbursements from GGRF accounts, including those held by Climate United, until further notice.”
Citibank told the US district court that orders came to freeze the funding after “the government informed Citibank that the GGRF program was subject to an ongoing criminal investigation.”
Supposedly, the FBI received “credible information” that Climate United’s Citibank account was “involved in possible criminal violations,” allegedly including conspiracy to defraud the United States and wire fraud, Citibank’s filing said. In a footnote, Citibank said that it also “learned” that the EPA was “deeply” concerned about “matters of financial mismanagement, conflicts of interest, and oversight failures.”
So, freezing the funds was viewed as necessary, the filing alleged, to prevent “misuse of funds.” And Citibank claimed it had no authority to dispute “lawful” orders.
“Citibank is not vested with discretion to second-guess the government’s concerns regarding the ‘misconduct, waste, conflicts of interest, and potential fraud’ that the government has stated is occurring,” Citibank’s filing said.
Climate United, which describes itself as “a public-private investment fund that removes financial barriers to clean technologies,” said in a press release that freezing the funds had already harmed “hard-working Americans who are struggling to pay for groceries and keep the lights on.”
“Small businesses and developers are unable to draw committed funds for project expenses, critical programs are delayed or paused, and Climate United’s reputation as a lender is impacted,” Climate United said, rounding up stories from stakeholders already struggling through the freeze and urging, “this isn’t about politics; it’s about economics.”
Getting rid of the justification for greenhouse gas regulations won’t be easy.
Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
A document that was first issued in 2009 would seem an unlikely candidate for making news in 2025. Yet the past few weeks have seen a steady stream of articles about an analysis first issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the early years of Obama’s first term: the endangerment finding on greenhouse gases.
The basics of the document are almost mundane: Greenhouse gases are warming the climate, and this will have negative consequences for US citizens. But it took a Supreme Court decision to get written in the first place, and it has played a role in every attempt by the EPA to regulate greenhouse gas emissions across multiple administrations. And, while the first Trump administration left it in place, the press reports we’re seeing suggest that an attempt will be made to eliminate it in the near future.
The only problem: The science in which the endangerment finding is based on is so solid that any ensuing court case will likely leave its opponents worse off in the long run, which is likely why the earlier Trump administration didn’t challenge it.
Get comfortable, because the story dates all the way back to the first Bush administration.
A bit of history
One of the goals of the US’s Clean Air Act, first passed in 1963, is to “address the public health and welfare risks posed by certain widespread air pollutants.” By the end of the last century, it was becoming increasingly clear that greenhouse gases fit that definition. While they weren’t necessarily directly harmful to the people inhaling them—our lungs are constantly being filled with carbon dioxide, after all—the downstream effects of the warming they caused could certainly impact human health and welfare. But, with the federal government taking no actions during George W. Bush’s time in office, a group of states and cities sued to force the EPA’s hand.
That suit eventually reached the Supreme Court in the form of Massachusetts v. EPA, which led to a ruling in 2007 determining that the Clean Air Act required the EPA to perform an analysis of the dangers posed by greenhouse gases. That analysis was done by late 2007, but the Bush administration simply ignored it for the remaining year it had in office. (It was eventually released after Bush left office.)
That left the Obama-era EPA to reach essentially the same conclusions that the Bush administration had: greenhouse gases are warming the planet. And that will have various impacts—sea-level rise, dangerous heat, damage to agriculture and forestry, and more.
That conclusion compelled the EPA to formulate regulations to limit the emission of greenhouse gases from power plants. Obama’s EPA did just that, but came late enough to still be tied up in courts by the time his term ended. The regulations were also formulated before the plunge in the cost of renewable power sources, which have since led to a drop in carbon emissions that have far outpaced what the EPA’s rules intended to accomplish.
The first Trump administration formulated alternative rules that also ended up in court for being an insufficient response to the conclusions of the endangerment finding, which ultimately led the Biden administration to start formulating a new set of rules. And at that point, the Supreme Court decided to step in and rule on the Obama rules, even though everyone knew they would never go into effect.
The court indicated that the EPA needed to regulate each power plant individually, rather than regulating the wider grid, which sent the Biden administration back to the drawing board. Its attempts at crafting regulations were also in court when Trump returned to office.
There were a couple of notable aspects to that last case, West Virginia v. EPA, which hinged on the fact that Congress had never explicitly indicated that it wanted to see greenhouse gases regulated. Congress responded by ensuring that the Inflation Reduction Act’s energy-focused components specifically mentioned that these were intended to limit carbon emissions, eliminating one potential roadblock. The other thing is that, in this and other court cases, the Supreme Court could have simply overturned Massachusetts v. EPA, the case that put greenhouse gases within the regulatory framework of the Clean Air Act. Yet a court that has shown a great enthusiasm for overturning precedent didn’t do so.
Nothing dangerous?
So, in the 15 years since the EPA initially released its endangerment findings, they’ve resulted in no regulations whatsoever. But, as long as they existed, the EPA is required to at least attempt to regulate them. So, getting rid of the endangerment findings would seem like the obvious thing for an administration led by a president who repeatedly calls climate change a hoax. And there were figures within the first Trump administration who argued in favor of that.
So why didn’t it happen?
That was never clear, but I’d suggest at least some members of the first Trump administration were realistic about the likely results. The effort to contest the endangerment finding was pushed by people who largely reject the vast body of scientific evidence that indicates that greenhouse gases are warming the climate. And, if anything, the evidence had gotten more decisive in the years between the initial endangerment finding and Trump’s inauguration. I expect that their effort was blocked by people who knew that it would fail in the courts and likely leave behind precedents that made future regulatory efforts easier.
This interpretation is supported by the fact that the Trump-era EPA received a number of formal petitions to revisit the endangerment finding. Having read a few (something you should not do), they are uniformly awful. References to supposed peer-reviewed “papers” turn out to be little more than PDFs hosted on a WordPress site. Other arguments are based on information contained in the proceedings of a conference organized by an anti-science think tank. The Trump administration rejected them all with minimal comment the day before Biden’s inauguration.
Biden’s EPA went back and made detailed criticisms of each of them if you want to see just how laughable the arguments against mainstream science were at the time. And, since then, we’ve experienced a few years of temperatures that are so high they’ve surprised many climate scientists.
Unrealistic
But the new head of the EPA is apparently anything but a realist, and multiple reports have indicated he’s asking to be given the opportunity to go ahead and redo the endangerment finding. A more recent report suggests two possibilities. One is to recruit scientists from the fringes to produce a misleading report and roll the dice on getting a sympathetic judge who will overlook the obvious flaws. The other would be to argue that any climate change that happens will have net benefits to the US.
That latter approach would run into the problem that we’ve gotten increasingly sophisticated at doing analyses that attribute the impact of climate change on the individual weather disasters that do harm the welfare of citizens of the US. While it might have been possible to make a case for uncertainty here a decade ago, that window has been largely closed by the scientific community.
Even if all of these efforts fail, it will be entirely possible for the EPA to construct greenhouse gas regulations that accomplish nothing and get tied up in court for the remainder of Trump’s term. But a court case could show just how laughably bad the positions staked out by climate contrarians are (and, by extension, the position of the president himself). There’s a small chance that the resulting court cases will result in a legal record that will make it that much harder to accept the sorts of minimalist regulations that Trump proposed in his first term.
Which is probably why this approach was rejected the first time around.
John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
Chief of the EPA is also trying to claw back $20 billion, citing alleged wrongdoing.
President Donald Trump’s freeze on federal funding shows little sign of thawing for climate, energy and environmental justice programs.
Despite two federal court orders directing the administration to resume distributing federal grants and loans, at least $19 billion in Environmental Protection Agency funding to thousands of state and local governments and nonprofits remained on hold as of Feb. 14, said environmental and legal advocates who are tracking the issue.
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin has vowed to seek return of an additional $20 billion the agency invested last year in the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund program, calling for a Department of Justice investigation into what he characterized as a “scheme… purposefully designed to obligate all of the money in a rush job with reduced oversight.”
Environmental advocates said Zeldin was unfairly smearing the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, or “green bank,” program, on which EPA worked for more than a year with the Treasury Department to design a standard financial agent arrangement—the kind the government has used many times before to collect and distribute funds.
Critics believe the Trump administration, thwarted last week in its effort to get an appeals court to reinstate its sweeping government-wide freeze on federal funding, is resorting to a new tactic—labeling individual programs as nefarious or fraudulent. Although that approach has met with some success—a federal judge last week allowed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to freeze $80 million in funding from a migrant shelter program in New York—legal experts said courts will be looking for specifics and evidence, not broad assertions that programs are improper.
“They cannot challenge an entire program based on charges of fraud and waste,” said Jillian Blanchard, a vice president of the nonprofit Lawyers for Good Government. “If they had actual concerns about fraud or waste, they would need to follow clear procedures and protocols in the regulations, going grant by grant to address this, but that’s not what’s happening here. They are challenging entire programs whole cloth without evidence.
“The executive does not have the authority to change policies simply because they don’t like them,” Blanchard said at a virtual briefing for reporters on Friday. “Congress makes the law, not the president and certainly not Elon Musk,” she said, referring to the billionaire donor whom Trump has deputized to cut government spending.
Feeling the freeze
Across the country, the spending freeze has thrown into chaos the environmental, resilience and community improvement programs that Congress authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022. Among the efforts on hold: clean drinking water, air monitoring, hurricane recovery and electric school buses.
“Real people on the ground are being hurt by the stop-start situation,” said Blanchard, whose group is working with the Natural Resources Defense Council on the cases of 230 grantees in 44 states.
Grantees are in a state of confusion because they have not heard directly from EPA, she said.
Michelle Roos, executive director of the Environmental Protection Network, a coalition of former EPA employees that is also working with Lawyers for Good Government, said many grantees are not sure what is happening because the agency’s employees have been forbidden to talk to people outside of the agency.
Several grantees reached by Inside Climate News said that they were not talking to the press, or did not want to say whether or not they could access their funding.
MDC, a nonprofit in Durham, North Carolina, along with the Hispanic Federation, was supposed to receive a $3 million environmental justice community change grant for disaster recovery and resilience programs in Latino areas of eastern North Carolina.
“We were thrilled to receive federal support to do this work, but unfortunately, like many others, we have experienced an interruption in accessing this funding,” said Clarissa Goodlett, MDC’s director of communications.
Many neighborhoods, especially those that are home to low-income, Black and Latino residents, are still rebuilding from hurricanes that hit in 2016 and 2018.
During the storms, rural counties in eastern North Carolina did not provide real-time emergency alerts or evacuation orders in Spanish, according to Enlace Latino NC, a Spanish-language digital news outlet.
The MDC grant would help Latinos connect with local governments to ensure their communities are included in discussions and decisions about the impact of climate disasters.
“We are investigating and pursuing whatever options and channels are available to us to ensure we can follow through on our commitment to communities in eastern North Carolina,” Goodlett said.
Dorothy Darr, executive director of the Southwest Renewal Foundation in High Point, near Greensboro, North Carolina, said she doesn’t know if the group’s $18.4 million grant is frozen. Southwest Renewal is teaming up with eight partners to support not only environmental projects—tree planting, water testing and building an urban greenway—but also workforce training and infrastructure improvements. These include upgrades to old, leaking sewer lines and inefficient HVAC systems and a new energy-efficient “cool” roof at a Guilford County school.
The money would also pay for nine new public electric vehicle charging stations, anti-littering campaigns and other improvements in historically Black and low-income neighborhoods in the southwest part of the city.
Darr said the foundation only recently received an account number from the EPA, and she plans to try to access the funds Monday.
“The grant title”—Environmental and Climate Justice Community Change Grants—”has the words ‘environment’ and ‘justice’ in it,” Darr said. “If you’re just slashing programs based on words, then we’re a sitting duck.”
In Texas, the nonprofit group Downwiders at Risk received word in a Feb. 4 letter that it had received a $500,000 EPA environmental justice “collaborative problem-solving” grant it had applied for last year. The money was to be used to install community air monitors in neighborhoods near Dallas. But the notification didn’t provide instructions on how to access the money, and no followup ever came.
Executive Director Caleb Roberts called around his local EPA office, but no one could give answers.
“People are still unsure. Our project officer at the EPA has no idea. I’ve emailed people higher up,” Roberts said. “They have no idea if things are funded or not. They are just as in the dark as we are.”
Downwinders’ award letter said they had 21 days to pull their first block of funding. If no instructions to access the money arrive before then, Robert worries they may lose it.
The city of New Haven, Connecticut, only received word on Jan. 21—the day after Trump’s inauguration—that it and its local nonprofit partners had received a $20 million environmental justice community change grant, according to Steve Winter, who heads up the city’s Office of Climate and Sustainability. But he had never been able to access the funds; the online system originally said “unavailable for payment;” that changed on Feb. 10 to “suspended.”
The money was supposed to help fund whole-home energy efficiency retrofits in a city where one-quarter of the population lives in poverty and where energy costs have skyrocketed since the start of the Russia-Ukraine war, Winter said. Connecticut, like much of New England, relies heavily on heating oil in winter—not only the most expensive home heating fuel, but the most polluting. The grants also would have helped with asbestos and mold remediation in the homes, which are necessary before energy efficiency upgrades can be done.
Winter said the city has warned its partners that they now may need to lay off staff that they’ve hired for outreach for energy efficiency programs, and the future of a community geothermal project is at risk. Also up in the air: a local food rescue organization’s plans to increase staff and food storage capacity.
“People might say, oh this environmental justice grant is some frivolous thing, but it’s about helping people with quality affordable housing, with lowering their energy bills, alleviating hunger in the community, providing affordable transportation options,” Winter said. “These are all trying to meet basic needs that also have an environmental impact.”
A “rush job” accusation
The Trump administration’s drive to root out “diversity, equity and inclusion,” or DEI programs, throughout the government has swept up environmental justice programs at EPA, even though the two are distinct policy initiatives similar only in that they often involve people of color. After taking office two weeks ago, the first employees that Zeldin announced he was eliminating from the agency were those in DEI and environmental justice programs.
“The previous Administration used DEI and Environmental Justice to advance ideological priorities, distributing billions of dollars to organizations in the name of climate equity,” Zeldin said in a statement. “This ends now. We will be good stewards of tax dollars and do everything in our power to deliver clean air, land, and water to every American, regardless of race, religion, background, and creed.”
Last week, as thousands more employees at EPA and other federal agencies were placed on administrative leave or accepted the deferred retirement offer, Zeldin escalated his critiques on environmental justice and climate programs.
In a video first posted on X, Musk’s social media platform, on Wednesday night,
Zeldin called out $20 billion for the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund that he said had been “parked at an outside financial institution,” suggesting that the money was given away in a “rush job” in the waning days of the Biden administration. In fact, the money in question was awarded to eight recipients in August, well before the election. The program’s defenders say it went through a rigorous selection process that began more than a year before the awards were announced.
The $20 billion falls under twoprograms within the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund and is intended to support nonprofits and financial institutions to serve as green banks. The eight recipients, which received between $400,000 and $7 billion, are supposed to use that money to finance projects by businesses and nonprofits around the country that would cut climate pollution. Much of the money is dedicated to low-income communities, where it is often harder for businesses to raise private financing.
The recipients have already begun using the funding to support businesses, including $250 million for an electric truck financing program beginning at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, $31.8 million in financing for a solar project for the University of Arkansas System and $10.8 million for solar projects on Tribal lands in Oregon and Idaho.
An electric truck is delivered to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Calif. on Dec. 17, 2021.
Credit: Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images
An electric truck is delivered to the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro, Calif. on Dec. 17, 2021. Credit: Brittany Murray/MediaNews Group/Long Beach Press-Telegram via Getty Images
Unlike most of the grant recipients under the IRA, who draw down their money over time as work is completed, the green banks already received their money. Zealan Hoover, who administered IRA programs at EPA during the Biden administration, said the money was placed into bank accounts at Citibank under terms of financial agreements worked out with the Treasury Department.
Although EPA had never used such an outside financial agent before, the Treasury Department had made such agreements with outside institutions many times in the past to distribute or collect money. The system used for electronic federal tax payments, for expanding access to retirement savings and for getting money to assist businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic are just a few of the examples he cited.
“What is underway is not a good-faith effort to fight fraud,” Hoover said. “If it was, federal agencies would not be firing thousands of employees who are hired to conduct robust management and oversight of these programs.”
Zeldin said he was calling for termination of the financial agent agreement for the green bank program, and for the immediate return of the entire fund balance to the United States Treasury. He also said he was referring the issue to the EPA’s Office of the Inspector General and Congress and would “work with the U.S. Department of Justice.” In fact, EPA’s inspector general was dismissed in the early days of the Trump administration along with those at 16 other agencies. EPA’s press office said the agency currently has an acting inspector general but when asked, did not respond with that person’s name. EPA did not answer further questions on the financial agent program, referring only to Zeldin’s video post.
“The American public deserves a more transparent and accountable government than what transpired the past four years,” Zeldin said in the post. “We take our obligations under the law as seriously as it gets. I’ve directed my team to find your ‘gold bars’ and they found them. Now we will get them back inside of control of government as we pursue next steps.”
Citibank declined to comment. Each of the eight recipients of the green bank funds either declined to comment or did not reply to requests for comment.
“Hard for courts to catch up”
What happens next for the grant recipients is not entirely clear. Courts have issued temporary restraining orders to halt the funding freeze until the issue can be argued on its merits. In a five-page order issued Feb. 10, U.S. District Judge John McConnell Jr. of Rhode Island said that it was clear that the administration had in some instances continued “to improperly freeze federal funds.”
McConnell ordered the administration to “immediately end any funding pause,” but EPA and other agencies that are administering IRA climate programs, like the Department of Energy, are continuing to hold back funds.
“We’re talking about funding for families to make upgrades that help them save on their monthly energy bill, funding for people to buy energy efficient appliances and to retrofit their home so that cold air stays out in the winter and hot air stays out in the summer,” said Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., the vice chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, in a briefing with reporters on Thursday. “Those programs aren’t just important to tackling the climate crisis. They are saving our families money.”
“What is painfully clear is that Trump’s illegal funding freeze is causing chaos and confusion,” Murray said.
But Murray and other Democrats, who helped shepherd the IRA to passage in 2022 with no Republican votes, now have little power to force a showdown in a Congress controlled by Republicans. And although multiple studies have shown that most of the $379 billion Congress devoted to funding the clean energy transition in that legislation has flowed to Republican districts, there has been little sign so far that GOP leaders are inclined to clash with the administration. In a few instances, Republicans have sought protection for individual programs that affect their own states.
Blanchard and other legal experts said the courts will have the final say on whether the Trump administration can continue to selectively freeze federal funds. But the decisions may not come soon enough for the programs that are relying on the money they were promised.
“The problem is, as a practical matter, it’s very hard for the courts to catch up,” said Richard Lazarus, an environmental law professor at Harvard Law School. “And the impact on these communities is immediate. The place is closed down, the services aren’t provided for these communities. So the impact can be immediate and devastating, and the practical remedy may be illusory.”
Lazarus was one of the legal scholars writing about environmental justice in the 1990s, before President Bill Clinton signed the first executive order to address communities that suffer a disproportionate burden of pollution. He said that although these communities now “have a fight on their hands,” it is not a new situation for them.
“It’s not as though the government turning against their hardship is something the EJ communities don’t know,” he said. “They don’t welcome it, but they know what this is. It’s how they’ve lived their lives for decades. They fought, and they’ll continue to fight. And that’ll be fighting in cases and lawsuits, and it’ll be fighting politically.”
This story originally appeared on Inside Climate News.
Set to be killed by Trump, the rules mostly lock in existing trends.
In April last year, the Environmental Protection Agency released its latest attempt to regulate the carbon emissions of power plants under the Clean Air Act. It’s something the EPA has been required to do since a 2007 Supreme Court decision that settled a case that started during the Clinton administration. The latest effort seemed like the most aggressive yet, forcing coal plants to retire or install carbon capture equipment and making it difficult for some natural gas plants to operate without capturing carbon or burning green hydrogen.
Yet, according to a new analysis published in Thursday’s edition of Science, they wouldn’t likely have a dramatic effect on the US’s future emissions even if they were to survive a court challenge. Instead, the analysis suggests the rules serve more like a backstop to prevent other policy changes and increased demand from countering the progress that would otherwise be made. This is just as well, given that the rules are inevitably going to be eliminated by the incoming Trump administration.
A long time coming
The net result of a number of Supreme Court decisions is that greenhouse gasses are pollutants under the Clean Air Act, and the EPA needed to determine whether they posed a threat to people. George W. Bush’s EPA dutifully performed that analysis but sat on the results until its second term ended, leaving it to the Obama administration to reach the same conclusion. The EPA went on to formulate rules for limiting carbon emissions on a state-by-state basis, but these were rapidly made irrelevant because renewable power and natural gas began displacing coal even without the EPA’s encouragement.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration replaced those rules with ones designed to accomplish even less, which were thrown out by a court just before Biden’s inauguration. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court stepped in to rule on the now-even-more-irrelevant Obama rules, determining that the EPA could only regulate carbon emissions at the level of individual power plants rather than at the level of the grid.
All of that set the stage for the latest EPA rules, which were formulated by the Biden administration’s EPA. Forced by the court to regulate individual power plants, the EPA allowed coal plants that were set to retire within the decade to continue to operate as they have. Anything that would remain operational longer would need to either switch fuels or install carbon capture equipment. Similarly, natural gas plants were regulated based on how frequently they were operational; those that ran less than 40 percent of the time could face significant new regulations. More than that, and they’d have to capture carbon or burn a fuel mixture that is primarily hydrogen produced without carbon emissions.
While the Biden EPA’s rules are currently making their way through the courts, they’re sure to be pulled in short order by the incoming Trump administration, making the court case moot. Nevertheless, people had started to analyze their potential impact before it was clear there would be an incoming Trump administration. And the analysis is valuable in the sense that it will highlight what will be lost when the rules are eliminated.
By some measures, the answer is not all that much. But the answer is also very dependent upon whether the Trump administration engages in an all-out assault on renewable energy.
Regulatory impact
The work relies on the fact that various researchers and organizations have developed models to explore how the US electric grid can economically meet demand under different conditions, including different regulatory environments. The researchers obtained nine of them and ran them with and without the EPA’s proposed rules to determine their impact.
On its own, eliminating the rules has a relatively minor impact. Without the rules, the US grid’s 2040 carbon dioxide emissions would end up between 60 and 85 percent lower than they were in 2005. With the rules, the range shifts to between 75 and 85 percent—in essence, the rules reduce the uncertainty about the outcomes that involve the least change.
That’s primarily because of how they’re structured. Mostly, they target coal plants, as these account for nearly half of the US grid’s emissions despite supplying only about 15 percent of its power. They’ve already been closing at a rapid clip, and would likely continue to do so even without the EPA’s encouragement.
Natural gas plants, the other major source of carbon emissions, would primarily respond to the new rules by operating less than 40 percent of the time, thus avoiding stringent regulation while still allowing them to handle periods where renewable power underproduces. And we now have a sufficiently large fleet of natural gas plants that demand can be met without a major increase in construction, even with most plants operating at just 40 percent of their rated capacity. The continued growth of renewables and storage also contributes to making this possible.
One irony of the response seen in the models is that it suggests that two key pieces of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are largely irrelevant. The IRA provides benefits for the deployment of carbon capture and the production of green hydrogen (meaning hydrogen produced without carbon emissions). But it’s likely that, even with these credits, the economics wouldn’t favor the use of these technologies when alternatives like renewables plus storage are available. The IRA also provides tax credits for deploying renewables and storage, pushing the economics even further in their favor.
Since not a lot changes, the rules don’t really affect the cost of electricity significantly. Their presence boosts costs by an estimated 0.5 to 3.7 percent in 2050 compared to a scenario where the rules aren’t implemented. As a result, the wholesale price of electricity changes by only two percent.
A backstop
That said, the team behind the analysis argues that, depending on other factors, the rules could play a significant role. Trump has suggested he will target all of Biden’s energy policies, and that would include the IRA itself. Its repeal could significantly slow the growth of renewable energy in the US, as could continued problems with expanding the grid to incorporate new renewable capacity.
In addition, the US is seeing demand for electricity rise at a faster pace in 2023 than in the decade leading up to it. While it’s still unclear whether that’s a result of new demand or simply weather conditions boosting the use of electricity in heating and cooling, there are several factors that could easily boost the use of electricity in coming years: the electrification of transport, rising data center use, and the electrification of appliances and home heating.
Should these raise demand sufficiently, then it could make continued coal use economical in the absence of the EPA rules. “The rules … can be viewed as backstops against higher emissions outcomes under futures with improved coal plant economics,” the paper suggests, “which could occur with higher demand, slower renewables deployment from interconnection and permitting delays, or higher natural gas prices.”
And it may be the only backstop we have. The report also notes that a number of states have already set aggressive emissions reduction targets, including some for net zero by 2050. But these don’t serve as a substitute for federal climate policy, given that the states that are taking these steps use very little coal in the first place.
John is Ars Technica’s science editor. He has a Bachelor of Arts in Biochemistry from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. in Molecular and Cell Biology from the University of California, Berkeley. When physically separated from his keyboard, he tends to seek out a bicycle, or a scenic location for communing with his hiking boots.
Ars has reached out to the lead author, Megan Liu, but has not received a response. Liu works for the environmental health advocacy group Toxic-Free Future, which led the study.
The study highlighted that flame retardants used in plastic electronics may, in some instances, be recycled into household items.
“Companies continue to use toxic flame retardants in plastic electronics, and that’s resulting in unexpected and unnecessary toxic exposures,” Liu said in a press release from October. “These cancer-causing chemicals shouldn’t be used to begin with, but with recycling, they are entering our environment and our homes in more ways than one. The high levels we found are concerning.”
BDE-209, aka decabromodiphenyl ether or deca-BDE, was a dominant component of TV and computer housings before it was banned by the European Union in 2006 and some US states in 2007. China only began restricting BDE-209 in 2023. The flame retardant is linked to carcinogenicity, endocrine disruption, neurotoxicity, and reproductive harm.
Uncommon contaminant
The presence of such toxic compounds in household items is important for noting the potential hazards in the plastic waste stream. However, in addition to finding levels that were an order of magnitude below safe limits, the study also suggested that the contamination is not very common.
The study examined 203 black plastic household products, including 109 kitchen utensils, 36 toys, 30 hair accessories, and 28 food serviceware products. Of those 203 products, only 20 (10 percent) had any bromine-containing compounds at levels that might indicate contamination from bromine-based flame retardants, like BDE-209. Of the 109 kitchen utensils tested, only nine (8 percent) contained concerning bromine levels.
“[A] minority of black plastic products are contaminated at levels >50 ppm [bromine],” the study states.
But that’s just bromine compounds. Overall, only 14 of the 203 products contained BDE-209 specifically.
The product that contained the highest level of bromine compounds was a disposable sushi tray at 18,600 ppm. Given that heating is a significant contributor to chemical leaching, it’s unclear what exposure risk the sushi tray poses. Of the 28 food serviceware products assessed in the study, the sushi tray was only one of two found to contain bromine compounds. The other was a fast food tray that was at the threshold of contamination with 51 ppm.
The incoming Trump administration has even more plans to delay electric vehicle adoption than previously thought. According to Reuters, which has seen transition team documents, the Trump team wants to abolish EV subsidies, claw back federal funding meant for EV charging infrastructure, block EV battery imports on national security grounds, and prevent the federal government and the US military from purchasing more EVs.
During the campaign, candidate Trump made repeated references to ending a supposed EV mandate. In fact, policies put in place by current US President Joe Biden only call for 50 percent of all new vehicles to be electrified by 2032 under EPA rules meant to cut emissions by 56 percent from 2026 levels.
More pollution
Instead, the new regime will be far more friendly to gas guzzling, as it intends to roll back EPA fuel efficiency standards to those in effect in 2019. This would increase the allowable level of emissions from cars by about 25 percent relative to the current rule set. US new vehicle efficiency stalled between 2008 and 2019, and it was only once the Biden administration began in 2021 that the EPA started instituting stricter rules on allowable limits of carbon dioxide and other pollutants from vehicle tailpipes.
About a third of the population looks to the California Air Resources Board, rather than the EPA, to get their emissions regulations.
The so-called ZEV states (for Zero Emissions Vehicles) do have something closer to an EV mandate, and from model-year 2026 in these states (California, Connecticut, Colorado, Delaware, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, and the District of Columbia) a third of all new cars sold by each automaker will have to be battery-electric—assuming the EPA grants California a waiver to allow this to happen.
As with the first Trump administration, we can expect a sustained attack on California’s ability to set its own vehicle emissions regulations and any attempts by other states to use those regs.
More tariffs
Trade tariffs will evidently be a major weapon of the next Trump administration, particularly when deployed to block EV manufacturing. Even the current administration has been wary enough of China dumping cheap EVs that it instituted singeing tariffs on Chinese-made EVs and batteries, with bipartisan support from Congress.
On Friday, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit denied a request to put a hold on recently formulated rules that would limit carbon emissions made by fossil fuel power plants. The request, made as part of a case that sees 25 states squaring off against the EPA, would have put the federal government’s plan on hold while the case continued. Instead, the EPA will be allowed to continue the process of putting its rules into effect, and the larger case will be heard under an accelerated schedule.
Here we go again
The EPA’s efforts to regulate carbon emissions from power plants go back all the way to the second Bush administration, when a group of states successfully sued the EPA to force it to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. This led to a formal endangerment finding regarding greenhouse gases during the Obama administration, something that remained unchallenged even during Donald Trump’s term in office.
Obama tried to regulate emissions through the Clean Power Plan, but his second term came to an end before this plan had cleared court hurdles, allowing the Trump administration to formulate a replacement that did far less than the Clean Power Plan. This took place against a backdrop of accelerated displacement of coal by natural gas and renewables that had already surpassed the changes envisioned under the Clean Power Plan.
In any case, the Trump plan was thrown out by the courts on the day before Biden’s administration, allowing his EPA to start with a clean slate. Biden’s original plan, which would have had states regulate emissions from their electric grids by regulating them as a single system, was thrown out by the Supreme Court, which ruled that emissions would need to be regulated on a per-plant basis in a decision termed West Virginia v. EPA.
So, that’s what the agency is now trying to do. Its plan, issued last year, would allow fossil-fuel-burning plants that are being shut down in the early 2030s to continue operating without restrictions. Others will need to either install carbon capture equipment, or natural gas plants could swap in green hydrogen as their primary fuel.
And again
In response, 25 states have sued to block the rule (you can check out this filing to see if yours is among them). The states also sought a stay that would prevent the rule from being implemented while the case went forward. In it, they argue that carbon capture technology isn’t mature enough to form the basis of these regulations (something we predicted was likely to be a point of contention). The suit also suggests that the rules would effectively put coal out of business, something that’s beyond the EPA’s remit.
The DC Court of Appeals, however, was not impressed, ruling that the states’ arguments regarding carbon capture are insufficient: “Petitioners have not shown they are likely to succeed on those claims given the record in this case.” And that’s the key hurdle for determining whether a stay is justified. And the regulations don’t pose a likelihood of irreparable harm, as the court notes that states aren’t even expected to submit a plan for at least two years, and the regulations won’t kick in until 2030 at the earliest.
Meanwhile, the states cited the Supreme Court’s West Virginia v. EPA decision to argue against these rules, suggesting they represent a “major question” that requires input from Congress. The Court was also not impressed, writing that “EPA has claimed only the power to ‘set emissions limits under Section 111 based on the application of measures that would reduce pollution by causing the regulated source to operate more cleanly,’ a type of conduct that falls well within EPA’s bailiwick.”
To respond to the states’ concerns about the potential for irreparable harm, the court plans to consider them during the 2024 term and has given the parties just two weeks to submit proposed schedules for briefings on the case.
Today, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that it has finalized rules for handling water supplies that are contaminated by a large family of chemicals collectively termed PFAS (perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances). Commonly called “forever chemicals,” these contaminants have been linked to a huge range of health issues, including cancers, heart disease, immune dysfunction, and developmental disorders.
The final rules keep one striking aspect of the initial proposal intact: a goal of completely eliminating exposure to two members of the PFAS family. The new rules require all drinking water suppliers to monitor for the chemicals’ presence, and the EPA estimates that as many as 10 percent of them may need to take action to remove them. While that will be costly, the health benefits are expected to exceed those costs.
Going low
PFAS are a collection of hydrocarbons where some of the hydrogen atoms have been swapped out for fluorine. This swap retains the water-repellant behavior of hydrocarbons while making the molecules highly resistant to breaking down through natural processes—hence the forever chemicals moniker. They’re widely used in water-resistant clothing and non-stick cooking equipment and have found uses in firefighting foam. Their widespread use and disposal has allowed them to get into water supplies in many locations.
They’ve also been linked to an enormous range of health issues. The EPA expects that its new rules will have the following effects: fewer cancers, lower incidence of heart attacks and strokes, reduced birth complications, and a drop in other developmental, cardiovascular, liver, immune, endocrine, metabolic, reproductive, musculoskeletal, and carcinogenic effects. These are not chemicals you want to be drinking.
The striking thing was how far the EPA was willing to go to get them out of drinking water. For two chemicals, Perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and Perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), the Agency’s ideal contamination level is zero. Meaning no exposure to these chemicals whatsoever. Since current testing equipment is limited to a sensitivity of four parts per trillion, the new rules settle for using that as the standard. Other family members see limits of 10 parts per trillion, and an additional limit sets a cap on how much total exposure is acceptable when a mixture of PFAS is present.
Overall, the EPA estimates that there are roughly 66,000 drinking water suppliers that will be subject to these new rules. They’ll be given three years to get monitoring and testing programs set up and provided access to funds from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to help offset the costs. All told, over $20 billion will be made available for the testing and improvements to equipment needed for compliance.
The Agency expects that somewhere between 4,000 and 6,500 of those systems will require some form of decontamination. While those represent a relatively small fraction of the total drinking water suppliers, it’s estimated that nearly a third of the US’ population will see its exposure to PFAS drop. Several technologies, including reverse osmosis and exposure to activated carbon, are capable of pulling PFAS from water, and the EPA is leaving it up to each supplier to choose a preferred method.
Cost/benefit
All of that monitoring and decontamination will not come cheap. The EPA estimates that the annual costs will be in the neighborhood of $150 billion, which will likely be passed on to consumers via their water suppliers. Those same consumers, however, are expected to see health benefits that outweigh these costs. EPA estimates place the impact of just three of the health improvements (cancer, cardiovascular, and birth complications) at $150 billion annually. Adding all the benefits of the rest of the health improvements should greatly exceed the costs.
The problem, of course, is that people will immediately recognize the increased cost of their water bills, while the savings of medical problems that don’t happen are much more abstract.
Overall, the final plan is largely unchanged from the EPA’s original proposal. The biggest differences are that the Agency is giving water suppliers more time to comply, somewhat more specific exposure allowances, and the ability of suppliers with minimal contamination to go longer in between submitting test results.
“People will live longer, healthier lives because of this action, and the benefits justify the costs,” the agency concluded in announcing the new rules.
Enlarge/ An oil refinery in Louisiana. Facilities such as this have led to a proliferation of petrochemical plants in the area.
On Tuesday, the US Environmental Protection Agency announced new rules that are intended to cut emissions of two chemicals that have been linked to elevated incidence of cancer: ethylene oxide and chloroprene. While production and use of these chemicals takes place in a variety of locations, they’re particularly associated with an area of petrochemical production in Louisiana that has become known as “Cancer Alley.”
The new regulations would require chemical manufacturers to monitor the emissions at their facilities and take steps to repair any problems that result in elevated emissions. Despite extensive evidence linking these chemicals to elevated risk of cancer, industry groups are signaling their opposition to these regulations, and the EPA has seen two previous attempts at regulation set aside by courts.
Dangerous stuff
The two chemicals at issue are primarily used as intermediates in the manufacture of common products. Chloroprene, for example, is used for the production of neoprene, a synthetic rubber-like substance that’s probably familiar from products like insulated sleeves and wetsuits. It’s a four-carbon chain with two double-bonds that allow for polymerization and an attached chlorine that alters its chemical properties.
According to the National Cancer Institute (NCI), chloroprene “is a mutagen and carcinogen in animals and is reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” Given that cancers are driven by DNA damage, any mutagen would be “reasonably anticipated” to drive the development of cancer. Beyond that, it appears to be pretty nasty stuff, with the NCI noting that “exposure to this substance causes damage to the skin, lungs, CNS, kidneys, liver and depression of the immune system.”
The NCI’s take on Ethylene Oxide is even more definitive, with the Institute placing it on its list of cancer-causing substances. The chemical is very simple, with two carbons that are linked to each other directly, and also linked via an oxygen atom, which makes the molecule look a bit like a triangle. This configuration allows the molecule to participate in a broad range of reactions that break one of the oxygen bonds, making it useful in the production of a huge range of chemicals. Its reactivity also makes it useful for sterilizing items such as medical equipment.
Its sterilization function works through causing damage to DNA, which again makes it prone to causing cancers.
In addition to these two chemicals, the EPA’s new regulations will target a number of additional airborne pollutants, including benzene, 1,3-butadiene, ethylene dichloride, and vinyl chloride, all of which have similar entries at the NCI.
Despite the extensive record linking these chemicals to cancer, The New York Times quotes the US Chamber of Commerce, a pro-industry group, as saying that “EPA should not move forward with this rule-making based on the current record because there remains significant scientific uncertainty.”
A history of exposure
The petrochemical industry is the main source of these chemicals, so their release is associated with areas where the oil and gas industry has a major presence; the EPA notes that the regulations will target sources in Delaware, New Jersey, and the Ohio River Valley. But the primary focus will be on chemical plants in Texas and Louisiana. These include the area that has picked up the moniker Cancer Alley due to a high incidence of the disease in a stretch along the Mississippi River with a large concentration of chemical plants.
As is the case with many examples of chemical pollution, the residents of Cancer Alley are largely poor and belong to minority groups. As a result, the EPA had initially attempted to regulate the emissions under a civil rights provision of the Clean Air Act, but that has been bogged down due to lawsuits.
The new regulations simply set limits on permissible levels of release at what’s termed the “fencelines” of the facilities where these chemicals are made, used, or handled. If levels exceed an annual limit, the owners and operators “must find the source of the pollution and make repairs.” This gets rid of previous exemptions for equipment startup, shutdown, and malfunctions; those exemptions had been held to violate the Clean Air Act in a separate lawsuit.
The EPA estimates that the sites subject to regulation will see their collective emissions of these chemicals drop by nearly 80 percent, which works out to be 54 tons of ethylene oxide, 14 tons of chloroprene, and over 6,000 tons of the other pollutants. That in turn will reduce the cancer risk from these toxins by 96 percent among those subjected to elevated exposures. Collectively, the chemicals subject to these regulations also contribute to smog, so these reductions will have an additional health impact by reducing its levels as well.
While the EPA says that “these emission reductions will yield significant reductions in lifetime cancer risk attributable to these air pollutants,” it was unable to come up with an estimate of the financial benefits that will result from that reduction. By contrast, it estimates that the cost of compliance will end up being approximately $150 million annually. “Most of the facilities covered by the final rule are owned by large corporations,” the EPA notes. “The cost of implementing the final rule is less than one percent of their annual national sales.”
This sort of cost-benefit analysis is a required step during the formulation of Clean Air Act regulations, so it’s worth taking a step back and considering what’s at stake here: the EPA is basically saying that companies that work with significant amounts of carcinogens need to take stronger steps to make sure that they don’t use the air people breathe as a dumping ground for them.
Unsurprisingly, The New York Times quotes a neoprene manufacturer that the EPA is currently suing over its chloroprene emissions as claiming the new regulations are “draconian.”
Enlarge/ More than 2,000 Tesla model-year 2023 Model Y and Model 3s have suffered steering failure, according to a new NHTSA safety defect investigation.
Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images
It’s been a rough week for Tesla. On Tuesday, a court in Delaware voided a massive $55.8 billion pay package for CEO Elon Musk. Then, news emerged that Tesla was being sued by 25 different counties in California for years of dumping toxic waste. That was followed by a recall affecting 2.2 million Teslas. Now, Ars has learned that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration’s Office of Defects Investigation is investigating the company after 2,388 complaints of steering failure affecting the model-year 2023 Model 3 sedan and Model Y crossover.
Paint, brake fluid, used batteries, antifreeze, diesel
In 2022, the US Environmental Protection Agency fined Tesla $275,000 for violating the Clean Air Act, which followed a $31,000 penalty Tesla paid to the EPA in 2019. But EPA data shows that Tesla continued to violate the Clean Air Act in 2023.
And on Wednesday, Reuters reported that 25 Californian counties sued Tesla for violating the state’s hazardous waste laws and unfair business laws by improperly labeling hazardous waste before sending it to landfills that were not able to deal with the material.
The suit alleged that violations occurred at more than 100 facilities, including the factory in Fremont, and that Tesla disposed of hazardous materials including “but not limited to: lubricating oils, brake fluids, lead acid batteries, aerosols, antifreeze, cleaning fluids, propane, paint, acetone, liquified petroleum gas, adhesives and diesel fuel.”
Despite potentially large penalties for these industrial waste violations, which could have resulted in tens of thousands of dollars of fines for each day the automaker was not compliant, the counties and Tesla swiftly settled the suit on Thursday. Tesla, which had annual revenues of $96.8 billion in 2023, will pay just $1.3 million in civil penalties and an additional $200,000 in costs. The company is supposed to properly train its employees and hire a third party to conduct annual waste audits at 10 percent of its facilities, according to the Office of the District Attorney in San Francisco.
“While electric vehicles may benefit the environment, the manufacturing and servicing of these vehicles still generates many harmful waste streams,” said District Attorney Brooke Jenkins. “Today’s settlement against Tesla, Inc. serves to provide a cleaner environment for citizens throughout the state by preventing the contamination of our precious natural resources when hazardous waste is mismanaged and unlawfully disposed. We are proud to work with our district attorney partners to enforce California’s environmental laws to ensure these hazardous wastes are handled properly.”
An easy recall, a not-so-easy defect investigation
Tesla’s latest recall is a big one, affecting 2,193,869 vehicles—nearly every Tesla sold in the US, including the Model S (model years 2012–2023), the Model X (model years 2016–2024), the Model 3 (model years 2014–2023), the Model Y (model years 2019–2024) and the Cybertruck.
According to the official Part 573 Safety Notice, the issue is due to the cars’ displays, which use a font for the brake, park, and antilock brake warning indicators that is smaller than is legally required under the federal motor vehicle safety standards. NHTSA says it noticed the problem as part of a routine compliance audit on a Model Y in early January. After the agency informed the automaker, Tesla looked into the issue itself, and on January 24, it decided to issue a safety recall. Fortunately for the automaker, it can fix this problem with a software update.
A software patch is unlikely to help its other safety defect problem, however. Yesterday, NHTSA’s ODI upgraded a preliminary evaluation (begun in July 2023) to a full investigation of the steering components fitted to model-year 2023 Models 3 and Y.
NHTSA’s ODI says the problem affects up to 334,569 vehicles, which could suffer a loss of steering control. There have been 124 complaints of steering failure to NHTSA, and the agency says Tesla identified a further 2,264 customer complaints related to the problem. So far, at least one Tesla has crashed as a result of being unable to complete a right turn in an intersection.
A third of the complaints were reported to have happened at speeds below 5 mph, with the majority occurring between 5 and 35 mph and about 10 percent occurring above 35 mph (at least one complaint alleges the problem occurred at 75 mph). “A majority of allegations reported seeing a warning message, ‘Steering assist reduced,’ either before, during, or after the loss of steering control. A portion of drivers described their steering begin to feel ‘notchy’ or ‘clicky’ either prior to or just after the incident,” NHTSA’s investigation said.
NHTSA says there have been “multiple allegations of drivers blocking intersections and/or roadways,” and that more than 50 Teslas had to be towed as a result of the problem. The problem appears to be related to two of the four steering rack part numbers that Tesla used for these model-year 2023 EVs. They were installed in 2,187 of the vehicles, according to the complaints.
Situated in a former sand and gravel pit just a few hundred feet from the Kennebec River in central Maine, the Riverside Station pumps half a million gallons of fresh groundwater every day. The well station processes water from two of five wells on either side of the river operated by the Greater Augusta Utility District, or GAUD, which supplies drinking water to nearly 6,000 local households. Most of them reside in Maine’s state capital, Augusta, just a few miles to the south. Ordinarily, GAUD prides itself on the quality of its water supply. “You could drink it out of the ground and be perfectly safe,” said Brian Tarbuck, GAUD’s general manager.
But in March 2021, environmental sampling of Riverside well water revealed trace levels of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), or “forever chemicals,” as they’re better known. The levels at Riverside didn’t exceed Maine’s drinking water standard of 20 parts per trillion (ppt), which was a relief, Tarbuck said. Still, he and his colleagues at the utility were wary. PFAS have been linked to a variety of health problems, and Maine lawmakers at the time were debating an even stricter limit for the chemicals. Tarbuck knew a lower standard was coming someday. The only question was when.
As it turns out, a tougher standard is expected early this year. That’s when the US Environmental Protection Agency is set to finalize an enforceable cap on PFAS in drinking water that will require GAUD and thousands of other utilities around the country to update their treatment methods. The standard, which in regulatory terms is called a maximum contaminant level, or MCL, limits permissible amounts of the two most studied and ubiquitous PFAS compounds—PFOA and PFOS—to just 4 ppt in drinking water each. Roughly equivalent to a single drop in five Olympic-size swimming pools, this is the lowest concentration that current analytical instruments can reliably detect “within specific limits of precision and accuracy during routine laboratory operating conditions,” according to the EPA. Four other PFAS—PFHxS, PFNA, PFBS, and HFPO-DA (otherwise known as GenX Chemicals)—will be regulated by combining their acceptable levels into a single value. Utilities will have three to five years to bring their systems into compliance.
Agency officials estimate that between 3,400 and 6,300 water systems will be affected by the regulation, which is the EPA’s first ever PFAS standard and the first MCL set by the agency for any chemical in drinking water in over 25 years. PFOA and PFOS account for the majority of anticipated exceedances.
GAUD is now gearing up to spend $3 to 5 million on PFAS removal technology, according to Tarbuck, much of which will be passed on to its customers in the form of higher water bills. Nationally, the price tag of meeting the standard could top $37 billion in upfront costs, in addition to $650 million in annual operating expenses, according to the American Water Works Association, or AWWA, a nonprofit lobbying group representing water utilities. That’s far higher than the EPA’s cost estimate of $777 million to $1.2 billion and a significant burden for an industry already contending with other costly priorities, such as boosting cybersecurity and “replacing all those antiquated, leaking big water pipes that transport the water from the treatment plant to the service line” that connects to homes, said Marc Edwards, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech. Chris Moody, the AWWA’s regulatory technical manager, said most of the money will be spent in the next several years, as utilities race to install PFAS removal systems and other infrastructure needed to meet compliance deadlines.
In proposing the limits, EPA officials said that they had leveraged the latest science to protect the public from PFAS pollution. Environmental groups welcomed the move as long overdue. But the standard has drawn widespread criticism from the water utility industry and some scientists who say that in many places, small drops in PFAS water levels will matter little for exposure or health. “There are other strategies that get us to safer, public health protective approaches to PFAS that don’t involve the really strict standard that EPA is putting forward,” said Ned Calonge, an associate dean for public health practice at the Colorado School of Public Health and chair of a 2022 National Academies of Sciences report on PFAS exposure, testing, and clinical follow-up.
EPA officials estimate that between 3,400 and 6,300 water systems will be affected by the regulation, which is the agency’s first-ever PFAS standard
A key issue, critics say, is that the standard ensnares too many utilities with very small PFAS exceedances. Roughly 98 percent of drinking water utilities in the country, including GAUD, have maximum PFOA and PFOS levels below 10 ppt, according to the AWWA. When the levels are already so low, further reductions of a few parts per trillion “is not going to have much effect on total exposure intake,” wrote Ian Cousins, an environmental chemist at Stockholm University and one of the world’s leading researchers on PFAS exposure, in an email to Undark.
Drinking water is only one among many different pathways by which people can be exposed to PFAS. The chemicals are also in agricultural produce, fish, meat, outdoor soil, household dust, nonstick cookware, cosmetics, fast-food wrappers, stain- and water-resistant fabrics, and other products. Just how much these sources each contribute to PFAS exposure is a subject of ongoing research. But the EPA estimates that Americans get 80 percent of their PFAS intake from sources other than drinking water, and according to Cousins, dietary contributions likely account for most human exposure. The US Food and Drug Administration has required the phase out of some PFAS in food packaging. But “food is contaminated via bioaccumulation in agricultural and marine food chains,” Cousins said. “We cannot clean up our food in the same way that we can add a treatment process to our drinking water.”
After finding “more than 100 readings with elevated lead near cables,” the EPA sent letters to AT&T and Verizon in December, requesting a meeting later this month, the Journal revealed. On the agenda, the EPA expects the companies to share internal data on their own testing of the cables, as well as details from any “technical reports related to the companies’ testing and sampling,” the WSJ reported.
The EPA’s investigation was prompted by a WSJ report published last July, alleging that AT&T, Verizon, and other companies were aware that thousands of miles of cables could be contaminating soils throughout the US, “where Americans live, work and play,” but did nothing to intervene despite the many public health risks associated with lead exposure.
In that report, tests showed that the telecom cables were likely the source of lead contaminated soils because “the amount measured in the soil was highest directly under or next to the cables and dropped within a few feet.” WSJ also spoke to residents and former telecom employees in areas tested who had contracted illnesses commonly linked to lead exposure.
Immediately, WSJ’s report spurred lawmakers to demand a response from USTelecom—a telecommunications trade association representing companies accused—with Senator Ed Markey (D-Mass.) suggesting that telecom giants were seemingly committing “corporate irresponsibility of the worst kind.”
Since then, the EPA has followed up and developed “its own testing data” in West Orange, New Jersey, southwest Pennsylvania, and Louisiana—the same locations flagged by the WSJ. In all locations, the EPA found lead contamination exceeding the “current recommendation for levels of lead it believes are generally safe in soil where children play,” 400-parts-per-million, the WSJ reported. In West Orange, two testing sites found lead “at 3,300 parts per million or higher.”
According to the EPA, initial testing by a national working group led to a conclusion that none of these sites poses an immediate health risk or requires an emergency response, but that finding hasn’t stopped the probe. The EPA told the WSJ that it still needs to address unanswered questions to decide “whether further actions may be required to address risks from the lead-containing cables.”
“While some locations sampled show concentrations above screening levels for long term exposures, existing data is not sufficient to determine whether lead from the cables poses a threat, or a potential threat, to human health or the environment,” the EPA said in a Reuters report.
Companies maintain that evidence from their own testing has shown lead cables do not pose public health risks requiring remediation.
USTelecom, speaking on behalf of Verizon and other telecom companies, told the WSJ that “our industry has been engaging with the EPA and our companies look forward to meeting with the EPA to discuss agency and industry testing results. We will continue to follow the science, which has not identified that lead-sheathed telecom cables are a leading cause of lead exposure or the cause of a public health issue.”
AT&T told the WSJ that it “will continue to work collaboratively with the EPA as it undertakes its review of lead-clad telecommunications cables. We look forward to the opportunity to meet with the EPA to discuss recent testing and other evidence that contradicts the Wall Street Journal’s assertions.”
An EPA spokesperson, Nick Conger, told Bloomberg that there is no date set for the meeting yet.
