Newsweek

Hurricane Harvey Flooding: EPA to Close Houston Lab Amidst Vital Recovery Work

By Janissa Delzo      September 16, 2017

Hurricane Harvey—a Category 4 storm—made history as it pummeled Texas leaving behind extensive damage and more than 40 inches of rain. The catastrophic floodwaters are potentially carrying many harms, including bacteria, human waste, and deadly chemicals. To understand exactly what may be lingering in the water, employees at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 6 Lab in Houston are conducting water tests. But now that lab, which is expected to play a key role in the extensive recovery efforts, may be closing, the Houston Chronicle reports.

When the lease ends in 2020, the 41,000 square foot space that employs about 50 people is expected to shut down and it’s unknown what will happen next, officials of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE) told the Houston Chronicle.

Environmentalist and labor union groups protested at a news conference on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. about the Trump administration’s pending decision to cut EPA funding by millions of dollars. The groups cited the important work that the chemists, biologists, and other lab employees are doing regarding Hurricane Harvey. Additionally, they stated that if the Houston lab closed, testing water and soil will be much more complicated, considering the next closest EPA regional lab is located in Oklahoma, 400 miles from Houston. In addition to the Houston-area, the lab also covers other parts of Texas, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas and Louisiana.

Houston EPA lab set to close. Some say the lab’s closure is among harmful impacts of the Trump administration’s drive to slice staff and mission in the agency.   houstonchronicle.com

At the news conference, John O’Grady, who works with AFGE representing EPA employees, voiced his concerns about the potential closing.

“We have a laboratory in Houston that is state of the art and is situated directly in an industrial petrochemical complex. And that laboratory is slated for closure. Why? How much money are we going to save with that?” he questioned.

In April the employees were told the building’s lease would not be renewed, Clovis Steib, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees local 1003, told CNN. Employees are still left in the dark about future plans, leaving many worried if they will have a job come 2020.

As the end of the lease gets closer in sight, “the folks in the Houston lab are in limbo; they’re waiting for the shoe to drop. It’s like being on death row,” Steib said.

The scientists at the lab play an important role in ensuring the safety of the millions of people displaced by Harvey, he explained.

“They will be a part of determining when it is safe for storm victims to return to the area, especially neighborhoods near toxic chemical plants and contaminated Superfund sites,” Steib said.

Water testing, organized by The New York Times, found concerning results of what’s lingering in it, including one area in Houston with fecal contamination that’s at a level more than four times considered safe. In the living room of one family’s home, the tests revealed the standing water had E.coli levels 135 times above a safe level. In the kitchen, there was also high levels of lead and arsenic, The Times reported.

CNN

Sachs: Big Oil will have to pay up, like Big Tobacco

By Jeffrey Sachs          September 15, 2017

Story highlights

• Jeffrey Sachs: Fossil fuel companies will soon face financial reckoning as courts hold them liable for damages caused by climate change
• Big Tobacco is implicated in causation of health problems — Big Oil will also be a target for civil damages and compensation

Jeffrey Sachs is a professor and director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his.

(CNN)Here is a message to investors in the oil industry, whether pension and insurance funds, university endowments, hedge funds or other asset managers: Your investments are going to sour. The growing devastation caused by climate change, as seen this month in Texas, Florida and the Caribbean, are going to blow a hole in your fossil-fuel portfolio.

Jeffrey Sachs

Not only will the companies you own suffer as society begins to abandon fossil fuels in earnest, they will also be dragged through the courts here and abroad for their long-standing malfeasance and denial of what they have done to the world.

Climate change deniers, mainly politicians in the pay of the oil industry, protest that there is no proof that destructive storms and floods are the result of human-induced global warming. Who can say that a Hurricane Harvey or Irma wouldn’t have occurred in the past?

Such a defense — the cynical shrug — will not play for much longer, either in the court of public opinion or in courts of law in the United States and abroad. The risks of climate-related disasters are real and rising, and soon it won’t matter politically or legally that any particular event might have occurred even without human-induced global warming.

The issue is of probability, not certainty. Of course, there have been weather-related disasters in the past. But global warming makes us more vulnerable to these events. Scientists emphasize that hurricane damage, for example, may rise for three reasons: higher sea levels (due to warming) cause larger storm surges; warmer oceans add energy to hurricanes; and warmer air holds more water vapor that can cause torrential downpours.

Trump is not changing view on climate change.

Insurance companies know that climate risks are rising, scientists know it, and an increasing number of investors know it. And more of the general public knows it, too.

In climate science, the link between specific events like Harvey and Irma and the general rise in risk due to global warming is called “attribution.” It’s a problem we grapple with in many contexts. When a miner gets lung disease, a homeowner with asbestos insulation develops a rare cancer, or a smoker succumbs to lung cancer, we can never be sure that the particular case was linked to coal dust, asbestos or cigarettes.

But the courts have been ready to read the probabilities, and hold companies liable for damages when the likelihood of causation is high enough.

The courts have also linked liability with the standard of care exercised by the defendant. When a company understands the risks but ignores them, or even worse, lies about them, the court or jury is far more likely to agree to a large claim.

The tobacco companies relentlessly misled the public about their products. Some oil companies have done the same about climate change. ExxonMobil, for example, knew internally for decades that its products contribute to global warming, according to a peer-reviewed Harvard University study published last month, but publicly downplayed the linkages and the resulting risks (Exxon denies this).

The Koch brothers, owners of refineries and oil pipelines, have manufactured doubts about climate science and spent vast sums to oppose decarbonization policies and to elect politicians to do the same.

Pope Francis slams climate change deniers.

But the science of climate attribution is rapidly becoming more sophisticated, leaving the oil industry more exposed than ever.

Consider, for example, the World Weather Attribution (WWA) project. This is an effort by a consortium of scientific institutions, including the University of Oxford Environmental Change Institute, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, the University of Melbourne and the Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre.

This project has recently shown, that human-induced climate change dramatically raised the likelihood of the record-breaking heat wave in western Europe this summer. The team found that climate change “made the intensity and frequency of such extreme heat at least twice as likely in Belgium, at least four times as likely in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and central England and at least 10 times as likely in Portugal and Spain.”

The project is now analyzing whether human-induced global warming raised the likelihood of the rainfall brought by Harvey.

American politics has long been manipulated by Big Oil, with massive campaign financing as well as backroom lobbying not seen by the public. The federal government and oil states like Texas have been as derelict as the companies, and could well find themselves also as defendants in cases brought by Americans and others who are hit by climate disaster.

Many Caribbean islands were devastated by Irma, and their leaders are appealing for aid. Soon, the cries around the world will change to a call for “compensation” or “civil damages” instead of just aid.

When climate justice comes — and it will — those who have been in denial will pay a heavy price. And those who have invested in companies that behaved recklessly and irresponsibly will share the heavy losses on that day of reckoning.