Page 120 • The Revelator

Trump Has Secretive Teams to Roll Back Regulations

An investigation finds many appointees with potential conflicts of interest.

by Robert Faturechi, ProPublica, and Danielle Ivory, The New York Times

President Trump entered office pledging to cut red tape, and within weeks, he ordered his administration to assemble teams to aggressively scale back government regulations.

But the effort — a signature theme in Trump’s populist campaign for the White House — is being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts.

Most government agencies have declined to disclose information about their deregulation teams. But ProPublica and The New York Times identified 71 appointees, including 28 with potential conflicts, through interviews, public records and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act.

Some appointees are reviewing rules their previous employers sought to weaken or kill, and at least two may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone.

The appointees include lawyers who have represented businesses in cases against government regulators, staff members of political dark money groups, employees of industry-funded organizations opposed to environmental rules and at least three people who were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for.

At the Education Department alone, two members of the deregulation team were most recently employed by pro-charter advocacy groups or operators, and one appointee was an executive handling regulatory issues at a for-profit college operator.

So far, the process has been scattershot. Some agencies have been soliciting public feedback, while others refuse even to disclose who is in charge of the review. In many cases, responses to public records requests have been denied, delayed or severely redacted.

The Interior Department has not disclosed the correspondence and calendars for its team. But a review of more than 1,300 pages of handwritten sign-in sheets for guests visiting the agency’s headquarters in Washington found that appointees had met regularly with industry representatives.

Over a four-month period, from February through May, at least 58 representatives of the oil and gas industry signed their names on the agency’s visitor logs before meeting with appointees.

The EPA also rejected requests to release the appointment calendar of the official leading its team — a former top executive for an industry-funded political group — even as she met privately with industry representatives.

And the Defense Department and the Department of Homeland Security provided the titles for most appointees to their review teams, but not names.

When asked for comment about the activities of the deregulation teams, the White House referred reporters to the Office of Management and Budget.

Meghan Burris, a spokeswoman there, said: “As previous administrations have recognized, it’s good government to periodically reassess existing regulations. Past regulatory review efforts, however, have not taken a consistent enough look at regulations on the books.”

With billions of dollars at stake in the push to deregulate, corporations and other industry groups are hiring lawyers, lobbyists and economists to help navigate this new avenue for influence. Getting to the front of the line is crucial, as it can take years to effect regulatory changes.

“Competition will be fierce,” the law firm Clark Hill, which represents businesses pitching the Environmental Protection Agency, said in a marketing memo. “In all likelihood, interested parties will need to develop a multi-pronged strategy to expand support and win pre-eminence over competing regulatory rollback candidates.”

Jane Luxton, a lawyer at the firm, said she advised clients to pay for economic and legal analyses that government agencies, short on staff, could use to expedite changes. She declined to identify the clients.

“You may say this is an agency’s job, but the agencies are totally overloaded,” Luxton said.

On a cloudy, humid day in March, Laura Peterson, a top lobbyist for Syngenta, arrived at the headquarters for the Interior Department. She looped the letter “L” across the agency’s sign-in sheet.

Her company, a top pesticide maker based in Switzerland, had spent eight years and millions of dollars lobbying the Obama administration on environmental rules, with limited success.

But Peterson had an in with the new administration.

Scott Cameron, newly installed at the Interior Department and a member of its deregulation team, had just left a nonprofit he had founded. He had advocated getting pesticides approved and out to market faster. His group counted Syngenta as a financial partner.

The meeting with Peterson was one of the first Cameron took as a new government official.

Neither side would reveal what was discussed. “I’m not sure that’s reporting information I have to give you,” Peterson said.

But lobbying records offered clues.

Syngenta has been one of several pesticide manufacturers pushing for changes to the Endangered Species Act. When federal agencies take actions that may jeopardize endangered animals or plants, they are generally supposed to consult with the Interior Department, which could raise objections.

For decades, the EPA largely ignored this provision when approving new pesticides. But recently, a legal challenge from environmental groups forced its hand — a change that affected Syngenta.

Pesticide lobbyists have been working behind the scenes at agencies and on Capitol Hill to change the provision. Companies have argued that they should be exempt from consulting with the Interior Department because they already undergo EPA approval.

Along with spending millions of dollars on lobbying, they have funded advocacy groups aligned with their cause. Cameron’s nonprofit, the Reduce Risks From Invasive Species Coalition, was one such group for Syngenta.

The organization says on its website that its goals include reducing “the regulatory burden of the Endangered Species Act on American society by addressing invasive species.” One way to do that is to use pesticides. The nonprofit’s mission includes creating “business opportunities for commercial products and services used to control invasive species.”

Because donations are not publicly reported, it is unclear how much Syngenta has contributed to Cameron’s organization, but his group has called the pesticide company one of its “generous sponsors.”

Cameron also served on a committee of experts and stakeholders, including Syngenta, that advised the federal government on decisions related to invasive species. At a committee event last July, he said that one of his priorities was “getting biocontrol agents to market faster,” according to meeting minutes.

Paul Minehart, a Syngenta spokesman, said: “Employees regularly engage with those in government that relate to agriculture and our business. Our purpose is to balance serving the public health and environment with enabling farmers’ access to innovation.”

A spokeswoman for the Interior Department did not respond to questions about how Cameron’s relationship with Syngenta might influence his review of regulations.

Under the law, members of the Trump administration can seek ethics waivers to work on issues that overlap with their past business careers. They can also formally recuse themselves when potential conflicts arise.

In many cases, the administration has refused to say whether appointees to Trump’s deregulation teams have done either.

One such appointee is Samantha Dravis, the chairwoman of the deregulation team at the EPA, who was a top official at the Republican Attorneys General Association. Dravis was also president of the Rule of Law Defense Fund, which brought together energy companies and Republican attorneys general to file lawsuits against the federal government over Obama-era environmental regulations.

The Republican association’s work has been criticized as a vehicle for corporate donors to gain the credibility and expertise of state attorneys general in fighting federal regulations. Donors include the American Petroleum Institute, the energy company ConocoPhillips and the coal giant Alpha Natural Resources.

The Republican association also received funding from Freedom Partners, backed by the conservative billionaires Charles G. and David H. Koch. Dravis worked for that group as well, which recently identified regulations it wants eliminated. Among them are EPA rules relating to clean-water protections and restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions.

Liz Bowman, an EPA spokeswoman, declined to say whether Dravis had recused herself from issues dealing with previous employers or their backers, or had discussed regulations with any of them.

“As you will find when you receive Samantha’s calendar, she has met with a range of stakeholders, including nonprofits, industry groups and others, on a wide range of issues,” Bowman said.

Bowman said the calendar could be obtained through a public records request. ProPublica and The Times had already filed a request for records including calendars, but the agency’s response did not include those documents. (An appeal was filed, but the calendar has not yet been released.)

“We take our ethics responsibilities seriously,” Bowman said. “All political staff have had an ethics briefing and know their obligations.”

Addressing the agency’s regulatory efforts, she said, “We are here to enact a positive environmental agenda that provides real results to the American people, without unnecessarily hamstringing our economy.”

At the Agriculture Department, the only known appointee to the deregulation team is Rebeckah Adcock. She previously lobbied the department as a top executive both at CropLife America, a trade association for pesticide makers, and the American Farm Bureau Federation, a trade group for farmers.

The department deals with many issues involving farmers, including crop insurance and land conservation rules, but it would not disclose whether Adcock had recused herself from discussions affecting her past employers.

At the Energy Department, a member of the deregulation team is Brian McCormack, who formerly handled political and external affairs for Edison Electric Institute, a trade association representing investor-owned electrical utilities.

While there, McCormack worked with the American Legislative Exchange Council, an industry-funded group. Both organizations fought against rooftop solar policies in statehouses across the country. Utility companies lose money when customers generate their own power, even more so when they are required to pay consumers who send surplus energy back into the grid.

Though the Energy Department does not directly regulate electrical utilities, it does help oversee international electricity trade, the promotion of renewable energy and the security of domestic energy production. After joining the department, McCormack helped start a review of the nation’s electrical grid, according to an agency memo.

Clean-energy advocates fear the inquiry will cast solar energy, which can fluctuate, as a threat to grid reliability. Such a finding could scare off state public utility commissions considering solar policies and serve as a boon for electrical utilities, said Matt Kasper, research director at the Energy and Policy Institute, an environmental group.

Disclosure records show that while McCormack was at Edison, the trade group lobbied the federal government, including the Energy Department, on issues including grid reliability.

The department would not answer questions about McCormack’s involvement with those issues.

Across the government, at least two appointees to deregulation teams have been granted waivers from ethics rules related to prior jobs, and at least nine others have pledged to recuse themselves from issues related to former employers or clients.

Some of the recusals involve appointees at the Small Business Administration and the Education Department, including Bob Eitel, who leads the education team and was vice president for regulatory legal services at an operator of for-profit colleges.

Another recusal involves Byron Brown, an EPA appointee who is married to a senior government affairs manager for the Hess Corporation, the oil and gas company.

Hess was fined and ordered to spend more than $45 million on pollution controls by the EPA during the Obama administration because of alleged Clean Air Act violations at its refinery in Port Reading, N.J. Disclosure records show that Brown’s wife, Lesley Schaaff, lobbied the EPA last year on behalf of the company.

An EPA spokeswoman declined to say whether Brown or Schaaff owned Hess stock, though an agency ethics official said Brown had recused himself from evaluating regulations affecting the company.

The agency declined to say whether Brown would also recuse himself from issues affecting the American Petroleum Institute, where his wife’s company is a member. The association has lobbied to ease Obama-era natural gas rules, complaining in a recent letter to Brown’s team about an “unprecedented level of federal regulatory actions targeting our industry.”

Before being selected to lead the deregulation team at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, Maren Kasper was a director at Roofstock, an online marketplace for investors in single-family rental properties. Financial disclosure records show Kasper owned a stake in the company worth up to $50,000.

Changes at HUD could increase investor interest in rental homes, affecting a company like Roofstock. The agency, for example, oversees the federal government’s Section 8 subsidies program for low-income renters.

Ethics officials allowed Kasper to keep her stake, but she pledged not to take actions that would affect it. (A spokesman for HUD said Kasper’s tenure on the deregulation task force has since ended.)

One by one, scientists, educators and environmental activists approached the microphone and urged government officials not to weaken regulations intended to protect children from lead.

The forum, run by the EPA in a drab basement meeting room in Washington, was part of the agency’s push to identify regulations that were excessive and burdensome to businesses.

Few businesspeople showed up. As public hearings on regulations have played out in recent weeks, many industry and corporate representatives have instead met with Trump administration officials behind closed doors.

Still, the EPA has asked for written comments and held about a dozen public meetings. The agency has received more than 467,000 comments, many of them critical of potential rollbacks, but also some from businesses large and small pleading for relief from regulatory costs or confusion.

After a quiet moment at the meeting to discuss lead regulations, the owner of a local painting company, Brian McCracken, moved to the microphone.

McCracken was frustrated by what he described as costly rules that forced him to test for lead-based paint in homes before he could begin painting. Each test kit costs about $2, and he may need six per room. If a family then declines to hire him, those costs come out of his pocket.

“I don’t think anyone is sitting here saying that lead-based dust does not hurt children,” he said. “That’s not what we are talking about. What the contractor needs is a better way to test.”

His voice quavered: “Why do I have to educate the general public about the hazards that generations before me created? It doesn’t make sense at all.”

Trump is not the first president to take on such frustrations.

President Bill Clinton declared the federal government was failing to regulate “without imposing unacceptable or unreasonable costs on society.” He assigned Vice President Al Gore to collect agencies’ suggestions for rules that should go. One rule dictated how to measure the consistency of grits.

President George W. Bush’s regulatory overhaul focused more on how new regulations were created. The administration installed a political appointee inside each agency who generally had to sign off before any significant new rule could be initiated. At the EPA for a time, that official came from an industry-funded think tank.

President Barack Obama ordered regular updates from each agency about the effectiveness of rules already on the books.

“When you raise the profile, when it’s clearly an executive priority, it gets attention,” said Heather Krause, director of strategic issues at the Government Accountability Office, the main auditor of the federal government. According to the auditor’s analysis, the effect under Obama was mostly to clarify and streamline rules, not eliminate them.

Like Bush, Trump has empowered political appointees. Though some agencies have included career staff members on their review teams, an executive order from Trump creating the teams does not require it — nonpolitical employees are generally believed to be more wedded to existing rules. And like Obama, Trump has imposed regular reporting requirements.

But Trump, who spent his business career on the other side of government regulations, has put an emphasis on cutting old rules.

The same day he signed the executive order initiating the review, he addressed a large crowd of conservative activists at a Maryland convention center.

“We have begun a historic program to reduce the regulations that are crushing our economy — crushing,” Trump said. “We’re going to put the regulations industry out of work and out of business.”

Amit Narang, a regulatory expert at the liberal advocacy group Public Citizen, said Trump’s decision to create teams of political appointees — formally known as regulatory reform task forces — should make it easier for the White House to overcome bureaucratic resistance to his rollback plans.

“To the extent there’s a deep state effect in this administration,” Narang said, “the task force will be more effective in trying to get the agenda in place.”

The New York Times’ Kitty Bennett contributed reporting to this story.

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Climate Deniers or Neighbors?

Angry messages to the Trump-supporting mayor of Tangier Island illustrate a need to listen, not to shout.

The calls rolled in:

“I hope you sink.”

“You’re racist.”

“We’re going to boycott you.”

So it went for Mayor James “Ooker” Eskridge and the Chesapeake Bay island of 400 fishermen that he calls home: messages from people who knew nothing about Tangier Island or the long, frustrating and exhausting fight to save it.

The backlash began in June, when CNN aired a story on the Tangiermen’s struggles to secure a seawall that would shore up the island. The place is losing land at a rate of about 15 feet a year, and it doesn’t have much more to give. CNN’s report wouldn’t have been so different from other tales of towns losing their battles with climate change — except that Eskridge mentioned two things: He doesn’t believe the sea is rising, and he loves Donald Trump like a family member.

Trump, devoted CNN viewer that he is, called Eskridge and told him not to worry about his future.

“Your island has been there for hundreds of years,” he told Eskridge, “and I believe your island will be there for hundreds more.”

That phone call, recounted in The Washington Post, was apparently enough for strangers to reach out to the picturesque island and wish death upon it. The reaction surprised the mayor, who, like many on the island, works long days catching crabs and then overseeing the activities at his shedding shanty.

“People make comments about us. They don’t know us. They don’t understand us,” Eskridge told me. “If we disagree or we have a different way of thinking, that’s no reason to hate somebody or wish him dead.”

I do know Ooker Eskridge. I’ve been interviewing him for years. Along with my then-8-year-old daughter, I spent the better part of three days with him in 2014 to gather information for a couple of stories, and I’ve been back since, too. I know he can tell you as much about birds as any ornithologist. I know he has a pet osprey that returns every year to a platform he built near his shanty. I know he’s a devout Christian with a Star of David tattooed on his arm. I know he and his wife adopted a girl from India, Sreedevi, then adopted three more and helped others on the island do the same. He named his boat Sreedevi, in keeping with the tradition of a Chesapeake waterman naming his first boat after his daughter. She’s probably the only Sreedevi in a bay full of boats named Barbara and Anne. (And one Wicked Witch, and one Crazy Bitch, but that’s another story, and more likely to be about ex-wives than daughters.)

Some journalists would call Eskridge a climate denier, shoving him into a familiar place in a familiar debate between scientists and industry-backed “climate skeptics.” Maybe it’s easy to dismiss Eskridge as a man who ignores what’s plain to see. And maybe, for people who’ve gotten to be deeply intolerant of other points of view, it’s not much of a leap to say that he and his island deserve what they get.

But Eskridge doesn’t actually deny that the waters around his island are rising. He’s just convinced that the bigger problem is erosion. For decades he has pleaded with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to build him a seawall, like the one that already protects the island’s airport and does a great job at it. He even found a guy willing to sink barges off the coast to shore up the island. The federal government nixed the idea.

He’s not the only one in a slowly sinking boat. Denise Drewer, the mayor of tiny Saxis, Va. — another Eastern Shore island, this one connected to the mainland by road — has been begging the Corps for help. On Taylor’s Island, Bruce Colson is hoping the Corps will add dredge material to nearby James Island to protect his campground from encroaching water. In southern Dorchester County, council members want to protect schoolchildren who can’t get to the bus because of high water.

In all those places I’ve have reported on, people blame the problem on “erosion” and “tides.” No one’s talking about Arctic ice melt. On the Eastern Shore, the oceanographer Bill Boicourt once told me, opinions on climate change range from an “open skepticism to a closed skepticism.” But whatever they believe is causing the problem, the solutions are the same: Fortify with breakwaters and seawalls or plan an orderly retreat and settle elsewhere.

Eskridge — and Colson and Drewer and their neighbors — are not the political opportunists who deny climate change and then quietly ask oceanographers how much time their North Carolina beach house has. They’re farmers, fishermen, real estate agents, businesspeople and ministers. They are real people with real doubts and concerns. They are perspectives we can’t afford to ignore.

I can see why environmentalists would be dismissive of the idea that Donald Trump is going to solve such places’ problems. He wants to cut the Corps’ budget, which means that Tangier’s seawall is far less likely. He wants to cut NOAA, which will mean less planning for adaptation in coastal communities. The U.S. Geological Survey conducts key monitoring at tide gauges, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service rebuilds habitat for birds, which can also protect populated islands; he wants to cut their budgets too. And of course, he wants big cuts at the Environmental Protection Agency, which is supposed to ensure the waters are clean enough for Tangiermen to keep crabbing for as long as they are able to stay.

Yet 87 percent of the Tangiermen voted for Trump. They backed him because, like millions of other Americans, they felt they had nothing left to lose. Maybe a billionaire, outside of the political system, would shake up Washington, pay attention to the rural areas, and give them the thing that could save them, whether it’s a bowling alley in South Carolina or a new factory in Ohio or some rock for a wall on Tangier. After years of false promises, Eskridge was elated that someone seemed to be listening. Whatever comes of Trump’s call, that’s something not to ignore, either.

The opinions expressed above at those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

Life Before the EPA

“Biological Annihilation”

Extinction starts to have an effect on ecosystems long before a species fully disappears. A new paper calls this “biological annihilation” — the effect that localized extinction has on a region when certain species, such as lions, become extirpated from their former habitats. The paper argues we should pay more attention to species even if they are considered “of low concern,” because many of them are actually in decline. Although these species are not currently considered threatened with extinction, their “population decay” causes cascading effects on the abundance of other local species — which, the paper warns, will eventually result in yet more extinctions.

4 Thoughts on World Population Day

We need to solve runaway human population growth if we hope to fix any other environmental problems.

Today, as on every July 11th, the United Nations celebrates World Population Day, an occasion designated to “focus attention on the urgency and importance of population issues.”

Let’s take a look at some of those issues.

1. We’re not making much, if any, progress.

The first World Population Day was held in 1990, when the world population was about 5.3 billion.

That number has now soared to more than 7.5 billion.

And if you think things are crowded now, just wait a few years. A recent United Nations study calculates the world human population will hit 8 billion in 2023 and balloon to 9.8 billion by 2050.

Now, that increase is not universal. Some countries will actually see declines — all European nations, for example — but the UN found that half of the population growth will take place in just nine countries: India, Nigeria, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Pakistan, Ethiopia, the United Republic of Tanzania, the United States of America, Uganda and Indonesia. India will eclipse China as the world’s most populous country by about 2024, while Nigeria will pass the U.S. as the country with the third-biggest population by 2050.

2. It’s not about just the number of people, but also what they consume.

We have more people now, but our average impact is also growing. One recent study found that more than 10 percent of the world population classifies as medically obese. That’s obviously just one marker for overconsumption, but it serves as a pretty potent illustration of how much the human population drives the environmental impact of our food system alone. Add in carbon emissions, deforestation, species habitat loss and extinction and we’ve got a real mess on our hands.

3. It’s also about inequality.

Much of the population explosion boils down to gender inequality. Women around the world lack access to education, social status, jobs, family planning and medical care — which drives population growth. Solving these problems would not only help make society more equal; as Paul Hawken notes in his book “Drawdown,” it could also give us some of the tools we need to help tackle global warming.

And this is also about wealth inequality. The world’s five richest men now control more wealth than half of the world’s population. With extreme poverty affecting populations around the world, this top-heavy concentration of assets leaves little opportunity for anything to get better.

4. Population needs to be a priority.

I know this is a tough issue to talk about. No one wants to say “you should have fewer kids,” but really, the world needs to have fewer kids and we need to do more for the people we already have. Every other topic we cover here on The Revelator — climate change, pollution, clean water, overdevelopment and the extinction crisis — stems at least in part from the impact of the ever-increasing human population and the systemic inequality with which we all live.

This is unsustainable. We need to take population issues seriously, both for the billions of people already on this planet and for the billions of other species that share our home.

Does Scott Pruitt Have a Case for Repealing the Clean Water Rule?

Or do his arguments not hold water?

On June 27, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt signed a proposed rule rescinding the Obama administration’s “Clean Water Rule.” This regulation is designed to clarify which streams, lakes, wetlands and other water bodies fall under the protection of the Clean Water Act.

EPA developed the Clean Water Rule in an attempt to resolve uncertainty created by a fractured 2006 Supreme Court decision, Rapanos v. United States. The Rapanos ruling caused widespread confusion about which waters were covered, creating uncertainty for farmers, developers and conservation groups. Efforts to clarify it through informal guidance or congressional action had failed, and EPA acted under mounting pressure from various quarters, including some members of the court.

As Oklahoma’s attorney general, Pruitt unsuccessfully sued to kill the rule, which he has called “the greatest blow to private property rights the modern era has seen.” Now he is seeking to accomplish by administrative fiat what he failed to achieve in court. However, he faces a stiff challenge from supporters of the rule, and the courts may not buy his arguments for wiping a rule off the books.

Making the case for change

Under the Administrative Procedure Act, federal agencies must follow specific steps when they seek to establish or repeal a regulation. These procedures are meant to establish efficiency, consistency and accountability. To promote fairness and transparency, the law requires that the public must have meaningful opportunity to comment on proposed rules before they take effect.

The Clean Water Rule emerged from an extensive rule-making process that featured over 400 meetings with state, tribal and local officials and numerous stakeholders representing business, environmental and public health organizations. It generated over one million comments, the bulk of which supported the rule.

This process was preceded by a comprehensive peer-reviewed scientific assessment that synthesized over a thousand studies documenting the importance of small streams and wetlands to the health of large rivers, lakes and estuaries. According to a 2015 fact sheet, which has been scrubbed from EPA’s website but is archived here, the rule protects streams that roughly one in three Americans depend upon for their drinking water.

To undo the Clean Water Rule, EPA will have to go through the same notice-and-comment process. Pruitt’s proposal to rescind the rule will be published in the Federal Register sometime in the near future. From that date, the public will have just 30 days to file written comments electronically. (Normally public comment periods last for 60 days, and the Clean Water Rule was open for comment for 120 days.)

EPA flyer issued in 2015 to support the Clean Water Rule.
USEPA/Flickr

EPA must then review and respond to the comments, make any changes it deems necessary and publish a final rule. Parties with standing can then challenge the final rule, although there is a question as to which court will have jurisdiction to hear them. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on this issue in the fall. In weighing challenges, the key question the court must address is whether EPA’s action is “arbitrary and capricious,” meaning that the agency has failed to consider important aspects of the problem or explain its reasoning.

In a seminal 1983 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that an agency must supply a “reasoned analysis” when it rescinds a rule adopted by a previous administration. The court acknowledged that agencies have some discretion to change direction in response to changing circumstances. However, it noted that “the forces of change do not always or necessarily point in the direction of deregulation.” Further, the court said that a decision to rescind a rule would be arbitrary and capricious if it offers an explanation “that runs counter to the evidence before the agency.”

Pruitt asserts that his repeal “need not be based upon a change of facts or circumstances,” citing a 2009 opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia. But in my view, Pruitt reads too much into that decision, which simply held that an agency did not face “heightened scrutiny” – that is, an extra-high bar – when changing policy, but must still “show that there are good reasons for the new policy.” As Justice Breyer observed, dissenting in the same case, “Where does, and why would, the Administrative Procedure Act grant agencies the freedom to change major policies on the basis of nothing more than political considerations or even personal whim?”

Does Pruitt have good reasons? Let’s consider them.

Repair or replace?

In his draft proposal, Pruitt argues for repealing the Clean Water Rule because it fails to pay enough homage to federalism principles embodied in section 101(b) of the Clean Water Act, in which Congress expresses a policy to “recognize, preserve and protect the primary responsibilities and rights of States to prevent, reduce and eliminate pollution.” Yet at another point he states that “This action does not have federalism implications” and, further, that it will not affect “the relationship between the national government and the States.”

Which is it? Either the repeal is necessary to rebalance power relationships or it isn’t. Moreover, wouldn’t it make more sense to first identify how the current rule encroaches on states’ authority and propose specific changes for public comment? Why throw the baby out with the bathwater?

Pruitt also contends that if states want to protect waters more strictly than the federal standard, they can choose to do so. But according to a detailed 50-state survey by the Environmental Law Institute, 36 states “have laws that could restrict the authority of state agencies or localities to regulate waters left unprotected by the federal Clean Water Act.”

According to a report by the Association of State Wetland Managers, only 23 states have laws that directly regulate activities that impact wetlands. The rest depend upon authority provided by section 401 of the Clean Water Act to provide protection for important wetlands. As the act shrinks, so do those authorities.

EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt addresses the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Feb. 25, 2017.
Gage Skidmore/Flickr, CC BY-SA

After rescinding the Clean Water Rule, Pruitt proposes to carry out a new and potentially lengthy rule-making process in which EPA and other agencies will reevaluate which waters are protected under the Clean Water Act. President Trump has directed Pruitt to consider a revised rule modeled on a highly restrictive definition that Justice Scalia proposed in the Rapanos case. As I have explained elsewhere, the Scalia test is not the controlling standard that the courts have adopted following Rapanos, and it would drastically reduce the coverage of the act from its historic reach.

Pruitt says it is necessary to repeal the Clean Water Rule while EPA reviews which waters should be covered by the Clean Water Act. Otherwise, he contends, the Supreme Court may lift a stay imposed on the rule by a federal appeals court, opening a floodgate of litigation across the country. But that is exactly what his proposed repeal would do. The court would likely grant EPA’s request to extend the stay for a reasonable period of time to allow EPA to initiate a full rule-making on a proposed revision of the rule.

Verdict: Arbitrary and capricious

Scott Pruitt has been on a slash-and-burn crusade through his predecessors’ regulatory initiatives. But the courts are beginning to scrutinize these moves more closely. Notably, the D.C. Circuit just ruled that Pruitt cannot suspend an Obama-era rule to restrict methane emissions from new oil and gas wells.

Elections do matter. But so does the rule of law. Pruitt has not offered any compelling reason to justify killing the Clean Water Rule outright. There is plenty of time for a more “reasoned analysis” of ways to protect the nation’s water quality.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

France Bans Gas-Powered Autos

In a move to help the country meet its Paris Accord climate goals, France announced this week that it will ban the sale of gas- and diesel-powered automobiles by 2040. That will be a big shift, as only 1.1 percent of new cars sold in France are currently pure electric vehicles. Even with the pending ban it will still take a long time to get older cars off the road: French consumers currently keep their gas-powered cars running for an average of 8.5 years, well below the 11.6 years in the United States.

Last Chance to Save the Vaquita?

Fewer than 30 of these rare porpoises remain. Can their extinction be prevented?

The race to save the vaquita porpoise (Phocoena sinus) from extinction has begun.

Earlier this week the Mexican government announced a permanent ban on the use of gillnets within the Gulf of California — a step that has become necessary to save the critically endangered vaquita. Fewer than 30 of these rare cetaceans remain in the northern Gulf, the species’ only habitat, where their population has been utterly devastated over the past few years by illegal fishing nets.

The massive gillnets aren’t actually used to target vaquitas. Poachers are looking for a fish called the totoaba (Totoaba macdonaldi). Totoaba swim bladders, long considered a treatment for circulatory and skin problems in traditional Chinese medicine, have soared in value in recent years, selling for upwards of $4,500 a pound. That price is hard to ignore in an impoverished region.

Conservationists have called for a permanent gillnet ban for years. It finally came to pass after actor Leonardo DiCaprio put public pressure on Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto, who, with DiCaprio and billionaire Carlos Slim, signed a memorandum of understanding last month to strengthen the country’s fishing legislation. That set the stage for this week’s gillnet ban.

Still, experts fear the ban won’t be enough. Conservationists also have a controversial, and admittedly last-ditch, plan to try to bring some vaquitas into captivity, putting them in the equivalent of protective custody. They’ll use a fleet of boats and a team of U.S. Navy dolphins to round up as many of the small porpoises as they can find, then move them to special enclosures that are being built now.

To understand how we got to this point, and what comes next, I spoke with biologist Barbara Taylor from the National Marine Fisheries Service and the Consortium for Vaquita Conservation, Protection, and Recovery (VaquitaCPR). A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.

John Platt: The last time we spoke, the vaquita population had fallen to about 100, then it was 60. Last year we heard that the number had fallen even further, to just 30. How many are there now?

Barb Taylor: Well, the truth is, is that we won’t know the new abundance number until September. The next acoustic monitoring will finish in the middle of August, and we hope to have a new number out the first week of September. I’m anticipating that it will be a rate of decline like we’ve been seeing. We went from 60 to 30 and we’ll probably lose another half by the end of this year, I would guess.

So yeah, it’s very grim.

Platt: It must weigh heavily on the whole team of people working on this species.

Taylor: Oh, yes. We’re definitely in emergency mode. It’s been quite the rollercoaster, I have to say, just getting results back and seeing dead vaquitas.

We had a temporary ban in place and vaquitas still continued to decline, which is why we are pushing forward. We need to get them out — capture as many vaquitas as we can as quickly as we can until we have evidence that the gillnets are out of the water.

Platt: So why do you think the previous, temporary gillnet bans weren’t enough or didn’t work? I’ve seen a lot of comments about funding to fishermen being distributed unequally, and obviously there’s a level of corruption going on. What were the barriers to success there?

Taylor: Well, I think there were a number of barriers, the biggest one being that totoaba is still incredibly lucrative and nobody has gone to jail over that. And the penalties, even if you do get caught, are minor. It’s just a cost of business. So, it’s such an enormous temptation to go totoaba fishing. That made it very difficult.

And then, enforcement has not done what needs to be done. The evidence is Sea Shepherd pulling out over 250 nets totoaba nets and other gillnets in the last two years. So clearly the fishermen are operating outside the law.

And I’m sure there’s some blame to go around on the compensation front, but that’s never really been well documented except, ironically, with some of the fishermen who were really the good guys, the guys who tried to convert to alternative gear and yet were not compensated. So yeah, that’s the biggest thing.

The second thing is that there was a loophole in the ban that allowed corvina (Cynoscion othonopterus) fishing. Corvina is the smaller cousin of totoaba and the big capture period is when they are aggregated for spawning right at Easter, which is when lots of Catholics like to eat fish, so it has been one of the major fisheries in the area. It’s an active gillnet fishery so they wrap the corvinas in this rodeo-style method.

It’s not been known to kill vaquitas and so they exempted it, but by doing that there were, I think, a couple of really bad outcomes. One, everybody had gillnets all the time, so the number of gillnets has not really decreased.

The other is the operation for totoaba. What they do is set one of these nets on the bottom with huge anchors and no surface markings. They just go down, hook the net, pull it up, taking the totoaba out and letting it drop back down to the bottom.

Well, it doesn’t really take that long to do that and it’s a relatively big area. So any boat that’s out in the water doing anything, they could be doing corbina fishing, but they could be looking like they’re sports fishing or whatever. The minute that no one’s looking they go over to their totoaba net and they pull the totoabas. So I think having all of the boats on the water for corbina season, which is the same time the same spawning season as totoaba and corbina, that’s when we saw all the dead vaquitas. And there were hundreds of boats out in the water, which just makes enforcement a nightmare.

Platt: Is fishing the main economic opportunity for the people in that region?

Taylor: Definitely for El Golfo de Santa Clara. It’s basically that and purported illegal activities of moving drugs through the area and human trafficking and things like that.

San Felipe has the big Baja 250 road race and it has a tourism industry built up around that. But since 2008, when the economy went sour and the drug wars happened at the same time, the tourism has really dropped off. Just when the fishermen actually were starting to convert to different kinds of gear and livelihoods, the hotels, restaurants and economy went south and just sort of drove them back into the dependency on fishing. It is still, I think, the spine of both of those communities, but it’s everything or nearly everything in El Golfo.

Platt: So now there’s the gillnet ban, the Mexican president and Leonardo DiCaprio and the Slim Foundation, plus the effort to get some of these animals into captivity. Are these three all kind of working in conjunction with each other?

Taylor: We hope so. That’s the intention. We always are concerned that something will happen like with California condors, that there will be a major NGO pushback on the idea of taking vaquitas into captivity. So far that hasn’t happened, even though many NGOs won’t actively endorse that strategy. But the recovery team basically acknowledged that Plan A of recovering vaquitas was making their habitat safe and gillnet free. There’s no evidence that that’s working and now we’re down to maybe 15 individuals left.

Despite all of the uncertainties with capturing vaquitas and keeping them in captivity, it’s still in my mind safer than it is leaving them out where they have a 50 percent chance of dying in a gillnet.

Until there’s real evidence that not only are the laws in place, but they’re being effectively enforced and there really aren’t gillnets in the water, you have to move forward on trying to keep some animals safe. Otherwise we’re going to lose them in the next year or two. I mean that’s just the reality.

The other reality is that unlike California condors, once you make the decision, we can’t pull them all out of the wild overnight. There’s lots of uncertainty.

And so we’re pushing forward as hard as we can on both fronts, because even if we are successful in catching some vaquitas in October and November we’re not going to have any chance at catching all the vaquitas. Some will be out there in that dangerous habitat no matter how successful we are.

And it may be that they aren’t suitable for captivity. We won’t know that until we try. In fact, we won’t know whether we can even catch them. We’re going out there with this tremendous team of experts from all over the world to try to make this happen and I can’t imagine a better team of people. We’re giving it the best shot we can, but it’s still uncertain that we’ll even be able to catch one.

Platt: It’s a huge habitat isn’t it? I mean it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.

Taylor: Yes, that’s my job. I am the looker for the needle in the haystack.

That happens to be my piece in this now-very complex puzzle. We’ll use the experience that we’ve developed doing surveys for vaquitas to get the same team of experts out there and use our big binoculars to try to find them. And what we found in 2015 was that the animals had hugely contracted their distribution. So, there wasn’t as much area to really survey. Plus we have our acoustic monitoring grid that’s out there as we speak and it will be getting us 3,000 days of data in the next couple of months about where the vaquitas are spending their time.

vaquita binoculars — NOAA Fisheries West Coast

So we have a lot more insight as to where to look for them. It’s not as big an area as one would think. I mean basically they’re spending all their time on one of three little ridges. They’ve sort of contracted back to their absolute best spots, so I think if they’re out there we can find them. But then keeping track of them is also something that has been extremely difficult in the past. In the past we were using one ship with six pairs of these giant 25-power binoculars, but you can only really look in one direction. When vaquitas are broadside you can see that triangular dorsal fin side and even then it’s hard to see them. If they decide that they don’t like the vessel noise and they’re going to move away from you, then you just get this knife’s edge view.

We’re actually going to use three visual platforms so that we can sort of form a triangle and reduce the chance of losing them. That’s where the Navy dolphins come in to actually help track the animals, so that we can get the experts with their nets in the right place at the right time and hopefully catch them and be able to then evaluate how they respond to being handled.

There are many steps along the path.

Platt: So, you would theoretically capture one, and if it doesn’t pass the first test it would go back in the water?

Taylor: Right. Each one of the catch vessels will have a porpoise veterinarian onboard and they are trained to recognize the symptoms of an animal that’s going into shock. And if it does start to go into shock then the plan is to release them, but with a satellite tag on them.

If we have any bad outcomes we have an independent panel of expert veterinarians that will help us evaluate what the next step will be, whether we should try again or whether we should declare them to be just not suitable for captivity, like Dall’s porpoise.

Platt: On the off chance that they are suitable, you’re building a containment center for them right now. Is that in the ocean or on land next to the water?

Taylor: Yes, both. The plan is to build these tuna pens — if you’ve been down to Ensenada you’ll see them floating off the coast there — that are specially designed for the porpoises. They can actually be anchored out where the animals are spending all their time now. So, it’ll be sort of a soft introduction. We’ll be able to evaluate them, put them in these ponds right out in their habitat that they’re used to, evaluate how they’re doing, teach them how to eat dead fish, all of that in the first month. Meanwhile, there’s a facility that’s being built as we speak that is basically a vaquita temporary hospital on land. It will have pools where if an animal got sick or needed to be separated for some reason and have intensive care they could be moved into those pools or in case of an emergency, if there’s a red tide or there’s a hurricane.

And then, as winter approaches the idea is to construct sea pens that are accessible from land behind the protective mountains. In winter storms it’s very difficult to get out and feed them. It’s just much better to be able to walk out a walkway and be able to take care of the animals, but still have them in their natural environment that they’re used to with the temperature and water turbidity and all those kinds of things. So, that is all designed, but isn’t being built yet, and the other two are actually in construction.

Platt: I remember you telling me a couple of years ago that these are very slow-breeding animals. They take a while to reach sexual maturity and only reproduce once every couple of years. So even if we manage to stop the attrition and get these animals breeding, it’s still going to take a while to rebuild the population. Do you have any confidence or hope in the ability to grow the population again?

Taylor: I have become a student of species that have gone extinct in the wild, or have gone through a captive phase, then recovered and been reintroduced and have now healthy populations in the wild again. There are many amazing examples of animals that have gone down to way lower numbers. In fact a New Zealand robin went down to two and the California condors down to eight. But they are birds, so it makes it a little easier because you can get several offspring every year.

But there are examples of mammals that only have one offspring per year that were in similar situations. Przewalski’s horses and Père David’s deer were both less than 15 when they were taken into captivity. And yeah, it took decades. We have to be realistic about that. If we can’t release them back into the wild, we’re in this for the long haul. It would be completely unprecedented with a marine mammal, so it’s a big challenge for sure and we can only hope that they actually can have one offspring per year instead of one every other year. But we won’t know until we try.

Platt: International Save the Vaquita Day is coming up on July 8th. What would you like my readers to know that could help these efforts?

Taylor: Well, right now I think the most important thing people can do is to donate to Vaquita CPR, where we’re still a half-million dollars short on a $5 million budget. Everyone can play a role now that we’re down to needing to pay for the emergency room.

The other really important thing — and I say this as somebody who works on many species globally — is that people learn more about gillnets, which are the biggest threat to marine mammals and to too much marine life.

Everybody, when they go out to restaurants, they’re eating seafood that’s been caught in gillnets, and I think people are just unaware that hundreds of thousands of animals inadvertently die in those nets every year. Pushing on Mexico to make this the first good example of converting a community over to using gear that isn’t driving species extinct is really important. Because there are many other species, sadly, that will be lined up behind vaquita if we lose them. They’re going to blink out because of gillnets. And I think people are just completely unaware of what astounding effect this is having on marine life.

The Revelator will bring you updates on the efforts to save the vaquita throughout the year.

A Declaration of Interdependence

A look back at history reveals a need to come together.

It’s 9 a.m. on July 4, 2017. I’ve just staked all my tomatoes, watered the sweet potato starts I planted over the weekend, and read The Declaration of Independence. Today is the first time I’ve ever ditched going to the lake for the 4th of July holiday with my family. I sent them off without me because the world changed.

Instead I’m here at my desk… because while I slipped baby sweet potato plants into dirt in ever-warmer weather, someone else was tweeting violent images of a pro wrestler taking down CNN as fake news. “Someone else” who viscerally reminds me of all the times I’ve been oppressed, hurt, abused and told to be quiet since I was a young girl who spent broken chunks of childhood in an authoritarian family, and who grew up female in a patriarchal system that constantly pushed us down.

It’s the first time since the election that I can write again, and even now it’s hard. Engaging in any way with such toxic power jolts my body with a familiar cocktail of stress hormones, and it’s all I can do to write, let alone allow for my own agency and creative impulses to speak to that kind of power.

Like so many others I wear a cloak of invisibility, one that hides the wounds inflicted by oppression so I can act normal in the face of what is not normal, what has never been normal. It is a mantle that lets me survive and function as best I can despite the indoctrination of stress physiology, in a systemic culture of toxic domination — a culture whose origins trace back to the days when human beings first claimed land, women and “others” as property.

A culture I recognized immediately while reading The Declaration of Independence this morning.

As I skimmed all the egregious acts of the ruling monarch of England, I shook my head. No wonder our founders incited a revolution. No wonder. The colonies were being dominated, unfairly, unjustly, horrifically, by the king. But I was also sickened by the impossible-to-miss similarities between that monarch’s tyrannical authoritarian acts and those of our president. I’m scared by the intense, empathic recognition I have of the emotions our founders must have known in order to write and act upon the Declaration, and later, The Articles of Confederation.

It is the first 4th of July of my life in which my mirror neurons are firing alongside men who signed papers 241 years ago.

Even more frightening though, is knowing a whole segment of our populace — the ones who (unwittingly or not) support what is essentially that same culture of domination we rebuked on July 4, 1776 — must surely also feel intense incitement to revolt against the other culture. The one that my beloved country, the United States of America, has given birth to through the great experiment of democracy. That other “culture” — really, a natural order of the world and all life in it — is interdependence.

Our democracy has allowed that natural law of interconnection to reemerge in post-patriarchal human society. And to begin to flourish. But by our own history of indigenous genocide and slavery and their ongoing traumatic consequences, the careless unleashing of harmful chemical pollutants, the erasure of whole species and ecosystems, the impacts and brutalities of misogyny, industrial agriculture, and gun violence that shreds thousands of families, and now, the dire and immediate threats of fossil fuel poisoning and climate change to our own civilization and the rest of life on Earth, our path to seeing — and living by — our interdependence has been… fraught.

That I am here now, dirt under my nails, smelling like tomatoes and soil, writing, is a testament to the solace and healing of lived interdependence. Every healthy human family on this planet enjoys the fruits of lived interdependence. Some of us find it via alternate routes. For years I have studied biology, zoology, chemistry, physiology, and most especially, ecology and the interconnection of the unity and diversity of life. Then, for decades, I reported on the infinite glittering facets of these as a science and environment writer. Most recently I wrote a novel for young adults about killer whales, climate change, shamans, and how domination culture has brought us to a terrible brink — but one we can step away from. One that our innate empathic interdependence will help us step away from.

I sent my kids off on holiday without me this year, because their lives — and the lives of all our youth — are now on the climate clock. Having reported on climate change since the inception of the term, and our first inklings of awareness, I hear the clock ticking all the time. Like Captain Hook stalked by the tic-toc croc. The news last week that we have all of three years to heed that clock, to do enough to safeguard the climate, has me here at my desk instead of in a kayak paddling alongside my sons.

I don’t know yet exactly what I can do to make a difference. I do know about life. I know about what happens when you put toxic chemicals into a body, or pollute a waterway, or spew the poisons of carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere. I do know what it means to be a mother, knowing these things, to children facing the most unprecedented era of change ever to confront humanity. And I do know love. So much love.

It is our interdependence that gives us love. It is our interdependence that will guide us in solving the crises caused by our “us against them” cultural baggage. And it is our interdependence that will continue to heal the traumatic wounds inadvertently inflicted by our country’s original independence days.

If they were here now, I suspect our founding fathers would join hands with our rising mothers and so many others — we who’ve transmuted our cloaks of invisibility into indivisibility — and together craft the next iteration of democracy for the world:

The Declaration of Interdependence.

The opinions expressed above at those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of The Revelator, the Center for Biological Diversity, or their employees.

Previously in The Revelator:

Life Before the EPA

Junk Raft: A Journey Through a Polluted Ocean

What better way to understand the dangers of plastic pollution than by traveling on a ship made out of garbage?

Few people intentionally sail through the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, one of the world’s most notoriously polluted stretches of ocean. Even fewer choose to do so in a ship that’s literally a piece of trash. In fact, only two people have done so: Joel Paschal and Marcus Eriksen. The two men accomplished their 2,600-mile journey in 2008 to help publicize the fact that we need to act now to stop the sea from drowning itself in plastic.

Eriksen, also president and cofounder of ocean conservation organization 5 Gyres, has written a book about his adventure, aptly titled “Junk Raft: An Ocean Voyage and a Rising Tide of Activism to Fight Plastic Pollution” (Beacon Press, $26.95), which came out this week. I recently spoke to him about his new book, his adventure in Junk Raft — and yes, she is a registered oceangoing vessel — and his mission to convince the world to stop using and producing plastic.

Cirno: “Junk Raft” recounts your epic trip in a boat of the same name across the Northern Pacific Ocean, from Los Angeles to Hawaii. What inspired you to take this journey?

Eriksen: My inspiration to do it was simply the plastic use and pollution issue. Prior to this, I went sailing on the Mississippi River for five months on a similar plastic-bottle raft. What I witnessed there was a never-ending trail of plastic leading to the sea. And then I went to Midway Atoll and saw all the effects on albatross. My idea for the second raft, Junk Raft, went back to my experience in the Gulf War. I was a Marine on the ground, in a sniper platoon. I saw the region’s great oil rigs catch fire and burn. I couldn’t understand the destruction around me. I wanted to rethink what I was fighting for: Conservation is worth it, not a resource war on petroleum.

I thought, “The plastic problem is fixable. Nonsensically we use plastic to create items we use once or twice and throw away — we just have to stop doing that.”

I have a lot of confidence in how rafts work and perform, and a great team: Joel Paschal, my fellow sailor and adventurer, and Anna Cummins, my wife, who served as a one-woman, land-based support team. All three of us were on a boat with Charles Moore — who coined the term “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” — on his sixth crossing across the North Pacific. This was the start of 5 Gyre’s global research. We’ve done at least 20 research trips since.

Cirno: What kinds of junk was Junk Raft made out of?

Eriksen: 15,000 plastic water bottles donated from schools and recycling centers; 2,000 Nalgene bottles that Patagonia stopped using because they contained toxic BPA; an old airplane cockpit as the ship’s hull, salvaged from wrecks in the desert; and 25 broken sailboat masts as a deck. Everything was lashed together Polynesian-style. We put the plastic bottles in socks underneath the deck, used two masts as an A-frame, and also sewed together spare, damaged sails as our mainsail.

We had modern communications and electronics on the raft — solar panels, wind generator, new batteries, chart plotter, satellite phone, computer. I could plug in the satellite phone to the computer and upload short, half-megabyte videos to the internet for our followers to watch. Anna was our land-based mission control. She was constantly checking weather for us and fundraising like mad to help support our sailing journey on the Junk Raft.

Cirno: How long did the trip take?

Eriksen: It took two months to build the raft and three months to sail it. Our sponsors thought our decision to sail away on that raft was a death wish. But as soon as we were halfway across, people realized we were succeeding — that we were doing it. When we got to Hawaii, a hundred people stood cheering for Joel and me on the dock. We later learned that a million people were following our journey online.

Cirno: In November I sailed the same stretch of the North Pacific that you did, but I was in a proper steel sailboat. What were some of the challenges of sailing in Junk Raft?

Eriksen: For what it was made of, the raft was rather seaworthy…it got the job done. But there were many difficulties, especially during storms.

The boat was constantly falling apart. We had problems with leaks and parts falling off. On day three we had our biggest storm, with 50 mile-per-hour winds. All the bottle caps began spinning off, and as a result, the boat sank a foot into the water. Our deck was submerged and we started sinking. So I called Anna and she sent forth a resupply mission to bring us glue so we could secure the bottle caps. They also brought greens and other fresh foods — because much of our food was damaged by water — and beer.

Cirno: When did you decide to write a book about the journey?

Eriksen: Two-and-a-half years ago, before I lost my memory of the journey and moved on to my next project. I’d kept a journal the whole time we sailed, and the movement to end the plastic problem was growing fast.

Cirno: So what was your goal when writing this book?

Eriksen: I wanted to use adventure as a vehicle to attract a lot of people. Here’s this crazy adventure we had, but here’s this issue we should all be knowledgeable about. We sailed 1.5 miles per hour, our ship began falling apart, we tried to outrun hurricanes, and more. It’s exciting but it teaches a lesson: We’ve created such a huge plastic trash problem that it’s become easier to sail across the ocean in a raft made of trash than to clean it all up.

Cirno: This journey was in 2008; it’s now 2017. How do you feel about the progress we’ve made on these issues?

Eriksen: I think it’s been highly positive. We’ve accomplished a lot. There’s been a huge surge in environmental NGOs forming to try to address the problem in a variety of ways, and some are doing great things, helping establish legislation that curbs or bans plastic use or changes peoples’ habits so that they use less plastic.

Yet stakeholders have reached this impasse: Many people are aware the problem exists, but we as a global community are not doing enough to make sure it doesn’t get worse.

What we need now is a revolution by design. There are some plastic products that really have to go, such as wrappers on foods and products. Right now we need to scale back plastic production immediately and eventually stop it. We need better waste management and recycling programs. We need to make bioplastics mainstream and affordable. We must do more recycling. Basically, we must do things that don’t harm people and the planet. Plastic has got to go.

Previously on The Revelator:

Plastic Pollution: From Ship to Shore

Revelator Reads: 7 New Environmental Books for July

Ivory Trading Hub Uncovered

Criminal syndicates from a small town in southern China are responsible for trafficking as much as 80 percent of all illegal ivory into the country, according to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency. Undercover operatives tracked a two-ton shipment of tusks from Mozambique to the town of Shuidong, thereby revealing trade routes, rampant bribery, and the ability to smuggle other wildlife products, including pangolin scales and rhino horns. China has announced the closure of its legal ivory market, but EIA found the syndicates remained active as late as last month.