Water and sediment sampling operations during Enbridge Spill Response on Morrow Lake near Battle Creek, Michigan from Mudpuppy II, EPA's news research vessel. Credit: U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Second Class Lauren Jorgensen

By Naveena Sadasivam, ProPublica
NEW YORK, Jul 29 2014 (IPS)

For years, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been frustrated in its efforts to pursue hundreds of cases of water pollution — repeatedly tied up in legal fights about exactly what bodies of water it has the authority to monitor and protect.

Efforts in Congress to clarify the EPA’s powers have been defeated. And two Supreme Court decisions have done little to decide the question.In recent years the EPA has allowed hundreds of cases of water pollution to go unpunished because it currently lacks the confidence that it can prevail in court.

Most recently, in April, the EPA itself declared what waters were subject to its oversight — developing a joint rule with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that sought to end the debate and empower the EPA to press hundreds of enforcements actions against alleged polluters across the country.

The new rule, for instance, explicitly defines several terms — tributary, floodplain and wetland — and makes clear that those waters are subject to its authority.

But the EPA’s effort has been met with immense opposition from farmers who say the agency is overreaching. An expansive online campaign organised and financed by the American Farm Bureau Federation has asserted that the new rule will give the EPA jurisdiction over farmers’ irrigation ditches, watering ponds and even puddles of rain.

The American Farm Bureau Federation’s president, Bob Stallman, said the proposed rule was the “the biggest federal land grab — in terms of power over land use — that we’ve seen to date.”

In an effort to address the concerns of farmers, EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy in recent weeks has been touring states in the Midwest.

“There are issues we need to discuss and clarify to get this rule right,” she said. “We have important work to do. All the silly contentions being brought up — that we intend to regulate dry ground or stock ponds or mud puddles after a rain — all that does is get in the way of our being able to have those serious discussions.”

The Clean Water Act of 1972 authorised the EPA to protect the “waters of the United States” from dangerous and or illegal pollution. But that term has been the subject of controversy and dispute virtually from the time the act was signed into law.

Regulators and industry representatives are generally in agreement that the law applies to some of the nation’s larger rivers. At issue, however, are the streams that flow intermittently and the wetlands adjacent to these streams that dry up during the summer.

Legal fights over those streams and wetlands, current and former EPA officials say, have cost the agency time, money and effectiveness in the face of real environmental threats. Indeed, in recent years the EPA has allowed hundreds of cases of water pollution to go unpunished because it currently lacks the confidence that it can prevail in court.

Granta Nakayama, who served as the assistant administrator for the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance at the EPA until 2009, found that between July 2006 and March 2008 the agency had decided not to pursue formal enforcement in 304 cases because of jurisdictional uncertainty.

In 2008, in an internal memo, Nakayama wrote that the uncertainty “results in delays in enforcement and increases the resources needed to bring enforcement cases.”

And so in 2007, when an oil company discharged thousands of gallons of crude oil into Edwards Creek in Titus County, Texas, the EPA did not issue a fine, pursue legal action or even require clean up.

Similarly, after a farming operation dumped manure into tributaries that fed Lake Blackshear in Georgia, the EPA did not seek to hold the polluting company responsible — despite the fact that tests showed unsafe levels of bacteria and viruses in the lake, which was regularly used for waterskiing and other recreation.

“The proposed rule will improve the process for making jurisdictional determinations for the Clean Water Act by minimizing delays and costs, and will improve the predictability and consistency of the permit and enforcement process for landowners,” an EPA spokesperson said.

The EPA expects that improving efficiency in jurisdictional determinations will also save the businesses that they regulate time and money.

“Protecting water is important to the long-term health of the economy,” the EPA spokesperson said. “Streams and wetlands are economic drivers because of their role in fishing, hunting, agriculture, recreation, energy, and manufacturing.”

Two Supreme Court decisions in the last 15 years have been the cause of much of the uncertainty.

In a 5-4 ruling in 2001, the Court held that the Army Corps of Engineers could not require permits for waters based on their use as a habitat by migratory birds. The Court ruling also included language that seemed to assert that only wetlands with a “significant nexus” to traditional navigable waterways would be protected under the Clean Water Act.

The Court did not make clear the meaning of the term “significant nexus.”

And in 2006, the Court, asked to determine whether a wetland needed to be adjacent to a traditional navigable waterway in order to be protected, wound up split, and reached no majority decision.

By the EPA’s own estimates, two million stream miles outside of Alaska are regarded as “intermittent,” and 20 percent of roughly 110 million acres of wetlands are considered “isolated.” As a result of the inability of the government to clarify the EPA’s jurisdiction over the last 15 years, these water bodies are currently unprotected.

“At some level this is a very frustrating debate to be having because water is all connected at some level,” said Jon Devine, a senior attorney in the water program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “What the Supreme Court’s decisions do is throw into significant doubt what is protected.”

As a result, in cases where a polluted waterway isn’t clearly under the EPA’s jurisdiction, the agency has sometimes spent thousands of dollars to model water flow and conduct studies to show that it is hydrologically connected to larger water bodies that are protected.

“It just causes an incredible waste of resources and rewards those who don’t really worry about compliance and punishes those who do,” said Nakayama, now an environmental lawyer at Kirkland & Ellis in Washington.

In past years, federal legislators have tried to introduce bills that address the ambiguity in the Clean Water Act’s language, but none have passed both the House and Senate.

In 2011, when Congress was considering a bill that made many of the changes that EPA’s current rule would, the American Farm Bureau Federation, as part of the Waters Advocacy Coalition, used a similar media strategy to kill the bill. The Coalition was made up of different industry groups that would be affected by the bill including mining associations and homebuilders.

The New York Times reported than an unnamed member of the Coalition said, “The game plan is to emphasise the scary possibilities. If you can get Glenn Beck to say that government storm troopers are going to invade your property, farmers in the Midwest will light up their congressmen’s switchboards.”

This time around, the pushback by farmers and others — called the “Ditch the Rule” campaign — has mainly taken place online. The Farm Bureau organisation has created a separate website for the campaign and created shareable videos and infographics.

The organisation has also been effective in recruiting state farming associations to join the campaign. It has resulted in a blitz of social media posts and a steady stream of local coverage often favouring the farmers’ point of view.

“The campaign has energised our grassroots to participate,” said Don Parrish, senior director of regulatory relations at the American Farm Bureau Federation. Although the campaign does not have a large amount of money flowing into it, Parrish said it has really “struck a chord.”

Lisa Garcia, a former administrator of environmental justice at the EPA, said the effort by the federation is chiefly one of misinformation.

“The rule is not adding or expanding the scope of waters historically protected,” said Garcia, who is currently at Earthjustice, an environmental non-profit organization. She said the opposition she has seen fits “this pattern of just completely fighting against any new regulation.”

Parrish disagrees. He said that the tensions that are playing out are because “the EPA is trying to create regulations that do an end run around the Supreme Court and Congress.”

“[The EPA is] really reaching into areas that Congress clearly didn’t want the EPA to regulate. They did not intend to put EPA in the land use business,” he said.

This story originally appeared on ProPublica.

Editing by: Kitty Stapp

A honey bee in a willow tree. Credit: Bob Peterson/cc by 2.0

By Matthew Charles Cardinale
ATLANTA, Georgia, Jul 29 2013 (IPS)

Two Congressional Democrats have co-sponsored new legislation called the Save America’s Pollinators Act of 2013 to take emergency action to save the remaining bees in the U.S., and in turn, the U.S. food supply.

At issue is the use of toxic insecticides called neonicotinoids. Recent studies suggest that at least four types of these insecticides are a primary cause of the massive decline in bee populations seen in the U.S. in recent years.“Our ecosystems are based on pollination of native bees; everything from grizzly bears to songbirds rely on foods that rely on pollination." -- Scott Hoffman Black of the Xerxes Society

It is estimated over 10 million beehives been wiped out since 2007, as part of a phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder.

“Given that EPA allowed many of these insecticides on the market without adequate safety assessments and without adequate field studies on their impact to pollinator health, we feel it’s time that Congress support a bill like the Conyers-Blumenauer bill, which would suspend the use of the neonicotinoids until EPA does the adequate science to prove that these neonicotinoids… are not harmful – and if they are harmful, to keep them off the market,” Colin O’Neil, director for government affairs for the Centre for Food Safety, told IPS.

“One-third of food that’s reliant on the honeybee pollination is really under threat, and threats to pollinators concern the entire food system,” O’Neil said.

During the last winter alone, which began in 2012 and ended early this year, U.S. beekeepers lost 45.1 percent of the colonies they operate, with some beekeepers losing 100 percent, according to a government-sponsored study.

The European Union has already imposed a two-year moratorium on several types of neonicotinoids, after the European Food Safety Authority found in January 2013 that certain neonicotinoids were threatening Europe’s bee populations.

In May 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) issued a joint study noting that, “Acute and sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees have been increasingly documented, and are a primary concern.”

The proposed legislation, by Rep. John Conyers and Rep. Earl Blumenauer, would require the EPA to suspend the use of at least four neonicotinoids, including imidacloprid, clothianidin, thiamethoxam, and dinotafuran.

The legislation would prevent the EPA from re-authorising the use of the chemicals as pesticides until the agency conducts a full review of the scientific evidence. It would have to determine there are no unreasonable adverse effects on bees or other pollinators or beneficial insects before allowing them back on the market.

Through their pollination activities, by which bees allow plants to reproduce, bees are responsible for over 125 billion dollars in global food production, including over 20 billion dollars in the U.S., according to the legislation’s findings.

“Neonicotinoids cause sublethal effects including impaired foraging and feeding behavior, disorientation, weakened immunity, delayed larval development, and increased susceptibility to viruses, diseases, and parasites and numerous studies have also demonstrated acute, lethal effects from the application of neonicotinoid insecticides,” the legislation states.

“Recent science has demonstrated that a single corn kernel coated with a neonicotinoid is toxic enough to kill a songbird,” it says.

In June 2013, over 50,000 bumblebees were killed in Wilsonville, Oregon, as a direct result of exposure to a neonicotinoid that was used not as a pesticide, but to cosmetically improve the appearance of certain trees.

So many bees have already died in the U.S. that just one more bad winter here could cause a major food crisis, one U.S. Department of Agriculture scientist said in the recent report.

O’Neil notes the U.S. House recently approved an amendment to the Farm Bill that would establish an interagency consultation process on pollinator protection, and would establish a task force to address bee decline.

“Passage of that was the first indicator this summer that members of congress were really waking up to this issue,” O’Neil said.

“We feel this bill [Conyers-Blumenauer] is necessary because the bees are dying now, and we can’t wait four years down the road to come to the conclusion that pesticides are killing bees,” he said.

The Centre for Food Safety recently sent an email to their members asking them to contact Gina McCarthy, the new head of the EPA, to encourage her to take action to benefit bees. McCarthy is believed to be a strong proponent of environmental stewardship.

“We’re hoping she’s going to be a better steward of bee health at the EPA than her predecessor was,” O’Neil said.

One of the neonicotinoids was conditionally registered for agricultural uses by the EPA in 2003, based on the fact that it was already registered as an insecticide for non-agricultural uses.

“So they allowed it to be conditionally registered without a field study on the condition this field study would still be received. Ten years later this requirement has never been met and the EPA continues to allow the use,” O’Neil said.

Scott Hoffman Black, executive director of the Xerxes Society, an organisation that advocates on behalf of invertebrates, told IPS, “The important fact about [neonicotinoids], they’re systemic, they’re inside the plant. Others go straight on the plant, and the rain would wash it off after. It’s [the neonicotinoids] in the roots, it’s in the stem, it’s in the flower, it’s in the flower nectar.”

When asked what would happen to te U.S. diet if there was a bee collapse large enough to eliminate pollination across the nation, Hoffman Black said that crops like wheat and corn, which do not require pollination, would still be available.

“Vegetables, fruits, nuts, all things that are highly nutritious and taste really good,” would be eliminated, Hoffman Black said. “We would have rice and wheat.

“Our ecosystems are based on pollination of native bees; everything from grizzly bears to songbirds rely on food that rely on pollination,” he said.

Environmental safety groups are stepping up efforts to prevent a reportedly dangerous yet widely used herbicide from being sold in the United States, even as the country’s primary environmental regulator is considering increasing the amount of the herbicide allowed in the U.S. food supply.

The agricultural giant Monsanto has for years relied on its flagship product, a weed-killer known as Roundup. The primary ingredient in Roundup is an herbicide called glyphosate, which Monsanto has used to selectively kill weeds while allowing genetically modified versions of sugarcane, corn, soy and wheat crops to grow.“Part of the problem is that there is no ethical way to prove that [glyphosate] is as toxic as it is.” -- Sayer Ji of GreenMedInfo

“We are increasingly seeing more and more samples of surface water coming up with residues [of glyphosate], and this is affecting frogs that live there,” Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, an advocacy group, told IPS. “Potatoes and carrots are also picking it up in the soil – there are multiple routes of exposure.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the federal regulatory agency, is currently preparing to increase the allowable amount of glyphosate in crops like carrots, sweet potatoes and mustard seeds. A public comment period on the proposal to do so ends Monday night, and the EPA has reportedly already received some 9,000 comments.

The new EPA regulation would allow “oilseed” crops such as flax, canola and soybean oil to contain glyphosate at levels up to 40 parts per million (ppm), up from 20 ppm, which is over 100,000 times the concentration needed to cause cancer according to a recent study. It also raises the allowable glyphosate contamination level for food crops such as potatoes from 200 ppm to 6,000 ppm.

Glyphosate has previously been shown to be an “endocrine disruptor”, which the National Institutes of Health has shown to have long-term effects on reproductive health. They can be very dangerous at low levels, thus restricting the amount allowed will not be effective.

“The EPA is failing to protect human health and the environment by neglecting to regulate the excessive use of herbicides,” a current Food & Water Watch petition states. “Instead, it is just changing its own rules to allow the irresponsible and potentially dangerous applications continue.”

Monsanto, meanwhile, claims glyphosate is safe because it only acts on a biological process that is present in plants, not animals.

“We are very confident in the long track record that glyphosate has,” Jerry Stainer, Monsanto’s executive vice president of sustainability, has stated in the past. “It has been very, very extensively studied.”

Yet new research says glyphosate interferes with gut bacteria, which can disrupt immunity and vitamin synthesis.

Indeed, according to EPA analysts, the consequences linked to exposure to the chemical include lung congestion and shortness of breath. Further, according to a study published in April, scientists have linked exposure to glyphosate to gastrointestinal disorders, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, depression, autism, infertility and cancer.

“Negative impact on the body is insidious and manifests slowly over time as inflammation damages cellular systems throughout the body,” the study states.

“Part of the problem is that there is no ethical way to prove that [glyphosate] is as toxic as it is,” Sayer Ji, director of GreenMedInfo, an advocacy group, told IPS. “Yet meanwhile, no new research is proving it’s safer, but rather the opposite. I think the EPA is really damaging its credibility.”

According to Lovera, the EPA tends to be very slow in taking new studies into account. (The EPA was unable to provide comment for this story before deadline.)

180 million pounds

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, more than 180 million pounds of glyphosate are applied to U.S. soil annually. Herbicide use has increased by 26 percent since 2001, according Food & Water Watch.

Instead of pushing more environmentally friendly techniques to combat weeds – such as varying crops from year to year or using crop covers – biotech companies have focused on inventing genetically engineered crops  that can withstand the use of Roundup and other herbicides.

Yet the impacts of this massively increased use of chemical inputs on environmental systems and human communities are only slowly being understood.

Scientists have repeatedly found that the numbers of migrating monarch butterflies, for instance, are today at their lowest point in decades. Environmental advocacy groups say this is because milkweed plants – the only plant on which these butterflies lay their eggs – are being killed off by these herbicides.

Nor are plants and animals the only ones reportedly being affected by this increased use of glyphosate.

In its Farm Family Exposure Study, GreenMedInfo looked at the glyphosate concentration in the urine of 48 farmers, their spouses and 79 of their children on the day before, the day of, and for three days after a glyphosate application on their farms.

Of the farmers studied, 60 percent had detectable levels of the chemical the day of the application. So too did four percent of their spouses and 12 percent of their children.

“For consumers in the United States, the best way to get around this is to look for organic labels on food, because they are not allowed to use Roundup,” Lovera told IPS. “That’s one of the biggest distinctions between conventional and organic products.”

Bumblebee pollinating Aquilegia vulgaris. Credit: Roo72/cc by 3.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, May 3 2013 (IPS)

A major study by the U.S. government’s environment and agriculture agencies has suggested a strong link between the use of certain pesticides and the widespread deaths that have afflicted honey bee populations around the world in recent years.

Still, the joint report, released Thursday, does not suggest limiting the use of these pesticides, nor does it recommend immediate action to impose a temporary ban, as was announced this week in a landmark decision by the European Union. Rather, the report offers technical tweaks while urging additional research on the issue."The five-to-ten-year timeframe these agencies are now saying they will follow is not fast enough." -- Pesticide Action Network's Paul Towers

“Acute and sublethal effects of pesticides on honey bees have been increasingly documented, and are a primary concern,” the report, released by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), states.

“Further … research is required to establish the risks associated with pesticide exposure to U.S. honey bee declines in general. The most pressing pesticide research questions lie in determining the actual field-relevant pesticide exposure bees receive and the effects of pervasive exposure to multiple pesticides on bee health and productivity of whole honey bee colonies.”

The report has also expanded official focus from one notorious family of pesticides – known as neonicotinoids (or “neonics”), the subject of the European Union’s new two-year moratorium – to a second, known as pyrethroids. Indeed, research within the report suggests that “the frequency and quantity of residues of pyrethroids coupled with the toxicity of these insecticides to bees could pose a 3-fold greater hazard to the colony than the systemic neonicotinoids.”

These are important findings in what remains a scientific mystery amidst an environmental and agricultural crisis. A half-dozen years after mass bee deaths were first noticed, last year was the worst yet on record, during which around half of all bees in U.S. commercial hives inexplicably disappeared.

Since 2006, the U.S. government estimates that 10 million bee hives have succumbed in the United States alone. Similar phenomena are being seen in European countries.

Beyond the potential environmental implications of what is being called Colony Collapse Disorder, major bee problems inevitably have major ramifications for agriculture. Government and other experts have put the annual value of bee-pollinated foods at nearly 20 billion dollars – making the new report’s findings increasingly urgent.

Great imperative

Despite the anticipation with which the report was being watched, the USDA and EPA ultimately state only that the findings are not yet conclusive enough to take major action.

The agencies note that pesticide use is one of several potentially interlinked factors that have contributed to the recent mass die-off. Other factors include abnormally high rates of bee parasites, poor nutrition among the insects, and a loss of genetic diversity among today’s hives.

“The report makes a compelling case that multiple factors are at play and that we do need to take action, but this needs to be done far more quickly,” Paul Towers, media director with the Pesticide Action Network, an advocacy group, told IPS.

“The five-to-ten-year timeframe these agencies are now saying they will follow is not fast enough. In fact, there is great imperative here: bees are a clear indicator of the overall health of our agricultural system, so if we’re unable to protect the pollinators we’ll put our entire agricultural system at risk.”

Further, consumer watchdogs say that multiple high-level studies in recent years have strengthened scientific consensus on the impact of pesticides on bee populations, with research suggesting these chemicals could act as a critical instigator among a combination of other factors. The weight of this evidence, they say, warrants a quicker response.

“We do need more research, and it is good that EPA and USDA are working together, but I do think we know enough now to act,” Jennifer Sass, a toxicologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group here, told IPS.

“The Europe ban is based on good data, and there is increasing evidence to where we can get a pretty good understanding of the impact on bees. All of the actions being suggested in the new report are good, but in addition we need to severely ramp down the volume of chemicals we’re using – or stop using them entirely.”

Indeed, it is important to note that the European Union’s ban is actually just a two-year moratorium, to allow for additional scientific study to progress in the context of mounting evidence.

“The EPA is putting blinders on, pretending the main problem is pesticides ‘drifting away’ from the application site, pretending the actual seed treatments aren’t the problem,” NRDC’s Sass, who recently co-authored a study accusing the EPA of shoddy approvals procedures, says.

“This has allowed them to come up with technical solutions, focusing on how to reduce the amount of pesticides that are getting off the treatment sites, when really the issue is that the pesticide is getting into the plants – just as it’s meant to do.”

Further, some research has found that these substances may not be staying where they’re placed. A California study discovered that 80 percent of the state’s waterways were contaminated with pesticides, for instance, while the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) found similar traces in 60 percent of water samples in Georgia.

Lobby victory?

The EPA has recently stepped up a required review of all “neonic” pesticides currently allowed in the United States, but that too won’t take place until 2018.

“The agency has accelerated the schedule for registration review of the neonicotinoid pesticides due to uncertainties about these pesticides and their potential effects on bees,” the EPA told IPS.

“However, if at any time the EPA determines there are urgent human and/or environmental risks from pesticide exposures that require prompt attention, the agency will take appropriate regulatory action, regardless of the registration review status of that pesticide.”

The agency says it has “several hundred” studies on the effects of neonics on bees and bee colonies, but notes that “At this time, the data available to the EPA do not support a moratorium” such as the one recently instituted in the European Union.

In this decision, Sass sees evidence of the strength of the chemicals lobby. Two of the most prominent neonic producers, for instance, are the chemicals giants Bayer and Syngenta, evidence of whose lobbying in the European Union on the issue has recently been documented.

“These chemical makers are clearly the biggest lobbying voice in this discussion – bigger than the growers and way bigger than the beekeepers,” Sass says. “While the action in Europe will protect agriculture, the EPA’s action will simply protect corporate profits.”`

Forward On Climate Rally. Washington DC, Feb. 17, 2013. Credit: Stephen D. Melkisethian/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Apr 23 2013 (IPS)

Advocacy groups here are applauding the publication of new government concerns, formally expressed Monday by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), over a recent assessment of the environmental impact of a major oil pipeline that would run between Canada and the U.S. Gulf Coast.

Because the EPA will eventually have to sign off on any decision to approve the pipeline proposal, made by a Canadian company called TransCanada, this indication of the agency’s strong reservations over the government’s assessment could now further gum up the consent process for the seven-billion-dollar project."Anyone who doesn’t work for an oil company or the Canadian government has said this is a boondoggle." -- 350.org's Daniel Kessler

While a draft State Department environmental impact assessment (known as an SEIS), released in March, found that the Keystone XL proposal would have no major environmental or climate impact, the EPA has now officially given that appraisal a rating of medium severity. In a letter to State Department officials Monday, the EPA expressed “environmental objections” to the SEIS due to “insufficient information”.

“The EPA has basically told the State Department that it needs to go back and do its homework – they looked at the major parts of the analysis and found it insufficient,” Daniel Kessler, a media campaigner with 350.org, an environment group, told IPS.

“That’s not really a surprise: anyone who doesn’t work for an oil company or the Canadian government has said this is a boondoggle. Still, at the end of the day the only thing that matters is what President [Barack] Obama thinks, and the EPA just gave him ample fodder to reject this proposal.”

In previous assessments, the EPA has expressed such strong concern only very rarely, giving out “environmental objections” or worse in just five percent of cases, according to Kate Colarulli, a campaigner with the Sierra Club, an advocacy group.

“We’re very pleased to see this come out of EPA, as it not only highlights a lot of the issues that we’ve point out, but also adds significant credibility to these concerns,” Colarulli told IPS.

“For a federal agency, this is really tough language. EPA’s job is to make sure that such assessments are both factually accurate and thorough, so that decision-makers have the best set of information, and here they’re saying the work needs to be better.”

Colarulli says this concern is underscored by the fact that the agency is in the midst of contentious Congressional confirmation hearings for a new administrator.

“This is a politically sensitive moment for EPA, so for them to come forward now shows they’re willing to put some skin in the game,” she says. “Their concerns about the negative consequences of the Keystone proposal are serious enough that they’re willing to take a public stand.”

Monday’s letter coincided with the end of a public response period on the State Department’s draft assessment. During that time, the agency reportedly received more than a million responses, although these have not yet been made public.

The State Department, meanwhile, has stated that the EPA’s concerns are just another part of this public response. “The State Department has always anticipated that in preparing a Final Supplemental EIS it would conduct additional analysis and incorporate public comments received on the Draft SEIS,” agency spokesperson Patrick Ventrell said in response to the EPA’s letter.

No updated modelling

The key concerns for the EPA have to do with the State Department’s determination that the direct environmental or climate implications of the Keystone XL proposal would be negligible.

The EPA suggests that the pipeline’s 50-year lifetime would result in 935 million metric tonnes of carbon emissions, a fact that the State Department appraisal does not counter. Nor does it contradict that the particularly dirty “tar sands” oil (or bitumen) that would flow through the pipeline releases far more greenhouse gas-related emissions than does conventional oil.

Rather, the State Department’s reasoning is that the Canadian tar sands would be developed regardless of whether the pipeline gets built – perhaps transporting the oil by train to the Pacific Ocean, instead. In fact, however, this conclusion has been repeatedly questioned, including by oil industry insiders and business analysts – and now by the EPA, the government’s lead regulator on such issues.

“We note that the discussion in the [draft] SEIS, while informative, is not based on an updated energy-economic modelling effort,” the EPA letter states.

“[W]e recommend that the Final EIS provide a more careful review of the market analysis and rail transport options … recognizing the potential for much higher per barrel rail shipment costs than presented in the DSEIS.”

Such suggestions will almost certainly need to be followed in some form. The pipeline’s cross-border nature has left the State Department as the lead agency in deciding on the Keystone XL proposal, with a decision ultimately needed from President Obama.

If none of more than a half-dozen federal agencies has any objection to the final assessment, the State Department would be able to unilaterally make a recommendation on the proposal. Yet the EPA’s letter makes clear that some bedrock objections already exist, and if they’re not dealt with the EPA would have another opportunity to make comments or to require that the approvals process be diverted directly to the White House.

“Both the State Department and President Obama’s administration have made clear that they intend to run a rigorous process using the best scientific evidence,” Anthony Swift, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defence Council, a watchdog group, told reporters Tuesday.

“And it’s impossible to do that while ignoring the findings of the EPA, which has the most expertise in environmental review. It would be very difficult to imagine the State Department ignoring the EPA comments.”

Conflicts of interest

Beyond some of the conclusions in the State Department’s assessment, the way the SEIS itself was undertaken has also come under fire. This follows on a 2011 investigation by the agency’s inspector-general that found that a previous version of the evaluation was carried out by a consultant with close and undisclosed (though not unlawful) links to TransCanada.

While that incident led to reforms of contractor-selection criteria, several groups are now alleging that the State Department has already violated those regulations by hiring a group called Environmental Resources Management (ERM) to complete the draft SEIS. ERM reportedly also has undisclosed ties to TransCanada.

On Monday, 11 environmental and public interest groups requested another investigation from the State Department inspector-general. A letter detailing the request, which IPS has seen, alleges “misleading disclosures on ERM’s conflict of interest questionnaire … [and] the Department’s apparent attempt to conceal ERM employees’ experience on TransCanada projects.”

Critics say the EPA should not have approved clothianidin, a potent pesticide that belongs to a family of substances linked to the current widespread die-off of global honeybee populations. Credit: Bob Peterson/cc by 2.0

By Carey L. Biron
WASHINGTON, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

An environment group here is warning that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), a key government regulator, may have been haphazardly approving thousands of pesticides for decades, some of which pose risks to both human and environmental health.

Following on two years of research, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), a watchdog group, has found that as much as 65 percent of the 16,000 pesticides the EPA approved between the late 1970s and 2010 were greenlighted through a hasty and potentially incomplete process.The public is under the false impression that if a substance has been registered by the EPA, it has gone through a thorough government review.

NRDC says these 11,000 substances were approved using a loophole in strict regulatory legislation known as “conditional registration”, created by the U.S. Congress to be used only in very limited circumstances.

“Properly used, conditionally registering a new pesticide provides an important benefit in special situations such as allowing new pesticides on the market to address a public health emergency,” a new NRDC report, released Wednesday, states.

“However, improper use of conditional registration means that scores of untested or undertested pesticides may litter the market, potentially threatening human health.”

The EPA told IPS it has yet to fully review the new report. However, the agency says it has found that “the data required pursuant to conditional registrations have been submitted and reviewed in a timely fashion. EPA’s review of the data confirms that products initially registered on a conditional basis are not posing unacceptable risks to human health or the environment.”

Congress created the conditional registration option in the late 1970s, a half-decade after it passed stringent new regulatory legislation covering pesticides, in response to industry complaints that the new testing requirements were too onerous and were gumming up the development process.

As such, lawmakers said they would allow the use of conditional registration if a developer claimed to have insufficient time to come up with the data required, and if the temporary granting of approval would not have an overly negative environmental impact.

Both of these requirements – temporary use and follow-up data – remain central components for the use of conditional registration. And yet, according to the NRDC findings, not only has the EPA appeared to massively over-rely on this loophole, but it has also failed to adhere to these additional reporting requirements.

Abdication

“The EPA’s database is seriously disorganized. Once a pesticide is conditionally registered, the EPA does not have a system to track the data it had requested as a condition of the registration,” the report states.

“In addition, the agency does not follow whether those data were received, what the data show regarding the pesticide’s potential for harm or other aspects of the registration decision, or what, if any, changes were made in response to the received data.”

Coupled with the fact that the EPA also offers no public comment period on its decisions, alongside a broader lack of transparency, NRDC is calling the approvals process “grievously flawed” and accusing the agency of an “abdication” of its duties towards public health and the environment.

“The big problem is we have to take EPA at their word, because what the public has access to doesn’t offer us some critical information,” Mae Wu, an NRDC attorney and co-author of the new report, told IPS.

“It sounds as though we’re just talking about a messy database here, but we’ve identified at least two real-life examples of pesticides that went through this process that, had it been more open, EPA might have realised shouldn’t be approved.”

Those two substances are nanosilver, tiny pieces of silver used for their antibacterial properties, including in infants’ toys; and clothianidin, a potent pesticide that belongs to a family of substances linked to the current widespread die-off of global honeybee populations.

To a certain extent, the EPA appears to implicitly agree with at least some of these concerns. In an internal report last year, the agency admitted to administrative mistakes regarding the use of conditional registration in around 95 percent of cases.

In an e-mail to IPS, the EPA says it is currently working “on improving record-keeping and have developed a plan to update the IT systems to address that need.”

Further, after being privately briefed on the NRDC initial findings in 2010, the agency’s use of conditional registration appears to have plummeted, to about 20 percent of pesticides approved in 2011 and 2012. “It really did seem to open their eyes to a problem they didn’t realise they had,” Wu says.

Birds and bees

EPA has stated that it would be moving up a required periodic re-appraisal of approved pesticides. But even under the new timeframe it is not expected to rule on clothianidin until 2018.

Since the introduction of this substance’s broader family of pesticides (known as neonicotinoids), in the mid-2000s, mass honeybee deaths have threatened the huge food crop industry – worth some 15 billion dollars a year here in the United States alone – that depends on their pollination.

With U.S. beekeepers currently reporting hive losses of up to 50 percent, last week a group of beekeepers, environmental and consumer groups formally accused the EPA of failing to protect bees from harmful pesticides. (Also last week, a major new report was published detailing the harmful effect of neonicotinoids on the U.S. bird population.)

The lawsuit follows an EPA decision last year to deny a petition to halt the use of clothianidin – despite the agency itself having rejected research on the substance’s safety by its producer, Bayer.

“The EPA denied the suspension request by essentially concluding that there was no ‘imminent hazard’, but it didn’t review a majority of the new studies that further support the charge of imminent hazard,” Sylvia Wu, a staff attorney at the Center for Food Safety, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, told IPS.

“We believe that EPA has been abusing the conditional registration process. The public is under the false impression that if a substance has been registered by the EPA, it has gone through a thorough government review. The reality is that a lot of these substances are being widely applied even though EPA has been aware of potential harms.”

Elsewhere, while the European Union earlier this month failed to ban three neonicotinoids pesticides thought to be endangering European bees, the European Commission is reportedly continuing to pursue action on one unless a compromise with industry is reached.

On Thursday, the two largest neonicotinoid producers, Bayer and Syngenta, proposed a package plan in the E.U. that would include greater monitoring of neonicotinoids, more research on bee viruses, and planting of more flowers around the edges of agricultural fields.