Beware the Hawkish Pundits Pushing for War Over Ukraine

Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.


A billboard hanging outside a night club reads: "No War!" on January 18, 2022 in Berlin, Germany. Tensions between Europe, Ukraine and the U.S. on the one side and Russia on the other remain high as the threat of war through a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to loom.

 (Photo: Sean Gallup/Getty Images)


GREGORY SHUPAK

January 19, 2022

 by Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)

With the United States and Russia in a standoff over NATO expansion and Russian troop deployments along the Ukrainian border, US corporate media outlets are demanding that Washington escalate the risk of a broader war while misleading their audiences about important aspects of the conflict.

Alexander Vindman (New York Times, 12/10/21): "A prosperous Ukraine buttressed by American support" could persuade Russians "to eventually demand their own framework for democratic transition"—i.e., regime change.

Many in the commentariat called on the US to take steps that would increase the likelihood of war. In the New York Times (12/10/21), retired US Army Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman wrote that "the United States must support Ukraine by providing more extensive military assistance." He argued that "the United States should consider an out-of-cycle, division-level military deployment to Eastern Europe to reassure allies and bolster the defenses of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization," even while calling for a strategy that "avoids crossing into military adventurism." He went on to say that "the United States has to be more assertive in the region."

Yet the US has been plenty "assertive in the region," where, incidentally, America is not located. In 2014, the US supported anti-government protests in Ukraine that led to the ouster of democratically elected, Russia-aligned Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych (Foreign Policy, 3/4/14). Russia sent its armed forces into the Crimea, annexed the territory, and backed armed groups in eastern Ukraine.

Since then, the US has given Ukraine $2.5 billion in military aid, including Javelin anti-tank missiles (Politico, 6/18/21). The US government has applied sanctions to Russia that, according to an International Monetary Fund estimate, cost Russia about 0.2 percentage points of GDP every year between 2014 and 2018 (Reuters, 4/16/21).

Furthermore, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)—a US-led military alliance hostile to Russia—has grown by 14 countries since the end of the Cold War. NATO expanded right up to Russia's border in 2004, in violation of the promises made by the elder George Bush and Bill Clinton to Russian leaders Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin (Jacobin, 7/16/18).

"Russia has shown its intent to violate its international commitments by demanding NATO cease expanding," Rob Portman and Jeanne Shaheen argue in the Washington Post (12/24/21)—ignoring the US's violated commitment to not expand NATO eastward.

In the Washington Post (12/24/21), Republican Sen. Rob Portman and Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen jointly contended in Orwellian fashion that the Biden administration should take "military measures that would strengthen a diplomatic approach and give it greater credibility." They wrote that "the United States must speed up the pace of assistance and provide antiaircraft, antitank and anti-ship systems, along with electronic warfare capabilities." The authors claimed that these actions "will help ensure a free and stable Europe," though it's easy to imagine how such steps could instead lead to a war-ravaged Europe, or at least a tension-plagued one.

Indeed, US "military measures" have tended to increase, rather than decrease, the temperature. Last summer, the US and Ukraine led multinational naval maneuvers held in the Black Sea, an annual undertaking called Sea Breeze. The US-financed exercises were the largest in decades, involving 32 ships, 40 aircraft and helicopters, and 5,000 soldiers from 24 countries (Deutsche Welle, 6/29/21). These steps didn't create a "stable Europe": Russia conducted a series of parallel drills in the Black Sea and southwestern Russia (AP, 7/10/21), and would go on to amass troops along the Ukrainian border.
Afghan precedent

Max Boot (Washington Post, 12/15/21) suggests the US should point out to Russia "that Ukraine shares a lengthy border—nearly 900 miles in total—with NATO members Romania, Slovakia, Hungary and Poland." Pretty sure they're aware of that, Max.

Max Boot, also writing in the Post (12/15/21), argued:

Preventing Russia from attacking will require a more credible military deterrent. President Biden has ruled out unilaterally sending US combat troops to Ukraine, which would be the strongest deterrent. But he can still do more to help the Ukrainians defend themselves.

The United States has already delivered more than $2.5 billion in security assistance to Ukraine since 2014, with $450 million of that coming this year. There are also roughly 150 US troops in Ukraine training its armed forces.

But Ukraine is asking for more military aid, and we should deliver it. NBC News reports that "Ukraine has asked for air defense systems, anti-ship missiles, more Javelin antitank missiles, electronic jamming gear, radar systems, ammunition, upgraded artillery munitions and medical supplies." The Defense Department could begin airlifting these defensive systems and supplies to Kyiv tomorrow.

Later in the article, Boot contended that the US should help prepare Ukraine to carry out an armed insurgency in case Russia intensifies its involvement in Ukraine. He said that "outside support" is "usually the key determinant of the success or failure of an insurgency": Because of aid from the US and its allies, he noted, the mujahedeen in Afghanistan "were able to drive out the Red Army with heavy casualties." Amazingly, Boot said nothing about the many alumni of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan who joined the Taliban and al-Qaeda (Jacobin, 9/11/21).

That it might be possible to reach an agreement in which Ukraine remains neutral between NATO and Russia (Responsible Statecraft, 1/3/22) is not the sort of possibility that Boot thinks is worth exploring. He apparently would prefer to dramatically increase the danger of armed conflict between two nuclear powers.
Whitewashing Nazis

The Nation (5/6/21): "Glorification of Nazi collaborators and Holocaust perpetrators isn't a glitch but a feature of today's Ukraine."

US media should present Americans with a complete picture of Ukraine/Russia so that Americans can assess how much and what kind of support, if any, they want their government to continue providing to Ukraine's. Such a comprehensive view would undoubtedly include an account of the Ukrainian state's political orientation. Lev Golinkin in The Nation (5/6/21) outlined one of the Ukrainian government's noteworthy tendencies:

Shortly after the Maidan uprising of 2013 to 2014 brought in a new government, Ukraine began whitewashing Nazi collaborators on a statewide level. In 2015, Kyiv passed legislation declaring two WWII-era paramilitaries—the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA)—heroes and freedom fighters, and threatening legal action against anyone denying their status. The OUN was allied with the Nazis and participated in the Holocaust; the UPA murdered thousands of Jews and 70,000–100,000 Poles on their own accord.

Every January 1, Kyiv hosts a torchlight march in which thousands honor Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera, who headed an OUN faction; in 2017, chants of "Jews Out!" rang out during the march. Such processions (often redolent with antisemitism) are a staple in Ukraine….

Ukraine's total number of monuments to Third Reich collaborators who served in auxiliary police battalions and other units responsible for the Holocaust number in the several hundred. The whitewashing also extends to official book bans and citywide veneration of collaborators.

The typical reaction to this in the West is that Ukraine can't be celebrating Nazi collaborators because it elected [Volodymyr] Zelensky, a Jewish president. Zelensky, however, has alternated between appeasing and ignoring the whitewashing: In 2018, he stated, "To some Ukrainians, [Nazi collaborator] Bandera is a hero, and that's cool!"

Furthermore, according to a George Washington University study, members of the far-right group Centuria are in the Ukrainian military, and Centuria's social media accounts show these soldiers giving Nazi salutes, encouraging white nationalism and praising members of Nazi SS units (Ottawa Citizen, 10/19/21). Centuria leaders have ties to the Azov movement, which "has attacked anti-fascist demonstrations, city council meetings, media outlets, art exhibitions, foreign students, the LGBTQ2S+ community and Roma people": the Azov movement's militia has been incorporated in the Ukrainian National Guard (CTV News, 10/20/21). Azov, the UN has documented, has carried out torture and rape.

Absent information

The fact that that Ukraine's government and armed forces include a Nazi-sympathizing current surely would have an impact on US public opinion—if the public knew about it. However, this information has been entirely absent in recent editions of the New York Times and Washington Post.

From December 6, 2021, to January 6, 2022, the Times published 228 articles that refer to Ukraine, nine of which contain some variation on the word "Nazi." Zero percent of these note Ukrainian government apologia for Nazis or the presence of pro-Nazi elements in Ukraine's armed forces. One report (12/21/21) said:

On Russian state television, the narrative of a Ukraine controlled by neo-Nazis and used as a staging ground for Western aggression has been a common trope since the pro-Western revolution in Kyiv in 2014.

Nothing in the article indicates that while "controlled" may be a stretch, the Ukrainian government officially honors Nazi collaborators. That doesn't mean Russia has the right attack Ukraine, but US media should inform Americans about whom their tax dollars are arming.

In the same period, the Post ran 201 pieces that mention the word "Ukraine." Of these, six mention the word "Nazi," none of them to point out that the Ukrainian state has venerated Holocaust participants, or that there are Nazis in the Ukrainian military. Max Boot (1/5/22) and Robyn Dixon (12/11/21), in fact, dismissed this fact as mere Russian propaganda. In Boot's earlier Ukraine piece (12/15/21), he acknowledged that the UPA collaborated with the Nazis and killed thousands of Polish people, but his article nevertheless suggested that the UPA offer a useful model for how Ukrainians could resist a Russian invasion, asserting that "all is not lost" in case of a Russian invasion, because "Ukrainian patriots could fight as guerrillas against Russian occupiers":

They have done it before. The Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) was formed in 1942 to fight for that country's independence. Initially, it cooperated with Nazi invaders but later fought against them. When the Red Army marched back into Ukraine in 1943, the UPA resisted. The guerrillas carried out thousands of attacks and inflicted thousands of casualties on Soviet forces while also massacring and ethnically cleansing the Polish population in western Ukraine. The UPA continued fighting until the 1950s, forcing Moscow to mobilize tens of thousands of troops and secret policemen to restore control.

"All is not lost," for Boot, though the lives of thousands of Poles and Jews were, the latter of whom he didn't bother to mention. Calling the perpetrators of such atrocities "Ukrainian patriots" is a grotesque euphemism that, first and foremost, spits on the victims, and also insults non-racist Ukrainians. After a two-paragraph interval, Boot wrote that,

the Ukrainian government needs to start distributing weapons now and, with the help of US and other Western military advisers, training personnel to carry out guerrilla warfare. Volodymyr Zelensky's government should even prepare supply depots, tunnels and bunkers in wooded areas, and in particular in the Carpathian Mountains, a UPA stronghold in the 1940s.

Evidently neither the UPA's precedent of fascist massacres, nor the presence of similarly oriented groups in contemporary Ukraine's armed forces and society, give Boot pause. He'd rather the US continue flooding the country with weapons; the consequences aren't a concern of Boot's.

Readers seeking riotous calls to violence in Eastern Europe should turn to the Times and the Post, but those who are interested in a thoroughgoing portrait will be disappointed.

© 2021 Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR)



Gregory Shupak teaches media studies at the University of Guelph-Humber in Toronto. His book, "The Wrong Story: Palestine, Israel and the Media," is published by OR Books.

How a powerful company convinced Georgia to let it bury toxic waste in groundwater

Documents reveal Georgia Power went to great lengths to advocate for risky waste storage.

By

 Max Blau

 -

January 19, 2022

SOURCEProPublica

Image Credit: Max Blau/ProPublica

For the past several years, Georgia Power has gone to great lengths to skirt the federal rule requiring coal-fired power plants to safely dispose of massive amounts of toxic waste they produced.

But previously unreported documents obtained by ProPublica show that the company’s efforts were more extensive than publicly known. Thousands of pages of internal government correspondence and corporate filings show how Georgia Power made an elaborate argument as to why it should be allowed to store waste produced before 2020 in a way that wouldn’t fully protect surrounding communities’ water supplies from contamination — and that would save the company potentially billions of dollars in cleanup costs.

In a series of closed-door meetings with state environmental regulators, the powerful utility even went so far as to challenge the definition of the word “infiltration” in relation to how groundwater can seep into disposal sites holding underground coal ash, according to documents obtained through multiple open records requests.

Earlier this month, Georgia Power was on its way to getting final approval from the state to leave 48 million tons of coal ash buried in unlined ponds — despite evidence that contaminants were leaking out. Georgia is one of three states that regulate how power companies safely dispose of decades worth of coal ash, rather than leaving such oversight to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency itself.

But last week, the EPA made clear that arguments like the ones Georgia Power has been making violate the intent of the coal ash rule, setting up a potential showdown among the federal agency, state regulators and the deep-pocketed power company. In a statement last week, the EPA said that waste disposal sites “cannot be closed with coal ash in contact with groundwater,” in order to ensure that “communities near these facilities have access to safe water for drinking and recreation.”

The EPA’s action follows a joint investigation by Georgia Health News and ProPublica that found Georgia Power has known for decades that the way it disposed of coal ash could be dangerous to neighboring communities.

“The coal ash rule was clear from the beginning, but industry had tried to inject uncertainty into plain language,” said Lisa Evans, an attorney who specializes in hazardous waste law for the environmental advocacy nonprofit Earthjustice. “The EPA has made it crystal clear what the plain language of the coal ash rule means.”

Georgia’s environmental regulators said it’s too soon to determine exactly how the EPA’s actions will play out in the state. In a letter dated Jan. 11, the EPA asked the Georgia Environmental Protection Division to review whether coal ash permits it has issued to Georgia Power are “consistent” with the federal agency’s guidance. Georgia Environmental Protection Division spokesperson Kevin Chambers, who declined to answer questions about Georgia Power’s lobbying or make any regulators available for an interview, said that the state agency is “awaiting further clarification” from the EPA on how the announcement will impact future permits for Georgia Power’s ash ponds. The agencies are scheduled to meet about the issue later this month.

John Kraft, a spokesperson for Georgia Power, said in a statement that the company intends to “comply with environmental regulations.” The utility has repeatedly denied that its coal ash ponds have contaminated residents’ drinking water or caused health problems in communities near its plants. He declined to answer ProPublica’s questions about the company’s lobbying efforts.

“We are evaluating EPA’s position,” Kraft said. “We will continue to work with them, as well as Georgia EPD, to safely close our ash ponds.”

For those living near coal ash ponds, the EPA’s decision couldn’t come soon enough. Gloria Hammond, a longtime resident of the tiny rural town of Juliette, Georgia, relied for decades on a private drinking well to pump water to her home from an underground aquifer. But two years ago, a sample of her well water taken by an environmental advocacy group revealed unsafe levels of contaminants often found in coal ash. Now, Hammond drives 10 minutes to a Baptist church to access a supply of clean drinking water.

She and others suspect those contaminants leaked into Juliette’s groundwater from a nearby disposal site at Plant Scherer, the largest coal-fired plant in the Western Hemisphere. The disposal site, less than a mile from Hammond’s house, holds nearly 16 million tons worth of coal ash in an unlined pond.

“They need to get the coal ash out of the drinking water,” Hammond said.

In early 2019, Chuck Mueller, GEPD’s top waste official, was grappling with a pivotal question that would impact thousands of Georgians for decades to come: How much of Georgia Power’s coal ash could legally remain buried in a pond without a protective liner? The utility had proposed disposing of 48 million tons — roughly half of its existing coal ash — that way. Mueller asked employees of his branch to figure out the answer.

After draining water from the ponds where ash is stored, Georgia Power is required to move the resulting dry ash into a landfill with a liner designed to prevent groundwater contamination — unless it can meet a set of requirements to leave the waste buried in an unlined disposal site.

The federal rule, which was enacted in 2015, allows utilities to bury the waste in an unlined ash pond only if they “control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the buried waste “to the maximum extent feasible.” Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator, says the rule is important because allowing water to mix with coal ash can lead to toxic heavy metals found in the waste migrating beyond the disposal site.

State regulators tasked with answering Mueller’s question read through dense Georgia Power filings and concluded that ash ponds at Plant Scherer, along with those at four other sites — Plants Hammond, McDonough, Wansley and Yates — contained waste that is submerged in groundwater, which some experts and regulators believe violates the federal coal ash rule.

Those findings were sent to one of Mueller’s top aides, William Cook, who oversees the state’s solid waste management program. Cook regularly met in private with Georgia Power representatives to get progress reports on the closure of the company’s ash ponds. That spring, Georgia Power representatives argued that state regulators could narrowly interpret the definition of a single word — “infiltration” — in the federal coal ash rule. The company believed this interpretation would allow millions of tons of waste to be left submerged in groundwater.

Georgia Power hoped to store coal ash in a way that only prevented water — such as rain falling from the sky — from seeping through a cover over the dry ash. They hoped regulators would disregard the presence of any groundwater that would soak the dry ash and potentially carry its heavy metals toward drinking wells.

Georgia Power representatives “believe that EPA would have written it in” if they wanted specific kinds of infiltration removed, Cook scribbled in his legal pad.

When Georgia Power representatives referenced an EPA document key to their understanding of “infiltration,” Cook asked his colleagues to review the document — which is 1,237 pages. They struggled to reconcile the case Georgia Power was making with the text of the regulation itself. John Sayer, head of environmental monitoring for the solid waste program, emailed his wife, an issues manager at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, for advice on the meaning of the word “infiltration,” which he wrote had caused “contention” in this context.

Eventually, Sayer emailed a colleague that he’d found a federal report that noted “groundwater would qualify as infiltration.” But Georgia Power kept pressing GEPD officials to narrow its definition of infiltration to only include rainwater falling from the sky. After months of research by Sayer and other state employees, Mueller was left to make the decision.

Later that summer, Chris Bowers, a senior attorney with the Southern Environmental Law Center, sent Mueller a report that highlighted the flaws in Georgia Power’s plans. As part of the SELC report, a veteran hydrogeologist named Mark Hutson analyzed the plans for ash ponds at the five plants where waste was below the water table. Huston concluded those plans “will not control, minimize, or eliminate” water from coming into contact with the dry ash.

At a subsequent meeting with GEPD, Bowers shared another state’s approach to the meaning of infiltration. Duke Energy Indiana had asked state regulators to let the company bury coal ash in an unlined pond in the southwest part of that state. When state regulators realized Duke Energy Indiana had not described how it would comply with federal guidelines to prevent groundwater from wetting the dry waste, regulators told the company they would only approve the plan if the company could stop infiltration “from any direction.” (Duke Energy Indiana later responded that removing the ash could cause a “very high safety risk” at the site. State regulators ultimately allowed some coal ash to remain buried there, so long as the company took steps to minimize groundwater from soaking the waste.)

Environmental regulators in other states such as North Carolina have forced utilities to scrap plans that didn’t comply with this portion of the coal ash rule. But Georgia Power, as well another power company in Ohio, pushed ahead with their controversial plans. The financial stakes were high. At Plant Scherer alone, installing a liner could cost $1 billion, according to one state official.

“Georgia Power wanted to rewrite the rule to say there’s a limitation it doesn’t have,” said Frank Holleman, a senior attorney with SELC. “It’s a preposterous proposal.”

One of Bowers’ clients, an environmental group called the Altamaha Riverkeeper, was grappling with this very issue in Juliette. The group soon discovered that water in the wells of Hammond and dozens of other Juliette residents contained concerning levels of contaminants found in coal ash. The group was worried that groundwater might be moving from the coal ash pond toward residents’ wells.

After the test results were publicized, Fletcher Sams, head of the Altamaha Riverkeeper, attended a closed-door meeting in February 2020 with several Juliette residents, local officials, state lawmakers and Georgia Power lobbyists. (ProPublica and Georgia Health News described parts of the meeting in a story last year.) The environmental advocate told attendees that his samples had revealed concerning levels of boron, calcium and sulfate — all indicators of coal ash. There was also evidence of a contaminant researchers had linked to cancer, hexavalent chromium, which had previously been discovered in some California drinking wells by environmental advocate Erin Brockovich. Georgia Power has acknowledged the presence of boron, calcium and sulfate but said that the hexavalent chromium is “naturally occurring.”

Sams, along with the Juliette residents, hoped Georgia Power would excavate Plant Scherer’s coal ash and put it in a lined landfill. But Aaron Mitchell, one of the utility’s top environmental lobbyists, insisted the company’s plan complied with environmental standards. However, after being peppered with questions by Sams, Mitchell acknowledged that the coal ash would still be submerged in groundwater if its plan to bury the waste was approved by state regulators.

Hearing that, Sams turned to the lone state regulator in the room, Chuck Mueller. He asked Mueller if Georgia Power’s plans to let water come into contact with dry ash met the state’s environmental standards.

“It’s allowed by the rules,” Mueller replied.

Shortly after Joe Biden was elected president, he chose a new EPA administrator with deep knowledge about the perils of coal ash. Michael Regan was the head of the environmental agency in North Carolina, a state that had seen one of the nation’s worst coal ash disasters in 2014, when a ruptured pipe sent 39,000 tons of coal ash pouring into the Dan River. Six years later, Regan convinced the state’s largest utility to excavate coal ash from its unlined ponds, which was done in order to protect residents from possible groundwater contamination.

Following Regan’s confirmation, environmental advocates urged federal officials to address the language in the coal ash rule that Georgia Power had tried to exploit. GEPD pushed ahead with the narrower definition of infiltration.

In June 2021, three months after Georgia Health News and ProPublica’s investigation into Georgia Power’s coal ash handling practices in Juliette, EPA officials met with GEPD to discuss the issue of infiltration. According to records obtained by ProPublica, state regulators said that Georgia Power could leave waste below the water table because the company had placed monitoring wells around the edge of those ash ponds to detect if heavy metals were migrating toward nearby residents’ homes.

The following month, GEPD began the process of issuing permits for unlined ponds where ash would remain submerged in groundwater. State regulators issued a draft permit for the first of these sites, one of Plant Hammond’s ash ponds, a step that then allowed the public to comment on the closure plan. Chambers, the GEPD spokesperson, said that the agency used “the commonly accepted meaning of ‘infiltration’” — and determined that Georgia Power’s proposal was “allowable under the rule.”

Last week, the EPA rejected the premise that groundwater legally could remain in contact with the dry ash — a statement that will likely impact Georgia Power’s closure plans at Scherer and four other plant sites. In its letter to GEPD, the EPA urged the state regulators to review the reasons why the federal agency intended to deny a plan to bury waste at southeast Ohio’s General James M. Gavin Power Plant, one of the largest power stations in the country. In that proposed decision, the EPA noted that the plant operators had failed to demonstrate how their closure plan would prevent infiltration.

The EPA’s filing notes that “infiltration” explicitly means “any liquid passing into or through” the coal ash pond “from any direction, including the top, sides, and bottom of the unit.” To Sams, the EPA’s announcement means that Georgia Power and GEPD cannot move forward with an “incorrect interpretation” of the country’s coal ash regulation. The EPA “restated in bold-crayon-block letters what we’ve been saying: You can’t store this waste full of toxic metals in groundwater,” Sams said.

Meiburg, the former EPA deputy administrator, said utilities could still challenge the agency’s clarification on the concept of infiltration because it did not go through the full rule-making process. But if GEPD ultimately approves permits that are less protective than what the federal regulation requires, the EPA has the power to strip Georgia of its ability to issue permits, according to Evans, the Earthjustice attorney.

Gloria Hammond, for her part, sees the EPA’s announcement as an important first step toward someday restoring the quality of Juliette’s groundwater. In the coming months, GEPD is expected to make a decision about Georgia Power’s permit at Plant Scherer. After feeling long ignored by environmental regulators, she hopes that GEPD requires Georgia Power to remove the ash from Juliette’s aquifer for good.

“I’m praying Georgia will take that into consideration,” Hammond said. “I hope they follow the EPA.”

We’ve breached Earth’s threshold for chemical pollution, study says

Even if we were to stop using and releasing [many novel entities], they would still be [here] for decades, or centuries, depending on what [substance] we’re talking about.”

By

 Elizabeth Claire Alberts

 -

January 20, 2022

SOURCEMongabay

An estimated 350,000 different kinds of chemicals are currently in the global market, yet most substances have not been evaluated. Image by MolnarSzabolcsErdely via Pixabay.

Many thousands of human-made chemicals and synthetic pollutants are circulating throughout our world, with new ones entering production all the time — so many, in fact, that scientists now say we’ve crossed a critical threshold that heightens the risk of destabilizing the entire Earth operating system and posing a clear threat to humanity.

There are about 350,000 different types of artificial chemicals currently in the global market, from plastics to pesticides to industrial chemicals like flame retardants and insulators. While research has shown that many of these chemicals can have deleterious impacts on the natural world and human health, most substances have not been evaluated, with their interactions and impacts not yet understood or entirely unknown.

“The knowledge gaps are massive and we don’t have the tools to understand all of what is being produced or released or [what is] having effects,” Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicologist and microplastics researcher from the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, told Mongabay in a video interview. “We just don’t know. So we try to look at what we do know and add up all these little puzzle pieces to get a big picture.”

As scientists endeavor to identify and understand the impacts of chemicals and other artificial substances — referred to en masse as “novel entities” — industries are pumping them out at a staggering rate. The global production of chemicals has increased fiftyfold since 1950, and this is expected to triple by 2050, according to a report published by the European Environment Agency. While some novel entities are regulated by governmental bodies and international agreements, many can be produced without any restrictions or controls.

The mismatch between the rapid rate at which novel entities are being produced, compared to the snail’s pace at which governments assess risk and monitor impacts — leaving society largely flying blind as to chemical threats — is what prompted Carney Almroth and colleagues to make a weighty argument in a new paper published in Science and Technology: that we have breached the “planetary boundary” for novel entities, endangering the stability of the planet we call home.

Quantifying the novel entities boundary

The concept of planetary boundaries was first proposed by a team of international scientists in 2009 to articulate key natural processes that, when kept in balance, support biodiversity; but when disrupted beyond a certain threshold, can destabilize and even destroy the Earth’s ability to function and support life. Nine boundaries have been identified: climate change, biosphere integrity, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, atmospheric aerosol pollution, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus, land-system change, and of course, the release of novel chemicals.

Many of these boundaries have clear thresholds. For instance, scientists determined that humanity would overshoot the safe operating space for climate change when carbon dioxide in the atmosphere exceeded 350 parts per million (ppm), which happened in 1988. The threshold for novel entities, however, has until recently evaded definition, largely because of the knowledge gaps surrounding these substances.

Patricia Villarrubia-Gómez, a plastic pollution researcher at Stockholm University’s Stockholm Resilience Centre, who co-authored the new paper, said these knowledge gaps aren’t present because these chemicals and other polluting substances don’t pose risks — it’s because scientists are still scrambling to understand novel entities and the myriad ways they can impact the natural world.

“It’s a very new field of study,” Villarrubia-Gómez told Mongabay in a video interview. “It’s in its infancy in comparison to other major environmental problems … most research has been done in the past seven years.”

Carney Almroth said researchers have used the Holocene, the current geological epoch that began just over 10,000 years ago, as a measuring point to quantify the thresholds of other planetary boundaries, but this approach wasn’t appropriate for novel entities.

“This boundary is different from the others because the others are all referring back to the Holocene conditions — that was 10,000 years of a very stable Earth system and Earth climate,” Carney Almroth said. Scientists “can look back and ask, ‘What were carbon dioxide levels then and where was nitrogen and phosphorus during that time period?’ and refer back to that [as a baseline]. We couldn’t do that because novel entities didn’t exist during that time period and the background baseline levels would be zero for most of them.”

Instead, the researchers gathered all of the information they could on artificial chemicals and other pollutants, looking at their impacts all along their supply chain, from extraction to production to use, and eventually, to their disposal as waste. Then they used a weight-of-evidence approach to determine that novel entities could, in fact, disrupt the planet’s stability.

“The weight of evidence indicates now that we are exceeding the boundary, but there’s more work to be done,” Carney Almroth said.

Björn Beeler, the international coordinator for the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN), who was not involved in this new research, called it a “very smart academic paper” that illustrates the need to act.

“We’re about to enter an exponential growth period,” Beeler told Mongabay in a phone interview. “If you’re concerned about toxic substance exposure, the amount of toxic substances [including plastic pollution] is set to grow three- [or] fourfold in the decades ahead.”

He added: “If you’re worried about it now, it’s set to get a lot worse.”

With science falling far behind in assessing risk, and governments largely failing to regulate chemicals, humanity is flying blind into a future where the unforeseen impacts of chemical pollutants could be catastrophic.

The release of novel entities isn’t the only planetary boundary that humanity has breached. Climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change and the biogeochemical flows of nitrogen and phosphorus have also pushed past the safe operating limits that keep Earth a habitable place.

As the demand for oil decreases, petrochemical companies are ramping up their plastic production. Image by Louis Vest via Flickr (CC BY-NC 2.0).

An ‘existential’ threat to humanity

What is known about chemical substances and other pollutants has long raised alarms among experts — dating back to Rachel Carson and the publication of Silent Spring, which helped launch the modern environmental movement. Hazardous chemicals such as pesticides can damage soil health, contaminate drinking water, and even get carried on the wind, to impact a wider environment and disrupt populations of birds, mammals and fish. Many of the chemicals we ingest, such as pharmaceuticals, persist after being flushed down the toilet, with wastewater polluting rivers and oceans, or even the land when contaminated solid sewage sludge is used to fertilize crops.

Chemical persistence in the environment is a major thorny problem: Research has shown that polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — highly toxic and carcinogenic substances banned by the U.S. as far back as 1977 and once widely used in coolants and oil paints — have continued building up in the blubber of killer whales (Orcinus orca), posing a genuine threat to a species that is already struggling in many parts of the world. So called “forever chemicals” — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs), that are highly toxic, carcinogenic and act like endocrine disruptors, are currently commonly used in disposable food packaging, cookware, cosmetics and even dental floss. A recent report also found them to be common in most of the drinking water in the U.S. They take hundreds or thousands of years to break down, but no U.S. limits have yet been placed on the concentration of forever chemicals in water.

“Even if we were to stop using and releasing [many novel entities], they would still be [here] for decades, or centuries, depending on what [substance] we’re talking about,” Carney Almroth said, adding that the risk of residual impacts from novel entities makes it even more imperative to stop, or at least slow down, the release of these substances.

The new paper in Science and Technology takes a specific look at plastics, which have become ever-present in daily life as food packaging, kitchenware and appliances. In recent years, much attention has been paid to the trillions of microplastics — fragments smaller than 5 millimeters, or three-sixteenths of an inch — polluting the global oceans, and the potential for larger plastic pieces to entangle or choke wildlife. New research shows that the sea breeze can even propel microplastics into the atmosphere, contaminating the very air we breathe and impacting climate change.

Plastic is highly problematic since it’s made out of a cocktail of chemicals that can leach out dangerous substances, especially when heated, cooled or scratched. A chemical compound known as bisphenol A (BPA) has been shown to act as an endocrine disruptor and interfere with hormones, impact immune systems and even promote certain cancers. One study even found that BPA can be absorbed into the human body through mere skin contact. But it’s not just BPA that’s harmful — many BPA alternatives have been found to be equally a risk to human health.

“We have been told for many, many decades that [plastics are] inert, and that they don’t release chemicals to their surroundings,” Villarrubia-Gómez said. “More and more, we’re discovering that that’s not true. Plastic leaches other chemicals … and we are in contact with [plastic] the whole day.”

Plastic isn’t just a problem in its end state. To make plastic, which uses petroleum as its base, greenhouse gases like ethane and methane need to be fracked from the ground and “cracked” into new compounds, the precursors to plastics. These industrial processes can release a number of toxic chemicals, along with various greenhouse gases, into the environment. The production of plastics is also intimately tied to the fossil fuel industry; as demand for oil drops, the petrochemical industry is ramping up its production of plastics.

“They see plastics as their next piggy bank,” Carney Almroth said. “Simultaneously, there’s a big push for an increase in plastics production and plastic use and plastic sales.”

Beeler said the release of novel entities into the environment poses a similar risk as climate change. “They’re both existential threats to humanity,” he noted. “Climate change [will determine] where you can live and how you can have a livelihood. Chemicals actually just remove your health — it’s very, very direct and personal. So I would draw them [as being at] the same crisis levels. It’s just that we’re not that socially conscious of chemicals and chemical safety, as we are of climate now.”

Determining a chemical’s risk often takes many years of methodical research, as scientists trace the causal connections between a synthetic substance and resulting environmental and health impacts. By then, that substance will often be ubiquitous, used in products across society.

Many chemicals will persist in the environment for a long time after they have stopped being released by industries. Image by yogendras31 via Pixabay.

‘Uptick in awareness’

While change is urgently needed to mitigate the impacts of novel entities, Carney Almroth said such an industrial paradigm shift would require a “massive overhaul of systemic societal structures.”

Industries that produce novel entities are “supported by the fact that we require constant economic growth,” she said. “This is one of the ways that they’ve been able to keep producing and using chemicals, even in the face of toxicity data, because they can show that it can grow economies, provide jobs, provide materials and so on and so forth.”

Despite the enormity of the problem, there may be opportunities for change in the near future. For instance, there are calls to form an international panel on chemical pollution, similar to those institutions focused on biodiversity and climate, such as the IUCN or the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In February and March, the U.N. Environment Assembly (UNEA) will also be meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, to discuss a number of environmental issues, including whether to mandate a new global treaty on plastics.

Beeler said that while negotiations may swing in the direction of only treating plastic as a waste issue, there are calls to address the entire plastic life cycle, taking into account all of the chemicals and pollutants plastic releases into the environment from production to waste stream.

He also said there’s also a reason for optimism in the way heightened public interest in plastic pollution has helped raise awareness of the larger problem of synthetic chemical contaminants.

“There’s been a small uptick in awareness [of] the harm from chemicals … due to the affiliation and link to plastics,” he said. “But prior to plastics, it was really [an awareness] desert — and plastics have created a little oasis of growing consciousness.”

Citations:

Allen, S., Allen, D., Moss, K., Le Roux, G., Phoenix, V. R., & Sonke, J. E. (2020). Examination of the ocean as a source for atmospheric microplastics. PLOS ONE , 15(5). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0232746

European Environment Agency (2017). Chemicals for a sustainable future. Retrieved from: https://www.eea.europa.eu/about-us/governance/scientific-committee/reports/chemicals-for-a-sustainable-future

Desforges, J., Hall, A., McConnell, B., Rosing-Asvid, A., Barber, J. L., Brownlow, A., … Dietz, R. (2018). Predicting global killer whale population collapse from PCB pollution. Science, 361(6409), 1373-1376. doi:10.1126/science.aat1953

Ma, Y., Liu, H., Wu, J., Yuan, L., Wang, Y., Du, X., … Zhang, H. (2019). The adverse health effects of bisphenol a and related toxicity mechanisms. Environmental Research, 176, 108575. doi:10.1016/j.envres.2019.108575

Persson, L., Carney Almroth, B. M., Collins, C. D., Cornell, S., De Wit, C. A., Diamond, M. L., … Hauschild, M. Z. (2022). Outside the safe operating space of the planetary boundary for novel entities. Environmental Science & Technology. doi:10.1021/acs.est.1c04158

Rockström, J., Steffen, W., Noone, K., Persson, Å., Chapin III, F. S., Lambin, E., … Foley, J. (2009). Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity. Ecology and Society, 14(2). Retrieved from https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/

Wang, Z., Walker, G. W., Muir, D. C., & Nagatani-Yoshida, K. (2020). Toward a global understanding of chemical pollution: A first comprehensive analysis of national and regional chemical inventories. Environmental Science & Technology, 54(5), 2575-2584. doi:10.1021/acs.est.9b06379

Zalko, D., Jacques, C., Duplan, H., Bruel, S., & Perdu, E. (2011). Viable skin efficiently absorbs and metabolizes bisphenol a. Chemosphere, 82(3), 424-430. doi:10.1016/j.chemosphere.2010.09.058

Our Synthetic Environment - Libcom.org

 Our Synthetic Environment

 Murray Bookchin 1962

 Table of contents

 Chapter 1: THE PROBLEM 

Chapter 2: AGRICULTURE AND HEALTH 

Chapter 3: URBAN LIFE AND HEALTH 

Chapter 4: THE PROBLEM OF CHEMICALS IN FOOD 

Chapter 5: ENVIRONMENT AND CANCER 

Chapter 6: RADIATION AND HUMAN HEALTH 

Chapter 7: HUMAN ECOLOGY 

Chapter 8: HEALTH AND SOCIETY

 Appendixes

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