Dr. Anthony Fauci leaving government after decades of work in disease prevention

Brad Reed
August 22, 2022

Donald Trump and Anthony Fauci AFP

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he is stepping down from his role as the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases after decades of service.

The New York Times reports that the 81-year-old Fauci, who was the public face of health advocacy during the COVID-19 pandemic that has killed more than a million Americans, will "pursue the next chapter" at the end of the year.

Although Fauci often served as a steady voice of expertise during the Trump administration's early response the deadly pandemic in 2020, he quickly became a lightning rod among Trump allies over his promotion of restrictions aimed at slowing the virus's spread.

In an interview with the Times, Fauci said that he wanted to do more public health advocacy outside of the government role where he has worked for nearly 40 years.

“So long as I’m healthy, which I am, and I’m energetic, which I am, and I’m passionate, which I am, I want to do some things outside of the realm of the federal government," he said.

President Joe Biden gave Fauci praise after he announced his coming retirement from government.

"Because of Dr. Fauci’s many contributions to public health, lives here in the United States and around the world have been saved," Biden said.

Fauci is stepping down from his roles in the NIH and Biden administration in December to 'pursue the next chapter' of his career, but urges he's not retiring

rcohen@insider.com (Rebecca Cohen) - 9h ago

Dr. Anthony Fauci announced on Monday that he plans to leave his roles in the National Institute of Health and the Biden administration in December, but insisted he is not yet retiring from his decades-long career in public health.


© Provided by Business InsiderDr. Anthony Fauci testifies before a Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee hearing on January 11, 2022 on Capitol Hill in Washington. Greg Nash/Pool via AP, File

Fauci will be leaving the positions of Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and Chief of the NIAID Laboratory of Immunoregulation, as well as the position of Chief Medical Advisor to President Joe Biden, he said, to "to pursue the next chapter of my career."

"While I am moving on from my current positions, I am not retiring," he said in a statement. "After more than 50 years of government service, I plan to pursue the next phase of my career while I still have so much energy and passion for my field."

"I want to use what I have learned as NIAID Director to continue to advance science and public health and to inspire and mentor the next generation of scientific leaders as they help prepare the world to face future infectious disease threats," he added.

This story is developing. 

Related video: Fauci To Retire by the End of President Biden’s Term
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Calls mount for release of Saudi woman facing34 years in prison over tweets

Jessica Corbett, Common Dreams
August 22, 2022

Salma Al-Shehab, a 34-year-old graduate student and mother of two, faces 34 years in prison for tweets critical of the Saudi monarchy. (Photo: European Saudi Organization for Human Rights/Twitter)

Human rights advocates around the world this week called on Saudi Arabia to free Salma al-Shehab after she was sentenced to 34 years in prison and a 34-year travel ban for tweets criticizing the kingdom's repression of women.

Liz Throssell, a spokesperson for the United Nations' Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, said Friday that "we are appalled by the sentencing" of al-Shehab, a 34-year-old mother and graduate student in the United Kingdom.

"We urge the Saudi authorities to quash her conviction and release her immediately and unconditionally," Throssell continued. "She should never have been arrested and charged in the first place for such conduct."

Throssell also put the sentencing into a broader context:

The extraordinarily lengthy sentence adds to the chilling effect among government critics and civil society at large and is yet another example of Saudi authorities weaponizing the country's counterterrorism and anti-cybercrime laws to target, intimidate, and retaliate against human rights defenders and those who voice dissent.

Saudi Arabia must not only release al-Shehab so that she can re-join her family, but also review all convictions stemming from free expression against human rights defenders, including women who were jailed after they legitimately demanded reforms of discriminatory policies, as well as religious leaders and journalists. The Saudi government should also establish a robust legislative framework in line with international human rights law to uphold the rights to freedom of expression and association, and the right of peaceful assembly for all.

Diana Semaan, Amnesty International's acting deputy director for the Middle East and North Africa, similarly called out the kingdom's authorities Thursday, declaring that "it is outrageous that Salma al-Shehab, a Ph.D. student and mother of two from Saudi Arabia's Shia minority, has been handed down such a cruel and unlawful punishment simply for using Twitter and retweeting activists who support women's rights."

Al-Shehab was arrested in January 2021 while on holiday in Saudi Arabia and initially sentenced to six years behind bars, but the country's Specialized Criminal Court of Appeal increased her sentence last week.

According to Semaan, "Al-Shehab should never have been convicted in the first place, but to have her sentence increased from six to 34 years following an unfair trial shows that the authorities intend to use her to set an example amid their unrelenting crackdown on free speech."

"She must be immediately and unconditionally released," the campaigner asserted. "The Saudi authorities must allow her to reunite to her family and to continue her studies in the U.K."

Like the U.N. spokesperson, Semaan also called for more sweeping action, arguing that "Saudi Arabi must end its relentless crackdown on women's rights activists and any others who dare to speak their mind freely."

"Women like Salma must be recognized and protected, not targeted for expressing their opinions," she said. "The authorities must also stop equating free speech with 'terrorism.' They should repeal or substantially amend Saudi's counterterrorism and anti-cybercrime laws, which criminalize dissent, and enact new laws that are fully compatible with international human rights law and standards."

Some critics of al-Shehab's imprisonment and the monarchy have accused Western leaders—including President Joe Biden, who visited Saudi Arabia earlier this summer—of emboldening the kingdom's leaders, especially Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman.

Lina al-Hathloul of the Saudi- and London-based human rights group ALQST—whose sister Loujain al-Hathloul was recently released from prison—said Monday that "Saudi activists warned Western leaders that giving legitimacy to the crown prince would pave the way for more abuses, which is unfortunately what we are witnessing now."

'Don’t we have enough trees?' GOP's Herschel Walker questions need for climate change spending

Travis Gettys
August 22, 2022

Herschel Walker speaks to the Class of 2016 during Basic Cadet Training in the U.S. Air Force Academy's Jacks Valley in Colorado Springs. (U.S. Air Force photo)

Republican candidate Herschel Walker questioned the wisdom of spending money on trees to mitigate climate change.

Walker, the Donald Trump-endorsed former football star who won the GOP nomination for Georgia Senate, expressed his opposition to the newly signed Inflation Reduction Act, which boosts spending on climate change preparations and environmental initiatives, during a Republican Jewish Committee event, reported the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

“They continue to try to fool you that they are helping you out, but they’re not, because a lot of money it’s going to trees," Walker said. "Don’t we have enough trees around here?”

Walker also criticized the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, which Trump abandoned soon after his inauguration, and predicted it would embolden Iran if it was revisited in the future.

“That’s what I don’t get," Walker said. "You’re going to give money to terrorists to be nice to you? He never read the definition of a terrorist, has he? They don’t like you. They like nothing about you.”

Walker also dismissed apparent criticism from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell, who recently questioned the quality of Trump-backed Senate candidates.

“I don’t ever worry about stuff like that,” Walker said. “When I got into this race, I got in this race to win it for the people. I said, ‘Guys, I’m here for the people of Georgia.’ I’m not worried about what people say.”

U$A

An Unusual $1.6 Billion Donation Bolsters Conservatives

A low-profile Republican financier donated his company to a new group run by the influential operative Leonard A. Leo.

Leonard A. Leo has used his connections to Republican donors and politicians to help finance battles over judicial appointments, abortion rights, voting rules and climate change policy.

Credit...T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times


By Kenneth P. Vogel and Shane Goldmacher
Aug. 22, 2022, 5:00 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON — A new conservative nonprofit group scored a $1.6 billion windfall last year via a little-known donor — an extraordinary sum that could give Republicans and their causes a huge financial boost ahead of the midterms, and for years to come.

The source of the money was Barre Seid, an electronics manufacturing mogul, and the donation is among the largest — if not the largest — single contributions ever made to a politically focused nonprofit. The beneficiary is a new political group controlled by Leonard A. Leo, an activist who has used his connections to Republican donors and politicians to help engineer the conservative dominance of the Supreme Court and to finance battles over abortion rights, voting rules and climate change policy.

This windfall will help cement Mr. Leo’s status as a kingmaker in conservative big money politics. It could also give conservatives an advantage in a type of difficult-to-trace spending that shapes elections and political fights.

The cash infusion was arranged through an unusual series of transactions that appear to have avoided tax liabilities. It originated with Mr. Seid, a longtime conservative donor who made a fortune as the chairman and chief executive of an electrical device manufacturing company in Chicago now known as Tripp Lite.

Rather than merely giving cash, Mr. Seid donated 100 percent of the shares of Tripp Lite to Mr. Leo’s nonprofit group before the company was sold to an Irish conglomerate for $1.65 billion, according to tax records provided to The New York Times, corporate filings and a person with knowledge of the matter.

The nonprofit, called the Marble Freedom Trust, then received all of the proceeds from the sale, in a transaction that appears to have been structured to allow the nonprofit group and Mr. Seid to avoid paying taxes on the proceeds.

For perspective, the $1.6 billion that the Marble trust reaped from the sale is slightly more than the total of $1.5 billion spent in 2020 by 15 of the most politically active nonprofit organizations that generally align with Democrats, according to an analysis by The Times. That spending, which Democrats embraced to aid the campaigns of Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his allies in Congress, dwarfed the roughly $900 million spent by a comparable sample of 15 of the most politically active groups aligned with the Republican Party.

The Marble Freedom Trust could help conservatives level the playing field — if not surpass the left — in such nonprofit spending, which is commonly referred to as dark money because the groups involved can raise and spend unlimited sums on politics while revealing little about where they got the money or how they spent it.

In a statement, Mr. Leo cited some of the left’s biggest donors and an advisory firm that helps manage the nonprofit groups they fund.

“It’s high time for the conservative movement to be among the ranks of George Soros, Hansjörg Wyss, Arabella Advisors and other left-wing philanthropists, going toe-to-toe in the fight to defend our constitution and its ideals,” Mr. Leo said. Mr. Seid and an associate did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The Marble Freedom Trust’s formation in May 2020, the donation of Tripp Lite shares by Mr. Seid, and Mr. Leo’s role have not been previously reported.

The funds are difficult to trace through public records. Tripp Lite is a private company that is not subject to corporate disclosure rules for public companies. On its tax filing, Marble indicated that the $1.6 billion came from the “sale of gifted company and subsidiaries,” but indicated that it withheld identifying information “to protect donor confidentiality.”

And Eaton, the publicly traded Irish company that bought Tripp Lite, does not refer to Marble in statements related to the sale.

The person with knowledge of the matter said that the Tripp Lite shares were donated to Marble months before the deal with Eaton was announced in January 2021. The sale was completed in March 2021.

Katy Brasser, a spokeswoman for Eaton, said in a statement, “We have no additional information to share regarding the acquisition that was announced last year.”

Ray D. Madoff, a professor of tax law at Boston College who is the director of the school’s Forum on Philanthropy and the Public Good, said the structure of the transaction was most likely legal but did appear to allow a donor to avoid federal tax obligations from the sale of the company.

Here is how it works: Marble Freedom Trust is registered under a section of the tax code — 501(c)4 — for organizations that focus primarily on what the Internal Revenue Service calls “social welfare” and as a result are exempt from paying taxes. Such groups are allowed to engage in political advocacy, but their supporters are not entitled to deduct donations from their income taxes. Supporters can, however, donate assets that a nonprofit can sell and avoid capital gains taxes on the sale.

“These actions by the super wealthy are actually costing the American taxpayers to support the political spending of the wealthiest Americans,” Ms. Madoff said.

She said that donating corporate shares to a nonprofit was one way that those with incredible wealth skirt taxes when giving away money not just to charities, but to more politically minded nonprofits.

The tax filings shows that the Marble trust paid $940,000 for legal fees related to the sale to Sullivan & Cromwell, a leading New York law firm that specializes in business transactions. Other law firms paid by Marble include Kirton McConkie, a Utah corporate firm that was paid $140,000, and Holtzman Vogel, a Virginia firm specializing in political law that was paid more than $100,000.

The mission that the Marble trust lists in its tax filings is vague. “The trust exists to maintain and expand human freedom consistent with the values and ideals set forth in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States,” it says in the filing.

The person with knowledge of the matter said that the group’s name derived from the metamorphic rock, signaling the group’s intent to be enduring and maintain a clarity of purpose.

Mr. Seid has kept a low political profile in recent years. His last federal campaign donation, in 2008, was to a Republican running for Congress in Illinois, and his name has previously appeared only once in The Times, in 1990, for lending a Republican candidate for governor of Illinois nearly half a million dollars.

His family foundation, the Barbara and Barre Seid Foundation, has operated with an annual budget of several million dollars, giving most often to the Chamber Opera Chicago, which Mr. Seid founded decades ago. He has been linked as a donor to some conservative causes in the past, though nothing at the scale of the Marble Freedom Trust.

Mr. Leo developed relationships with many major donors during his years as executive vice president of the Federalist Society, an influential conservative legal group through which he helped advise Republican presidents on the selection of Supreme Court justices.

In 2018, during a live event, Justice Clarence Thomas joked about how honored he was to be sharing the stage with Mr. Leo, calling him “the No. 3 most powerful person in the world.”

In recent years, Mr. Leo increasingly expanded into a broader role in the conservative movement, shaping the big money flow as an adviser to donors and nonprofit organizations. In 2020, he left the Federalist Society to become chairman of a company called CRC Advisors, which advises and helps manage conservative nonprofits.

He is trustee and chairman of the Marble trust and has “primary authority” to decide how the money is spent, according to the tax filing, which shows that he was paid $350,000 in salary by the group.

Others named on the tax filing include Jonathan Bunch, who is listed as successor trustee. Mr. Bunch is president of Mr. Leo’s firm, CRC Advisors.

The Marble trust, which has already reported donations totaling nearly $229 million to other nonprofits, will expand the capabilities of a network of nonprofit groups that Mr. Leo has helped shape and guide in recent years.

In 2020, groups linked to Mr. Leo spent a total of $122 million on issues that animate the conservative base, including working to confirm conservatives to federal judgeships, fighting to restrict access to abortion and defending measures that Republicans cast as protections against voter fraud but that Democrats contend are hurdles to voting.

One of the groups, the Rule of Law Trust, which has been involved in judicial confirmation fights, received $153 million from the Marble trust last year. Another, the Concord Fund, received $16.5 million from the new group.

Two other funds that steer money into conservative politics, Donors Trust and Schwab Charitable Fund, received a total of $59.1 million from the Marble trust, according to the filing.

That left the Marble trust with a whopping $1.4 billion to spend at the end of April 2021. While that money cannot be donated directly to campaigns or party committees, it could help mitigate slowing Republican fund-raising ahead of a 2022 midterm cycle that otherwise seemed to favor the party in many ways.

Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and Shane Goldmacher from New York.

Why does the GOP work so hard to let psychopaths in suits get away with murder?

Thom Hartmann
August 22, 2022

Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) addresses the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Arena in Cleveland, Ohio. 

(mark reinstein/Shutterstock.com)

Alfred Ruf poisoned his wife as part of a scheme to get rich off her life insurance. So did Dr. Gregory “Brent” Dennis, who was looking at a $2 million payout. Joshua Hunsucker poisoned his wife for a mere $250K in life insurance money, $80,000 of which he used to buy a boat. David L. Pettis poisoned his wife for $150,000.

I don’t know the names of the men who poisoned and killed my father and my brother Stan, who died last Thursday, but I know where they worked and why they did it: just like Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis, they intentionally and knowingly took actions they knew would result in death when they sold asbestos to my dad’s employer and got my brother addicted to tobacco.

The asbestos industry knew as early as the 1890s, and got definite confirmation in the 1940s that their product caused mesothelioma, a particularly brutal lung cancer that killed my father.

Even today, their executives are trying to avoid responsibility for it: Johnson & Johnson is playing bankruptcy games to avoid paying for cancers caused by their asbestos-laced talcum powder, and not a single executive is even slightly worried about going to jail for all these dead people.

Same deal with the tobacco industry whose top CEOs lied to the faces of members of Congress in 1994 at the same time their industry has been killing over 400,000 Americans a year every year of my lifetime.

Like those four wife-killers, they all did it for the money. A hell of a lot more money than Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis could ever imagine.

Ruf, Dennis, Hunsucker and Pettis are all in prison. The decision-makers who today are still promoting tobacco and using bankruptcy laws to avoid paying for asbestos deaths are enjoying the pandemic from their mansions and yachts.

And this only scratches the surface. In just the past week, hundreds of Americans have been killed and thousands rendered homeless by climate change-driven weather that men in the fossil fuel industry knew fifty years ago would happen as the result of their selling their products.

And they did it all for money.

Then there is the American “health insurance” industry, unlike any other in the world, that kills thousands of Americans every year by destroying their lives with debt (over $1 trillion right now) or refusing services to them whenever the company can weasel out of a payment.

Ever since our nation’s founding, capitalism in America has been played in ways that protect stone cold killers. Psychopaths in suits. But it’s gotten particularly bad since Big Tobacco was outed in the 1990s.

There was a time when we used to prosecute these criminals.

In the 1980s, Reagan deregulated the Savings & Loan industry; predictably, within a few years, a handful of executives had made themselves multimillionaires while hundreds of thousands of families across America were wiped out.

The Justice Department stepped in and prosecuted 1100 banksters, 839 were convicted, and over a hundred went to prison.

When the so-called “Dot-com Bubble” burst around the turn of the century, dozens of bigshot executives from Enron, WorldCom, Qwest and Tyco, among others, were prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned. We were still occasionally sending executives to prison as late as 2005.

Not anymore.

After Glass-Steagal was repealed in 1999, banksters spent the next decade lying to investors around the world about the value of their “Collateralized Debt Obligations” and other recently legalized “exotic” financial instruments that were packed full of “liar loans” and bad mortgages.

That led straight to the Bush Crash of 2008, when guys like Steve Mnuchin (who threw over 30,000 California families out of their homes) got fabulously richer. America bailed out the Wall Street banksters to the tune of over a trillion dollars.

But only one guy went to jail for the thousands of lies, frauds and outright crimes that occurred during the Bush years and led to the Bush Crash of 2008. He was a mid-level banker born in Egypt (who grew up in Michigan), has brown skin, and his name is Kareem Serageldin.

The judge in his case said right out loud that Serageldin’s role in hiding a mere $37 million of the $2.1 billion in bad mortgages his employer, Credit Suisse, had concealed from other banks and regulators was “a small piece of an overall evil climate within the bank and with many other banks.”

But Bush talked to his Justice Department and federal prosecutors and decided to give Mnuchin and the other banksters a pass.

Dozens of banks and hundreds of banksters had done far worse than Serageldin, but none were even indicted. Serageldin spent almost 3 years in a federal prison hellhole.

When Ralph Nader revealed in 1966 that automakers were knowingly selling defective cars and trucks but that fixing them would have cut profits more than paying out death benefits to settle lawsuits, America was outraged and Congress acted, creating the NTSB and establishing federal regulations.

The following decades saw hundreds of white collar criminals imprisoned across dozens of industries: between 1995 and 1997 alone white collar crime was 17.6 percent of federal prosecutions.

But by 2012 it was down to 9.4 percent and, while the numbers are difficult to know for sure because of Trump administration obstruction and incompetence, appear to have significantly collapsed from there since.

Partly this has been the result of post-1980 Supreme Court decisions making it easier for prosecutors to ignore sentencing guidelines for white collar crimes (unless they’re committed by Brown-skinned executives, apparently).

Partly it was every major industry in America taking advantage of the Court’s Citizens United decision to legally purchase and own politicians in both parties, guaranteeing political pressure on prosecutors who might even think about going after corporate criminals.

Partly it was a relentless focus by several administrations on street crime (“superpredators” and “stop and frisk”), pulling resources away from prosecutors’ offices that might have otherwise been directed to the snakes in suits.

And part of it was a massive lobbying campaign by some of America’s most powerful CEOs to insert “mens rea” (Latin for “state of mind”) language into the recent criminal justice reform act, so it would become almost impossible to convict a senior executive of a crime he directed his company to commit.

This new law now requires prosecutors to prove that not only did the CEO know that he could cause a particular John Doe in, say, Wheeling, West Virginia to die from the product, but it was his intention to specifically kill that particular man or someone just like him.

In other words, because of the recent “criminal justice reform” legislation, prosecuting CEOs is now all but impossible.

The morbidly rich in America are immune from taxes: most pay less than 3 percent in income taxes. They’re similarly immune from prosecution for very real criminal decisions that destroy the lives of and regularly kill very real human beings.

In America today if you poison and kill your wife to make $150,000 in life insurance money, you’ll probably end up in prison.

But if you poison and kill hundreds of thousands of people so you can take home a multi-million-dollar paycheck, you get to buy a new yacht.

This has to end.

Expansion of Clean Energy Loans Is ‘Sleeping Giant’ of Climate Bill

The bill President Biden signed into law recently will greatly expand government loans and loan guarantees for clean energy and automotive projects and businesses.

The John Day Dam, a hydropower dam in Washington State. The new loan money could spur development of clean energy sources, like converting dams into power facilities.

Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times


By Ivan Penn

NYT
Aug. 22, 2022

Tucked into the Inflation Reduction Act that President Biden signed last week is a major expansion of federal loan programs that could help the fight against climate change by channeling more money to clean energy and converting plants that run on fossil fuels to nuclear or renewable energy.

The law authorizes as much as $350 billion in additional federal loans and loan guarantees for energy and automotive projects and businesses. The money, which will be disbursed by the Energy Department, is in addition to the more well-known provisions of the law that offer incentives for the likes of electric cars, solar panels, batteries and heat pumps.

The aid could breathe life into futuristic technologies that banks might find too risky to lend to or into projects that are just short of the money they need to get going.

“This is a sleeping giant in the law and a real gold mine in deploying these resources,” said Dan Reicher, a former assistant energy secretary in the Clinton administration. “This massive amount being made available is a big deal.”

But like all government efforts to aid industry and advance new technologies, the expansion of the loan authority carries risks for Mr. Biden and the Democrats, who passed the bill without any Republican votes. About a decade ago, conservatives seized on the failure of Solyndra, a solar company that had borrowed about $500 million from the Energy Department, to criticize the Obama administration’s climate and energy policies.

Backers of the program have argued that despite defaults like Solyndra, the program has been sustainable overall. Of the $31 billion the department has disbursed, about 40 percent has been repaid and interest payments in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30, 2021, totaled $533 million — more money than the failed Solyndra loan.

The Energy Department’s loan programs began in 2005 under the George W. Bush administration but expanded significantly in the Obama era. The department provided a crucial loan that helped Tesla expand when it only sold expensive two-door electric sports cars; the company is now the world’s most valuable automaker.

Under the Trump administration, which played down the risks of climate change, the department’s loan office was much less active. The Biden team has been working to change that. Last month, the department said it planned to loan $2.5 billion to General Motors and LG Energy Solution to build electric-car battery factories in Michigan, Ohio and Tennessee.

The department’s loan program office is currently reviewing 77 applications for $80 billion in loans sought before the new climate law was approved. The Inflation Reduction Act will add $100 billion to existing loan programs for financing production of electric vehicles, for instance, and for projects on tribal lands. It will also add up to $250 billion in new loan guarantees and $5 billion in grants.

“We have established that the private sector wants to use our resources again,” said Jigar Shah, the director of the Energy Department’s loan programs office who is a former solar energy entrepreneur. “We still have to do a lot of work. We have to identify all the areas that qualify.”

Read More on Electric VehiclesInflation Reduction Act: The law extends tax incentives in an effort to steer more U.S. consumers toward electric cars. But new rules complicate the qualification process.
Plug-In Hybrids: After falling behind all-electric cars, U.S. sales of plug-in hybrids have been surging. The high cost of electric cars and gasoline have given them an opening.
Car Crashes: Tesla and other automakers capture data from their vehicles to operate their products. Experts say the collected information could also improve road safety.
A Frustrating Hassle: The electric vehicle revolution is nearly here, but its arrival is being slowed by a fundamental problem: The chargers where people refuel these cars are often broken.

One beneficiary of the new loan money could be the Palisades Power Plant, a nuclear facility on Lake Michigan near Kalamazoo, Mich., that closed in May. The plant had struggled to compete in the PJM energy market, which serves homes and businesses in 13 states, including Michigan, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C.

The Biden administration has made nuclear power a focal point of its efforts to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector by 2035. The administration has offered billions of dollars to help existing facilities like the Diablo Canyon Power Plant — a nuclear operation on California’s coast that is set to close by the end of 2025 — stay open longer. It is also backing new technologies like small modular reactors that the industry has long said would be cheaper, safer and easier to build than conventional large nuclear reactors.

The owner of the Palisades facility, Holtec International, said it was reviewing the loan program and other opportunities for its own small reactors as well as bringing the shuttered plant back online.

“There are a number of hurdles to restarting the facility that would need to be bridged,” the company said in a statement, “but we will work with the state, federal government, and a yet to be identified third-party operator to see if this is a viable option.”

One beneficiary of the new loan money could be the Palisades Power Plant, a nuclear facility near Kalamazoo, Mich., that closed in May.

Credit...John Madill/The Herald-Palladium, via Associated Press

In addition to nuclear projects, the loan money could spur development of other clean energy sources, including converting dams that do not produce electricity into new power facilities like those by Rye Development, a company based in West Palm Beach, Fla., that is working on several projects in the Pacific Northwest.

Some researchers and developers are exploring conversion of old fossil fuel plants into clean energy facilities. That could mean using old oil and gas wells for geothermal power; old coal power plants as sites for large batteries; and old coal mines for solar farms. Such conversions could reduce the need to build projects on undeveloped land, which often takes longer because they require extensive environmental review and can face significant local opposition.

“We’re in a heap of trouble in siting the many millions of acres of solar we need,” Mr. Reicher said. “It’s six to 10 million acres of land we’ve got to find to site the projected build out of utility scale solar in the United States. That’s huge.”

Other developers are hoping the government will help finance technologies and business plans that are still in their infancy.

Timothy Latimer is the chief executive and co-founder of Fervo Energy, a Houston company that uses the same horizontal drilling techniques as oil and gas producers to develop geothermal energy. He said that his firm can produce clean energy 24 hours a day or produce more or less energy over the course of a day to balance out the intermittent nature of wind and solar power and spikes in demand.

Mr. Latimer claims that the techniques his firm has developed will lower the cost for geothermal power, which in many cases is more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas or solar panels. He has projects under development in Nevada, Utah, Idaho and California and said that the new loan authority could help the geothermal business expand much more quickly.

“It’s been the talk of the geothermal industry,” Mr. Latimer said. “I don’t think we were expecting good news a month ago, but we’re getting more ready for prime time. We have barely scratched the surface with the amount of geothermal that we can develop in the United States.”

For all the potential of the new law, critics say that a significant expansion of government loans and loan guarantees could invite more waste and fraud. In addition to Solyndra, the Energy Department has acknowledged that several solar projects that received its loans or loan guarantees have failed or never got off the ground.

A large nuclear plant under construction in Georgia, Vogtle, has also received $11.5 billion in federal loan guarantees. The plant has been widely criticized for years of delays and billions of dollars in cost overruns.

“Many of these projects are funded based on political whim rather than project quality,” said Gary Ackerman, founder and former executive director of the Western Power Trading Forum, a coalition of more than 100 utilities and other businesses that trade in energy markets. “That leads to many stranded assets that never live up to their promises and become examples of government waste.”

But Jamie Carlson, who was a senior adviser to the energy secretary during the Obama administration, said the department learned from its mistakes and developed a better approach to reviewing and approving loan applications. It also worked more closely with businesses seeking money to ensure that they were successful.

“It used to be this black box,” said Ms. Carlson, who is now an executive at SoftBank Energy. “You just sat in purgatory for like 18 months and sometimes up to two years.”

Ms. Carlson said the department’s loans serve a vital function because they can help technologies and companies that have demonstrated some commercial success but need more money to become financially viable. “It’s there to finance technologies that are proven but perhaps to banks that are perceived as more risky,” she said.

Energy executives said they were excited because more federal loans and loan guarantees could turbocharge their plans.

“The projects that can be done will go faster,” said William W. Funderburk Jr., a former commissioner at the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power who now runs a water and energy company. “This is a tectonic plate shift for the industry — in a good way.”

U$A

SACRIFICE ZONES

Visualizing Toxic Air

Making data public isn’t enough when it’s incomprehensible to the people it affects. ProPublica set out to decode a complex EPA data set to expose hot spots of industrial air pollution across the U.S.

by Lylla Younes and Al Shaw Aug. 22, 2022

Photo illustration by ProPublica. Photography by Kathleen Flynn/ProPublica.


SERIES:SACRIFICE ZONES
Mapping Cancer-Causing Industrial Air Pollution
ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

This story was co-published with Investigative Reporters and Editors. It will appear in an upcoming special issue of The IRE Journal focused on pollution.

In November 2021, ProPublica published a series of immersive investigative stories about a statistical cancer-risk model created by the Environmental Protection Agency. Our reporting showed that although the model revealed increased cancer risk in communities all over the country, the agency did little to stop the toxic air emissions that were causing the increased risk — or even to inform affected communities.

Discovering the Information Gap

Building the project required that we develop a thorough understanding of a complex statistical model, ground-truth the sometimes unreliable data that had been self-reported by polluters, solve technical challenges associated with massive data sets and interview people who lived and worked near dangerous pollution.

The project builds on a series we worked on alongside The Times-Picayune and The Advocate of New Orleans in 2019. That project was about the residents of “Cancer Alley,” a region of southeast Louisiana home to many refineries and chemical plants. While residents had long complained that they were being sickened by industrial smokestacks, many regulators and corporate spokespeople argued the air was safe to breathe.

Companies that emit industrial pollution have long been required to report their emissions to the EPA, which makes the data public in an online database called the Toxic Release Inventory. But our reporting in Louisiana found that the TRI data is not precise enough to show the fine-grained degrees of risk in industrial areas, which left the people living closest to facilities unsure about their safety.

When we began researching how we might obtain data that would enable us to quantify pollution levels and cancer risk at a finer scale, we found out that the EPA had actually created its own high-precision model called the Risk-Screening Environmental Indicators Model, or RSEI, which was capable of doing just that.

The trouble was, the EPA published the results of the RSEI model in an interface that makes it very difficult to understand where the pollution travels and how serious the associated cancer risk is.

RSEI uses emissions estimates industrial companies submit to the agency each year along with weather data and facility-specific information to estimate concentrations of cancer-causing chemicals in half-mile-wide squares of land across the country. Using the powerful tool, we found that we could estimate how the emissions from, say, a plastics plant could be elevating the cancer risk near an elementary school several blocks away.

After we published a visual story about the dangerous concentrations of carcinogenic air blanketing neighborhoods in southeast Louisiana, we recognized the need for a deeper, national analysis. So we embarked on a two-year endeavor to identify toxic hot spots and to build an interactive map residents could use to look up the estimated cancer risks at any address in the country.

Taking the Investigation National

Expanding our original Cancer Alley analysis to include the entire country presented an enormous data challenge. The EPA organizes RSEI by splitting the entire country up into 810-by-810 meter grid cells. For each cell, there are rows for concentrations of every chemical attributed to each facility.

There are around 29 million 810-by-810 meter grid cells nationwide and more than 1.4 billion rows of data for a single year. Even using the largest database instance available on Amazon Web Services, it took up to a week to run queries on the data. Often, our queries took days simply to fail. It was a long, demotivating slog.

That’s when some colleagues told us about Google BigQuery, which is a Google Cloud services product that allows you to do SQL-style queries on very large data sets. Using BigQuery, code that once took a week to run finished in minutes.

Because of this dramatic speedup, we were also able to expand our ambitions. Averaging five years of data would make our analysis much more robust, since averaging across that time would account for a facility that happened to have had a particularly bad or good year in our observation data set. And because our analysis was meant to calculate incremental lifetime cancer risk, taking a five-year average instead of a one-year snapshot would result in a much more accurate estimate.

Loading in five years of RSEI data increased the size of the database from about 1.4 billion rows to about 7 billion rows. Yet BigQuery happily crunched through it.

When our code finished running, we had detected more than 1,000 toxic hot spots — some the size of a single grid cell, some encompassing entire cities or regions. We were also able to determine which facilities were responsible for the highest average cancer risks within a given radius surrounding them.

This led us to some shocking initial findings, one of which did not stand up to scrutiny once we started reporting it out.

Questioning Assumptions

Our colleague Ava Kofman started pursuing an initial finding that appeared to indicate that Boeing was responsible for substantially increasing cancer risk over the city of Portland, Oregon. But her interviews and comparisons with state databases showed that the company had actually misreported its data to the EPA, and that faulty data had shown up as a massive overestimate of risk in the RSEI model underlying our analysis. Boeing subsequently fixed the problem and sent amended data to the agency.

Ava’s finding led us to stop what we were doing and rethink our assumptions. We created a large-scale, systematized fact-checking process. We reached out to each of the top 200 facilities (ranked by the level of nearby cancer risk) to ask them if their emissions reporting was accurate — and if not, whether they would resubmit 2014-18 data to the EPA. Of the 109 companies that responded to us, 71% confirmed that their reported emissions were correct, and 29% noted errors, which we asked them to correct. We then worked with RSEI experts to adjust the output of the model to reflect the chemical concentrations the companies provided to us directly.

Finding Stories in the Data

Once we completed the nationwide interactive map, we had a trove of potential stories before us. Some of the hot spots we identified, like Cancer Alley and the Houston Ship Channel, were infamous. Others, like the cloud of toxic ethylene oxide covering a large swath of Laredo, Texas, were not previously known — even to residents breathing the contaminated air.

Seven more ProPublica reporters joined the effort. They fanned out to report out the conditions on the ground in some of the nation’s most toxic industrial areas and to investigate the state and local policy decisions driving the high emissions rates there.

Early on, we were interested in understanding which communities were most affected by the toxic pollution. Since RSEI data is available at the census-tract level, we were able to join our cancer risk estimates to demographic information. This analysis estimated that predominantly Black census tracts experience more than double the level of toxic industrial air pollution as majority-white tracts.

We were also curious about which companies were the primary drivers of the toxic pollution. We mapped the facility ownership profiles of the nation’s dominant chemical companies. We then computed the number of RSEI grid cells in which each company independently elevates cancer risk above various EPA risk thresholds. We published the results of this analysis in the first story of our “Sacrifice Zones” series.

After our stories and interactive news application launched, the EPA announced a raft of targeted actions and specific reforms including stepped-up air monitoring and scrutiny of industrial polluters. In February 2022, three Democratic U.S. representatives introduced a $500 million bill that would require the EPA to create a pilot program for air monitoring in communities overburdened with pollution.

Explore the interactive map and the stories that came out of it at propublica.org/toxmap.


Lylla Younes
Lylla Younes was a reporter and developer on ProPublica’s New Apps team. lylla.younes@propublica.org

@lyllayounes


Al Shaw
Al Shaw is a deputy editor on the news apps team at ProPublica. Al.Shaw@propublica.org
@a_l

THAT'S HARD TO DO

Becoming the Workers’ Party Again

SINCE THEY NEVER WERE

With their new and overdue embrace of industrial policy, the Democrats can now deliver to working-class voters who’ve understandably felt betrayed.

BY SHERROD BROWN

AUGUST 5, 2022
AMERICAN PROSPECT

DAVID RICHARD/AP PHOTO
Workers of the Ford Motor Company cheer during a news conference, June 2, 2022, in Avon Lake, Ohio. Ford announced it will add 6,200 factory jobs in Michigan, Missouri, and Ohio as it prepares to build more electric vehicles and roll out two redesigned combustion-engine models.

As a kid growing up in Ohio, I walked the halls of Johnny Appleseed Junior High with the daughters and sons of union workers—electricians, autoworkers, steelworkers—at companies like Westinghouse, Tappan Stove, Ohio Brass, and General Motors.

By the time I graduated from Mansfield High, those plants were shutting down. Corporate America wanted cheaper labor, wherever they could find it. First, they went to anti-union, low-wage states, often in the South. Then, when those wages weren’t low enough, they moved overseas—first to Mexico, then to China. Always in the name of “efficiency”—business-school-speak for “pay workers less.”

As they shut down production, these CEOs earned the monikers “Chainsaw Al,” “John the Cutter,” and “Larry the Knife.”

It transformed our country. A toxic combination of shareholder capitalism and pliant politicians gutted our middle class, hollowed out our towns, and dried up opportunity for people outside big coastal cities and people without college degrees or inherited wealth.

And it upended our politics.

We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again.

The geographic heart of the transformation in Americans’ voting patterns lies in places like my Ohio hometown, in the manufacturing towns of America’s industrial heartland.

The “blue wall” was crumbling. Between 2012 and 2020, Democrats lost nearly 2.6 million votes in small and midsized towns in Ohio and the Midwest. A recent report sheds light on how it happened—and what progressives can do to fix it.

I’ve spent my whole life with these voters. For those of us who come from the Midwestern progressive populist tradition, these are our friends, our neighbors, our families. My fellow Democrats need to start by understanding these voters—and the ways politicians of both parties have let them down, over and over.

These folks have been through a lot—from the 2008 financial crisis to COVID to inflation. And those blows followed decades of job losses.

A majority of voters in these communities say they or a family member suffers from a chronic health condition. A majority have had personal experiences with disabilities, job loss, mental-health issues, and addiction. Half have experienced a loss of pension or retirement savings. Their paychecks and job security have been eroding for decades.

Their hard work doesn’t pay off like it used to. And for women and people of color—who make up more of these voters than the national media narrative ever portrays—hard work has never paid off the way it should.

All these Americans are desperate for more stability and security in their lives. But they wonder if things will ever get better. They think politicians have forgotten them.

The people I grew up with knew that Republicans would sell them out to corporations—Bush negotiating NAFTA, Gingrich fighting to bring China into the WTO, Trump granting corporate tax breaks. That surprised no one.

But many Democrats’ active encouragement of the corporate outsourcing agenda came as a shocking betrayal. Those decisions stung much worse coming from the party of Roosevelt—the party that for generations these workers had trusted to be on their side.

We are supposed to be the workers’ party. Democrats must be that party again. We must sharpen the difference between us—historically, America’s party of workers—and the party of big business.

Many are waking up to this reality.

As inflation continues to batter families’ bank accounts—and the president’s poll numbers—even free-traders of yesteryear are beginning to admit the problems of a labyrinthine supply chain stretched across the globe.

And for the first time in my memory, there’s real momentum to take action to fix it. Democrats just passed the kind of industrial policy we haven’t seen in many decades, to build out domestic supply chains of key inputs like semiconductors.

It will create the kind of jobs that too many communities have lost. And it sends a clear message to these Americans that we have not forgotten them.

None of this requires compromising on our values. A commitment to populist economics and fair trade isn’t just compatible with a commitment to social justice—the two naturally go together. One need only read Martin Luther King’s dozens of speeches to unions, and ponder what he was doing when he was killed, to remember the deep connection between workers’ rights and civil rights.

A relentless focus on populist economics wins out over Republicans’ manufactured culture war.

When you’re on the edge, worried about the next layoff or health setback and struggling to make ends meet, the latest Twitter feud or cable news controversy is just background noise.

The hometowns of America’s heartland have been battered and bruised. To create a durable governing majority, we have to show these voters—through our words, through our actions, through our policies—that we hear them. We see them. We are on their side.

Can Ocean Shipping Go Green?

Everyone agrees that ocean shipping must decarbonize. The question is how, and how fast.

BY ROBERT HITT
AUGUST 22, 2022

The container ship Volga Maersk passes the city of Kronstadt after leaving the seaport of St. Petersburg, Russia, April 4, 2022.

The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) allocates $3 billion in grants over the next five years for greener American ports, a positive step for domestic ports and the international shipping industry that relies on them. But decarbonization of the shipping industry as a whole will require more aggressive investments and international cooperation.

Ocean shipping was left out of the Paris Agreement on climate change, and again escaped being put under binding climate targets during last year’s COP26 in Glasgow. But there has been some forward movement. Shipping companies plan to operate 200 green ships by 2030, and there will be six “green shipping corridors” by mid-decade. Also, the United States and Norway announced a “Green Shipping Challenge” for COP27 in Egypt, to encourage nations to put forward concrete plans of action for full shipping decarbonization by 2050.

These are positive steps, but they do not yet match the scale of the challenge. The 200 pledged ships represent about 0.4 percent of the industry’s fleet, which numbers over 50,000. Given that the industry has earned record profits the past two years in association with the supply chain crunch, they certainly have the working capital to accelerate the transition.

There are also challenges with sourcing the fuels to drive sustainable ocean vessels. Maersk, the world’s largest shipping company, has ordered 12 ships that run on methanol, a biofuel, to be ready by the end of 2025. That’s only about 2 percent of its current fleet, but it would require over four times the world’s current annual production of methanol.

More from Robert Hitt

The shipping conglomerates likely won’t commit to these plans if they turn out to be bad for business. Maersk has admitted that these green ships might first sail with fossil fuels. With the viability of new fuels uncertain, and a lifespan of 25 to 35 years for each ship, the shipping industry may find building ships that can only run on green fuel to be too big of a risk.

“We’re talking about an investment of roughly hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars,” said Stavros Karamperidis, professor of maritime economics at the University of Plymouth, explaining the shipping industry’s possible thought process. “So can you imagine that you’re investing $100 million and you don’t know what’s going to be the future fuel? What’s your choice? Go with what you know.”

Maersk has a stated goal of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2040. According to Maersk’s North American head of environment and sustainability, Lee Kindberg, its current plan is for all new ship orders in the next decade to have the capability to run on green methanol, but Kindberg was cautious not to say that the company will “absolutely” commit to this plan, citing the need for reliability.

“Maersk is actually a bit ahead of the curve because they’re kind of building the ships for the fuel to catch up,” said Elise Georgeff of the International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT). “I think trying to make bold moves in a very transitionary period is going to open [the company up] for a lot of judgment.”

The shipping conglomerates likely won’t commit to these plans if they turn out to be bad for business.

Shipping companies Maersk, CMA CGM, and Cosco are collaborating with the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group to create a “green corridor” between Los Angeles and Shanghai, in alignment with COP26’s Clydebank Declaration for zero-emission maritime routes. Green corridors such as this would at their best serve as proofs of concept by establishing the infrastructure and regulatory regime for net-zero shipping between a few select ports.

However, while that’s going on, the rest of world trade will still run on fossil fuels, and there may be no easy way for other routes to adopt lessons from these corridors. Different green fuel sources might not be readily available near specific ports, or scalable for use in long-haul ocean shipping. And there are likely to be different levels of commitment to decarbonization for the stakeholders of each route.

If green shipping is limited to these corridors, the impact “will be zero or very little,” said Wim Naudé, a professor of economics at the University of Cork’s Environmental Research Institute. “You need to scale it up and this is the fundamental challenge.”

In an extensive study on what it would take to get to net-zero emissions by 2050, the International Energy Association was optimistic about the speed at which new technology would be adopted in shipping, with ammonia-, hydrogen-, and bioenergy-fueled ships gaining traction in the 2030s, and overtaking fossil fuels as a percentage of the fuel in the shipping sector by 2040. But even in this optimistic scenario, the shipping industry does not reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

“Green” methanol, the fuel Maersk plans to use and has contracted sourcing for, does release carbon when it is burned, but since its carbon can be sourced from carbon capture or other renewable means, it is considered a low-carbon fuel. However, most methanol is currently sourced from natural gas, and it’s easy to imagine industry reaching for fossil fuel–derived methanol, particularly if green methanol remains or becomes scarce. Likewise, hydrogen can be greenwashed by production through electricity generated by a fossil fuel–reliant energy grid. Scrutiny will need to be continually applied to the shipping industry to make sure touted decarbonization efforts are in good faith.

To ensure a green transition on a global scale for shipping, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), the U.N. agency responsible for setting international shipping standards, will be pivotal, due to the international nature of the industry and the practices ocean shipping companies use to get around national laws and standards.

On this point, parties that might normally be in opposition to each other agree. “I think that the major pressure that we can put on these companies is through the IMO,” said political economist Charmaine Chau of UC Santa Barbara, who is deeply critical of the shipping industry’s exploitation of workers. Lee Kindberg, of Maersk’s environment and sustainability department, said, “We have encouraged [the IMO] to be more ambitious … and also put more teeth into [their decarbonization goals] … We would like the entire industry to continue playing on a level playing field.”

The IMO has set a goal of a 50 percent reduction in carbon emissions for the shipping industry by 2050 compared to 2008 levels, but missed an opportunity, according to Naudé, to aim for 100 percent net zero at COP26. The U.S. and Norway’s Green Shipping Challenge is likely an attempt to fill that void, but the IMO could still tighten its goals. Such a move may galvanize efforts for a green transition, and reverse current trends, which predict between 90 and 130 percent of 2008 emissions from the shipping industry by 2050, potentially accounting for 17 percent or more of total global emissions as other sectors more easily and quickly decarbonize.

Transitioning the world economy away from fossil fuels to support not only domestic needs but the needs of global trade is a tall order, and will require aggressive domestic and international policies. But closer to home, the IRA can take strides to make ports greener. Funding could go to projects that electrify port equipment, like cold ironing, which connects ships to the grid while they’re docked so they do not burn fuel. Smaller support vessels could likely run on batteries, or more easily adopt zero-emission fuel technologies.

The $17 billion to improve ports from the bipartisan infrastructure law, including $450 million for replacing outdated equipment, will also go a long way toward port decarbonization and making surrounding communities healthier. These efforts would be complemented by industrial policy meant to reshore certain industries, reducing the reliance on ocean shipping.

Still more funding is likely needed to complete the transition in the United States; the American Association of Port Authorities claimed $50 billion was needed for green infrastructure projects in the next decade. With the creation of green fuels and their infrastructure, building of green ports, and construction of green ships all left to be done, interventions like the IRA and bipartisan infrastructure law need to be a starting point, not an end.

On Wisconsin’s French Island, residents live with lingering ‘forever chemicals’

Kirsti Marohn
French Island, Wis.

MPR
August 22, 2022 

Town of Campbell, Wis., resident, and town board member Lee Donahue lifts a 5-gallon bottle of drinking water she and others others have been using in their homes. Donahue has been working to raise awareness of PFAS in town wells and get the state to help improve the resident's drinking water.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

A big part of what drew Lee Donahue to move to the Town of Campbell, Wisconsin, nearly two decades ago was water.

Water surrounds this community on French Island, just north of La Crosse. The island is encircled by the Mississippi River on one side, and the Black River on the other.

An angler motors out into Lake Onalaska and the Mississippi River on Wednesday.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

"The reason people live here is the connection with nature,” Donahue said. “Everybody is a fisherman. Everybody is recreational, whether it's a canoe, a kayak, a photographer."

But these days, water is also a major source of worry for Donahue, who's the town supervisor for health, education and welfare.

For more than a year, residents of the town of Campbell have been using bottled water for drinking, cooking, even brushing their teeth. That's because many private wells on French Island have high levels of PFAS that make the water unsafe to drink.

PFAS, or per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a large class of human-made chemicals known for their tendency not to break down in the environment. They’re found in a wide variety of products, including nonstick cookware, carpet, clothing and some firefighting foam.

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Donahue said residents of the Town of Campbell are angry and frustrated. Some drank their well water for decades, not knowing about the contamination. Long-term exposure to PFAS is linked to adverse health effects such as kidney and thyroid disease, and cancer.

"It weighs so heavily on your mind,” Donahue said. “You now have something in your body you can't get out, and you don't know what your health response is going to be. Are you going to have liver cancer? Are you going to have brain cancer? Are your 21-year-old children going to have testicular cancer? You don't know."
A fighter plane takes off during training at the La Crosse Regional Airport on French Island Thursday. PFAS contamination has been found in the drinking water near the airport.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

Officials believe the source of the contamination is the La Crosse Regional Airport, where foam containing PFAS was used for training and to put out fires from plane crashes.

The nearby city of La Crosse owns the airport. It also has three municipal wells located on French Island that it's no longer using because of PFAS detections.
Water tanks on US Geological Survey land near the airport on French Island sit unused due to PFAS contamination.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

The state and the city have been supplying residents of French Island with five-gallon water jugs. But finding a long-term solution is proving difficult, and will be costly.

"We're kind of the tip of the spear in the state of Wisconsin,” said La Crosse Mayor Mitch Reynolds. He said similar issues have been identified in Rhinelander, Madison, Marinette, Wausau and other communities.

“We realize that there are some significant levels of chemicals all over the place out there,” Reynolds said.

The French Island situation highlights the legal and regulatory challenge of figuring out who's responsible for the PFAS problem, and who should pay for it.

Reynolds said La Crosse officials have been working with the Town of Campbell to find a solution, such as possibly connecting residents to the city water system.

The airport fire department training area at the La Crosse Regional Airport on French Island Wednesday, where some of the PFAS contamination is suspected of having originated.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

The city also sued nearly two dozen chemical manufacturers that produced the firefighting foam used at the airport.

"We feel the manufacturers are responsible as those who knew very well the risks of the chemicals in the foams and all the rest of the products that we use, and just did not disclose that information,” Reynolds said.

Last month, Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers and Attorney General Josh Kaul traveled to French Island to announce a lawsuit against 18 companies, including 3M and DuPont, seeking to force them to reimburse the state for investigating and cleaning up PFAS contamination.

In a statement, 3M said it acted responsibly in connection with its manufacture and sale of PFAS “and will vigorously defend its record of environmental stewardship.”

Families enjoy the beach and water at Airport Beach on French Island on Wednesday.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

Legal action growing

Wisconsin’s case expands on Minnesota's lawsuit against 3M, which settled in 2018. The company agreed to pay the state $850 million for natural resource damages in eastern Twin Cities suburbs, where several communities’ water supplies were affected.

But the contamination isn’t confined to the eastern Twin Cities, or to drinking water. In the years since that lawsuit, scientists and regulators have realized that PFAS is a much more pervasive problem, said Sophie Greene, PFAS coordinator for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

"We're realizing that we can find PFAS in not just drinking water, but also in our lakes and our streams,” Greene said. “We can find it in our fish and our deer. And in some cases, when we go out and measure it in the air, we’re even finding it in the air."

While Minnesota’s case solely targeted 3M, Wisconsin’s lawsuit names not just PFAS manufacturers, but also companies that distributed, sold or promoted PFAS products.

John Gardella is an environmental law attorney with the CMBG3 Law firm in Boston, who advises corporations on PFAS regulations. He said the number of state lawsuits and enforcement actions against companies related to PFAS is on the rise. And increasingly, the enforcement actions are targeting more than just the manufacturers of PFAS.

"It's a huge swath of companies — landfills, recycling facilities, even companies that just had fires on their property and the fire department utilized (PFAS-containing) foam,” he said. “It's really, really downstream."

Town of Campbell, Wisconsin, resident and town board member Lee Donahue looks out onto the Black River near the Airport Beach on French Island. Donahue has been working to raise awareness of PFAS in town wells and get the state to help improve the resident's drinking water.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

Federal regulations

Under the Biden administration, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is taking a more active role in regulating PFAS on the federal level.

It recently issued health advisories for four PFAS chemicals at very low levels. It's expected to adopt enforceable drinking water standards in the near future that could be costly and challenging for communities to meet.

David Andrews, a senior scientist with the nonprofit Environmental Working Group, said local communities are having to bear the costs of treating water for PFAS. And as the levels considered safe to drink get lower, those costs will go up.

"As you try to clean up to lower and lower concentrations, we're finding that significantly more drinking water systems and waterways are contaminated with these pollutants,” Andrews said. “And it will cost a substantial amount to clean up this contamination.”

The EPA also is moving toward declaring some PFAS to be hazardous substances under the federal Superfund law, making it easier to hold polluters financially responsible.

There also have been efforts at the state level to ban the use of PFAS in certain products. In Minnesota, the Legislature adopted a PFAS ban on food packaging, but efforts to keep the chemicals out of other products such as ski wax, cookware and cosmetics failed to pass.

“Unfortunately, the only real solution to this problem is to get these chemicals out of our environment and out of our commerce,” Greene said.

Town of Campbell, Wisconsin, resident, and town board member Lee Donahue cups rainwater to water her vegetable plants on Wednesday in her backyard. Donahue won't use water from her hose because it's contaminated with PFAS.
Ken Klotzbach for MPR News

On French Island, Donahue worries that the PFAS will keep on spreading, affecting the rivers and wildlife that residents treasure.

“It's horrible not to be able to drink your tap water,” she said. “But what happens as the PFAS spreads and it affects all of this additional facet of our quality of life? What happens then?”

U of M study: Without protections, many Midwest lakes will lose coldwater habitat