Must-read recap: The New Lede's top stories
US EPA withdraws glyphosate registration review decision, a bill bans deep sea mining in California waters, and solar power helps health care facilities gain climate resilience.
US EPA withdrawing interim registration review decision for glyphosate
US regulators on Friday said they would withdraw all remaining portions of the interim registration review decision for the weed killer glyphosate.
The move comes after the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued an opinion saying EPA had violated the law in its assessment of glyphosate, which is the world’s most widely used weed killer and the active ingredient in Roundup and numerous other herbicide products.
The court found that EPA had ignored important studies in its human health safety assessment of the chemical and had also violated the Endangered Species Act. The EPA’s withdrawal comes before an October 1 deadline under which the agency was supposed to have completed its assessment. EPA had asked the court to extend its deadline but the court denied the request.
In its June 17 opinion, the 9th circuit said the agency’s 2020 assessment of glyphosate, the active ingredient in the herbicide Roundup, was flawed in many ways. The federal appeals court ruled that EPA failed to follow established guidelines for determining cancer risk, ignored important studies, and discounted expert advice from a scientific advisory panel. The EPA applied “inconsistent reasoning” in finding that the chemical does not pose “any reasonable risk to man or the environment,” the panel determined.
The court vacated the human health portion of the EPA’s glyphosate assessment and said the agency needed to apply “further consideration” to evidence. The 9th Circuit also said the agency violated the Endangered Species Act in its assessment.
“EPA’s underlying scientific findings regarding glyphosate, including its finding that glyphosate is not likely to be carcinogenic to humans, remain the same,” the EPA said in a statement announcing its withdrawal of the glyphosate decision. “In accordance with the court’s decision, the Agency intends to revisit and better explain its evaluation of the carcinogenic potential of glyphosate and to consider whether to do so for other aspects of its human health analysis.”
For the ecological portion of its review, EPA said it intends to consider what risk mitigation measures may be necessary based on the Endangered Species Act consultation for glyphosate and will prepare an analysis of how the weed killer affects monarch butterfly habitat. (Read the rest of the story.)
Bill bans deep sea mining in California waters
California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a bill this week that will prevent deep sea mining in the waters off the state coastline, a move that joins California with other western states in a bid to protect more than 2,500 square miles of Pacific Ocean seafloor.
Deep sea mining involves the retrieval of minerals and deposits from the ocean floor found at depths of 200 meters or greater. Critics say the practice can damage ocean ecosystems and pollute the water with destructive plumes of sediment that can harm sea life, but advocates say the practice is critical to meeting demand for minerals used in making an array of products.
“We know incredibly little about what’s in our ocean,” said Matthew Montgomery, a spokesman for state lawmaker Luz Rivas, who authored the bill. “But while we don’t necessarily know what’s on our ocean floors, we know how destructive this practice [of deep sea mining] can be.”
The California Seabed Mining Prevention Act aims both to protect ocean ecosystems and California’s economy. Valued at $45 billion and employing over half a million people, California’s ocean-based economy is the largest in the United States and includes tourism and recreation.
“I think it’s a precedent-setter,” said Arlo Hemphill, a Greenpeace USA expert on deep sea mining. “There are whispers that Hawaii might do something similar. If enough states do this, it sends a message to Washington that we need something like this at the federal level.”
The new law does not stop foreign companies from staging their vessels at California docks. Last year, a Belgian company staged its ship in the port of San Diego before setting out to test mining equipment in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ), an area between Hawaii and Mexico popular with seabed mining companies.
The CCZ is home to an abundance of rocks called polymetallic nodules, which contain metals that can be used to make batteries for electric vehicles. (Read the rest of the story.)
Solar power helping healthcare facilities gain climate resilience
It is not easy to rattle Rosa Vivian Fernandez. As the CEO of a California healthcare clinic that primarily serves a low-income, largely Hispanic community, Fernandez sees the harsh struggles faced by disadvantaged populations on a daily basis. But when she traveled to Puerto Rico in 2017 to visit extended family members, Fernandez was shocked to see how deeply Hurricane Maria had devastated the island infrastructure, including the ability of healthcare providers to serve people in need.
More than 5,000 people died due to the violent Atlantic storm, which caused an estimated $92 billion in property damages, wiping out the electrical grid.
“All the healthcare centers–the ones that did not get flooded or destroyed by the storm–went down,” she said. “People died from the lack of services.”
Power to a children’s hospital in San Juan was restored when Tesla deployed its own solar panels and batteries after the 2017 hurricane, setting them up in the hospital parking lot. But this week most of Puerto Rico was again without power in the wake of yet another hurricane, forcing a cancer hospital on the island to relocate its patients when a backup generator failed.
After her 2017 visit, Fernandez realized the clinic she heads, San Benito Health Foundation in Hollister, California, could also be vulnerable to power failures that could jeopardize patient health. California’s record heat waves and other factors are increasingly taxing an already strained electrical power grid. Something had to be done, she decided.
Today, the 17,000 square-foot San Benito clinic is almost 100% solar powered with the ability to rely entirely on sun-powered energy for a week, thanks to a $1.7 million, self-contained microgrid of solar panels and batteries along with a controller that manages the system.
The clinic has been heralded as an example for other healthcare facilities to follow, an achievement made more noteworthy by the fact that roughly 90% of the patients are people of color who lack health insurance. (Read the rest of the story.)