As much of a token as it is, as powerless as it is, wasn't EPA's weak Environmental Justice (EJ) program (and its ambitious 2020 agenda) to be preferred. as against, well, nothing? We may find out soon, as the former EPA EJ Director, Mr. Mustafa Ali goes off to become VP of the Hip Hop Caucus, a group aimed at organizing young people to support civil rights and environmental protection. Hopefully, the surviving EPA EJ employees will document and disclose everything. Time, the law and the people are all on our side. But IF Herr Trump gets away with this:
1. Chalk up another win for Trumpery and the misguided kluckers and chumps who voted for it -- working class Tories, like those who voted in Margaret Thatcher.
2. Chalk up another loss for my all of my many beloved liberal friends who didn't hold their noses and vote for Hillary Rodham Clinton, the lesser of two evil candidates.
Remember, dear readers, decisions are made by people who show up. Keep showing up -- the EPA's current state is one of despair. So is FDEP and SJRWMD.
Ask questions. Demand answers. Make disclosures. Expect democracy.
The Washington Post
EPA environmental justice leader resigns, amid White House plans to dismantle program
By Brady Dennis
March 9 at 12:28 PM
Mustafa Ali of the Environmental Protection Agency speaks on human rights and the environment during a Wilson Center event in Washington last June. (Chris Cruz/ Wilson Center, Environmental Change and Security Program)
A key environmental justice leader at the Environmental Protection Agency has resigned, saying that a recent budget proposal to defund such work would harm the people who most rely on the EPA.
Mustafa Ali, a senior adviser and assistant associate administrator for environmental justice, has served more than two decades at the agency, working to ease the burden of air and water pollution in hundreds of poor, minority communities nationwide. He helped found the EPA’s environmental justice office during the early 1990s and became a key adviser to agency administrators under Republican and Democratic presidents.
Ali’s departure, initially reported Thursday by InsideClimate, comes as the White House is seeking to close the agency’s Office of Environmental Justice. A budget proposal reviewed last week by The Washington Post would cut the agency’s overall budget by a quarter, leading to a 20 percent reduction in the workforce. It also listed the environmental justice program as among several dozen slated to lose all funding. The document stated that the new administration supports the idea of environmental justice but would eliminate that EPA office and “assumes any future EJ specific policy work can be transferred to the Office of Policy.”
[White House eyes plan to cut EPA staff by one-fifth, eliminating key programs]
Ali explained his departure in an interview Thursday, saying, “I never saw in the past a concerted effort to roll back the positive steps that many, many people have worked on though all the previous administrations. … I can’t be a part of anything that would hurt those communities. I just couldn’t sign off on those types of things.”
He added that it remains early in the Trump era and noted that each new administration sets its own priorities. Still, he said, “I hadn’t seen any positive movement in relationship to vulnerable communities … I hadn’t seen yet any engagement with communities with environmental justice concerns.”
In his resignation letter, Ali implored the agency’s administrator, former Oklahoma attorney general Scott Pruitt, to think twice before slashing EPA programs aimed at helping disadvantaged areas.
“When I hear we are considering making cuts to grant programs like the EJ small grants or Collaborative Problem Solving programs, which have assisted over 1,400 communities, I wonder if our new leadership has had the opportunity to converse with those who need our help the most,” Ali wrote. “I strongly encourage you and your team to continue promoting agency efforts to validate these communities’ concerns, and value their lives.”
Environmental justice leaders have been skeptical of Pruitt from the start. The longtime EPA adversary repeatedly sued the agency in tandem with fossil fuel companies and other corporate interests, often arguing that the agency’s efforts to regulate pollution went beyond its legal authority.
[EPA chief’s climate change denial is easily refuted by the EPA’s website]
During his Senate confirmation process, Pruitt answered written questions from Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.). One of them read: “How do you define ‘environmental justice’? Do you think it’s a serious issue?”
“I am familiar with the concept of environmental justice,” Pruitt answered. “As I testified, the administrator plays an important role regarding environmental justice. I agree that it is important that all Americans be treated equally under the law, including the environmental laws.”
But Pruitt’s critics point to the hundreds of thousands of dollars he received from oil and gas companies during his political campaigns over the years. He also led the Republican Attorneys General Association, which received substantial sums of money from Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Murray Energy and other firms. Since arriving at the EPA last month, he has taken early steps to beginning rolling back Obama-era regulations on everything from methane emissions to vehicle fuel standards.
“The future ain’t what it used to be at the EPA,” Pruitt recently told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt addressed the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 25 in Oxon Hill, Md. (The Washington Post)
That’s a future for which Ali decided not to stick around.
“I’ve seen too much over the years to allow there to be any rolling back,” he said. “Sometimes people forget that we’re talking about folks lives. If we do our job properly, it can be a huge benefit. If not, it can have big ts.”
Michelle Roberts, national co-coordinator of the Environmental Justice Health Alliance, said Thursday that Ali “played a significant role on the issue of environmental justice” by advocating within the EPA on behalf of low-income Americans and those of color. “People were able to have a seat at the table” though Ali’s work, Roberts said, noting that he also helped provide the grants and technical resources that allowed communities to show how they were being disproportionately affected by pollution.
Ali pressed for President Obama to issue a 2013 executive order that improved chemical plant safety, Roberts noted, and served as a crucial intermediary between the town of Mossville, La., and the company building a major plant nearby.
It is unclear whether the proposed cuts will remain in place when the White House releases its budget blueprint in mid-March, and any reductions would have to be approved by Congress through the appropriations process.
Ali also helped shape one of the last major EPA initiatives under the Obama administration — an “EJ 2020 Action Agenda” that would direct more enforcement resources to pollution-affected communities, focus on eliminating disparities in drinking water and air quality around the country and consider environmental justice issues in the agency’s rulemaking and permitting approaches. There have been few indications that the new administration intends to follow through on that plan.
Ali has taken a job as senior vice president at the Hip Hop Caucus, a nonprofit civil and human rights group that tries to foster grass-roots activism among younger Americans through hip-hop music and cultural events. “As one of the leading voices in the social justice movement, he has shown himself to be an extraordinary leader throughout his career and has a proven track record,” the group’s president, the Rev. Lennox Yearwood Jr., said in a statement.
On Thursday, Ali made his first public appearance for the group at an environmental justice conference in Flint, Mich., home to a poor community nearly three years into a crippling water contamination crisis.
Juliet Eilperin contributed to this report.
EPA's Environmental Justice Head Resigned After 24 Years. He Wants to Explain Why.
"To move backwards didn’t make any sense."
REBECCA LEBER
MAR. 9, 2017 3:02 PM
Mother Jones Magazine
The head of the Environmental Protection Agency's Office on Environmental Justice submitted his resignation on Tuesday. First reported by InsideClimate News, the resignation of Mustafa Ali comes as the Trump administration considers layoffs and budget cuts at the EPA that, if enacted, would eliminate the environmental justice budget and cut funding to grants for pollution cleanup.
Ali, a founder of the program in 1992 who has worked there since, told Mother Jones he resigned because he was concerned the administration's proposals to roll back its environmental justice work would disproportionately affect vulnerable communities. "That is something that I could not be a part of," Ali says.
"Each new administration has an opportunity to share what their priorities and values are," he says, adding that he has "not heard of anything that was being proposed that was beneficial to the communities we serve. To me that was a signal that communities with environmental justice concern may not get the attention they deserve."
The office, created during the George H.W. Bush administration, defines its mission as reducing the disproportionate impacts environmental problems have on minority, low-income, and indigenous people by integrating these concerns into all of the EPA's decision making. Since its founding, the office has distributed $24 million in grants to 1,400 communities.
In his resignation letter, Ali attempted to make the case for the Office of Environmental Justice by appealing to Pruitt's interest in economic growth. He described what happened in Spartanburg, South Carolina, which received a $20,000 grant from the EPA to address the community's abandoned dump sites that were leaching toxic chemicals. The mostly low-income, African American residents of the region experienced high rates of cancer and respiratory disease. Local black leaders leveraged that grant into $270 million from investors and the government to revitalize the city, "creating jobs and improving their environments through collaborative partnerships," Ali wrote. "When I hear we are considering making cuts to grant programs like the EJ small grants or Collaborative Problem Solving programs, which have assisted over 1400 communities, I wonder if our new leadership has had the opportunity to converse with those who need our help the most."
Ali spoke to Mother Jones from Flint, Michigan, where he was attending a two-day environmental justice summit in the city that famously confronted an environmental crisis when the community's drinking water was found to be contaminated with lead. He says he will continue the work he has focused on for 25 years as the new senior vice president of the Hip Hop Caucus, a national nonprofit that organizes and recruits activists to promote social justice, including on climate change. "I want to make sure I am investing my time and talents in a place that is going to be supportive of that work," he says.
Ali hopes his resignation will bring attention to the effects on low-income and marginalized communities of the new administration's program cuts and loosened regulations.
During his confirmation hearings, EPA administrator Scott Pruitt told Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) that he is "familiar with the concept of environmental justice" and acknowledged that the "administrator plays an important role regarding environmental justice."
"Under his leadership, he has the ability to move to the next level if he chooses to," Ali says. Environmental justice leaders "have dedicated decades to trying to gain traction and make progress. We've done some of that, and to move backwards didn't make any sense to me."
--------------
GRIST
This story was originally published by the Huffington Post and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
The White House wants to cut one-quarter of the Environmental Protection Agency’s funding and eliminate 1 in 5 EPA employees, three sources with knowledge of the proposed budget told The Huffington Post.
The fiscal year 2018 budget proposes axing funding for a vast array of programs, including those aimed at low-income people, minorities, and indigenous groups.
"While this ‘zero out’ strategy would impact nearly every community in the United States, a close examination shows the burden of these cuts will fall hardest on the health of low-income Americans and people of color,” Travis Nichols, a spokesman for Greenpeace USA, said in a statement. “This is environmental racism in action.”
The reductions target the implementation of the Clean Power Plan, the sweeping Obama-era regulation aimed at slashing carbon emissions from the utility sector, the country’s biggest emitter by far. The initiative has been stalled since the Supreme Court granted a stay last year in a lawsuit spearheaded by then-Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, whom President Donald Trump named EPA administrator.
Axing the initiative undermines the country’s commitments in the 2015 Paris climate agreement, the first global deal to include the U.S. and China, the world’s biggest polluters.
The cuts the Office of Management and Budget put forward Monday do not appear to include reductions to the EPA’s capitalization fund, roughly $2 billion set aside as loans for states to improve sewers and drinking water infrastructure. That means the 25 percent reduction targets the EPA’s critical functions, including scientific research and enforcing rules against polluters.
“No cut like this has been proposed for the EPA since the early 1980s, in the first phase of the Reagan administration,” Stan Meiburg, a former acting deputy EPA administrator who spent 39 years at the agency, told HuffPost. “That didn’t ever get implemented, but it created a lot of chaos.”
The EPA budget totaled nearly $8.2 billion last year, a 0.22 percent sliver of federal spending. The agency employed about 15,300 people — one of its smallest workforces since 1989. Eliminating more than 3,000 positions would be “unprecedented,” Meiburg said, and would require buyouts and layoffs.
The EPA did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The EPA has a brief window to appeal the budget cuts, after which time the proposal goes to Congress for approval. The OMB routinely puts some programs on the chopping block — including the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act, which helps pay for repairs to outmoded diesel engines, and a different program aimed at reducing exposure to lung cancer-causing radon gas — but Congress typically amends the budget to reinstate the funding.
“The OMB cuts, Congress puts them back,” said Meiburg, who oversaw the EPA budget for years. “They go through this dance every year.”
Public health programs were among those recommended for phaseout, including grants that cover screening for chemicals that disrupt endocrine systems.
The budget proposed cutting funding to programs that benefit communities of color, including grants to improve water and living standards for Alaska Native villages, grants for restoring nature along the U.S.-Mexico border, a program supporting minority-owned small businesses, and multipurpose grants that can go to states or Native American tribes.
Funding for scientific research and education — a sort of boogeyman among conservative lawmakers of late — took a hit, with proposals to zero out the Science to Achieve Results, or STAR, program, which funds research and provides recipients with a living stipend; environmental education and justice programs; and research into how to adapt to global climate change.
“It’s almost like I might as well just kill myself because I will have no protection,” said Cheryl Johnson, executive director People for Community Recovery, a 37-year-old nonprofit aimed at cleaning up polluted parts of Chicago’s inner city. “I won’t have the resources to be able to go and educate my community or educate even just my family about the environmental hazards in our community.”
The OMB also proposed eliminating basic programs for addressing pollution from beaches, fisheries, ozone-deteriorating gases, as well as programs for mapping out Lake Champlain, the Long Island Sound, and San Francisco Bay.
Even programs targeting revitalization of old properties or land — which could go hand-in-hand with Trump’s $1 trillion infrastructure plan — were proposed for elimination, including grants for brownfields, which are properties zoned for redevelopment but hindered by toxic waste.
The cuts should come as no surprise. Trump has assembled the most openly polluter-friendly Cabinet in recent history, putting climate science skeptics and fossil fuel executives in key environmental posts.
Trump named Myron Ebell, a once-fringe conspiracy theorist who shares the president’s view that global warming is a hoax, to lead the EPA transition team. He also nominated Pruitt, who sued the EPA 13 times as Oklahoma’s top cop and has deep ties to oil and gas companies, as EPA administrator. Pruitt was narrowly confirmed by the Senate last month.
“The Trump administration clearly sees corporations as its true constituents, not the people of this country,” Nichols said. “For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has helped protect people’s health and safety when corporations have put them in danger, and the Trump administration now wants to undo all of that. These proposed cuts negate any goodwill Trump may have shown during his Congressional address, including his empty promises to promote clean air and water.”
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