Environmental Health

"Since 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency has been embroiled in an enforcement battle with a Michigan-based company accused of modifying the state’s largest coal-fired power plant without getting federal permits for a projected rise in pollution. On Dec. 7, as the Supreme Court was considering whether to hear the case, EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt issued a memo that single-handedly reversed the agency’s position."

"The city of Flint, which has been reeling for years over lead seepage from its pipes into its tap water, is accused of violating the terms of a major settlement agreement aimed at improving its water quality. Advocacy groups say the city is failing to disclose information about its efforts to replace its lead pipes."

"The U.S. has abandoned any claim to climate leadership as the only nation to pull out of the Paris Climate Accord. In Trump's Cabinet, climate denial is pretty much cause for a Merit Badge. Congressional leadership doesn't acknowledge climate change to be a problem, or even a thing."

"Day-to-day increases in air pollution, even at levels generally considered acceptable, are associated with increased deaths among the elderly."

"The Environmental Protection Agency has ignored many years of evidence of dangerous levels of lead paint in millions of Americans’ homes and must propose tighter standards within 90 days to protect children from lead exposure, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday."

"The Environmental Protection Agency has tasked a banker who was banned from the banking industry for life with oversight of the nation’s Superfund program."

"Anthony Stansbury propped his rusty bike against a live oak tree and cast his fishing line into the rushing waters of Florida’s Anclote River. When he bought a house down the street last year, Stansbury says he wasn’t told that his slice of paradise had a hidden problem."

"More than 700 people have left the Environmental Protection Agency since President Trump took office, a wave of departures that puts the administration nearly a quarter of the way toward its goal of shrinking the agency to levels last seen during the Reagan administration."

"A federal court wants the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to report, with “precision and specificity,” how it plans to take a key step in implementing a 2015 smog pollution rule."

"The Trump administration has rolled back Obama-era climate policies at a brisk pace in the first year of Donald Trump's presidency. But it has been equally aggressive in minimizing the climate science that justified those regulations in the first place."