Recent developments offer further confirmation that government agencies cannot be depended on to protect workers or the environment from toxins and other hazards. While the Department of Labor is hard at work to reduce regulations that protect workers from exposure to toxic chemicals on the job, the Environmental Protection Agency has suffered a legal defeat that may finally force it to prevent shipping agencies from discharging water tainted with invasive species into bays and estuaries.
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The DOL case appears to be a race to the finish line as Bush appointees try to sneak through a last-minute regulation change in the way the danger of toxic exposure is assessed.
The actual language of the proposed change has not been made public, but it appears that the change would allow higher levels of exposure to toxic chemicals. It is highly suspicious that the DOL is fast-tracking this change in the waning days of the Bush administration when in the past 7 ? years, it has only adopted one rule to regulate a chemical—and that was done under court order.
“It’s an insult to America’s workers for the DOL to be spending its time in the last year of this administration allegedly fine-tuning the details of how to do these regulations when, other than the one ordered by a court, they have issued no major worker-health regulations,” said Professor Adam Finkel, of the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey.
Finkel, who is also the former health standards director at Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration, added, “The reality is there’s a great need to light a fire under this moribund agency to do something—anything—to protect workers.”
Environmental Protection Agency refuses to protect environment
Meanwhile, environmentalists have won the latest round of a 10-year court battle to force the EPA to regulate ship discharges under the Clean Water Act.
Ships coming into U.S. ports from other countries have water from the port of origin in the hold to serve as ballast. This water is then discharged at the destination port. The problem is that the water may contain invasive, non-native species that cause environmental damage to U.S. bays, rivers and estuaries.
In 2005, a lower court ruled that the EPA had illegally exempted these ship discharges from the Clean Water Act. The lower court gave the EPA until September 2008 to end the exemption; the EPA appealed the decision to the Ninth Circuit Court, which has now upheld the original decision.
“The EPA spent nearly ten years fighting against using the nation’s only comprehensive law to combat an environmental plague that is costing the U.S. economy billions of dollars,” said Deborah Sivas, Director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Stanford Law School, which represented the environmental groups that filed the lawsuit.
At least 21 billion gallons of ballast water from international ports are released into U.S. waters each year.
“The San Francisco Bay and Delta have been completely invaded by non-native species introduced by commercial ships coming to our ports,” said Sejal Choksi, of the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper. “Species such as the Asian clam and Chinese mitten crab are clogging the intake pipes of drinking water facilities and power plants, harming the commercial fishing industry, and destroying native species habitat.”
Those non-native species have no natural predators in North American waters, and so run rampant and cause extensive damage.
Nina Bell, Executive Director of Northwest Environmental Advocates, said the court’s decision will force shipping companies to pay some of the cost of cleaning up invasive species.
“The Ninth Circuit’s decision is very important for the taxpayers who have been paying the huge price of the EPA’s continuing refusal to implement the Clean Water Act,” said Bell. “If the EPA had used its Congressional mandate thirty years ago, this country would have been using the Clean Water Act to effectively control ship discharges for all that time.”
However, the shipping industry has already shifted from fighting in the courts to lobbying Congress. “As soon as we won the district court case in 2005, the shipping industry immediately turned to Congress for a special exemption from the Clean Water Act, to preserve their ability to pollute at the nation’s expense,” Bell said.
From the DOL to the EPA, government agencies put the interests of capitalist corporations above the health of workers and the environment. Only through organized struggle can these agencies be forced to take even the smallest action in a positive direction. Ultimately, the capitalist state apparatus must be done away with so that human needs and environmental protection can be prioritized.
