Category: Blog entry
-
Pennsylvania College Students Tell Wolf: No New Pipelines, Green Jobs Now
On Monday, students from 19 Pennsylvania colleges and universities delivered a statement to Governor Tom Wolf’s Capitol office demanding no new natural gas pipelines and immediate investment in green jobs. The students are attending Pennsylvania Student Power Spring Break near Harrisburg, an alternative spring break program for students working on social, economic, and environmental justice…
-
Environmental Justice and Your Block
We wanted to create a visualization that shows how income varies by block to facilitate community environmental justice organizing. In some neighborhoods there are major differences between blocks, and these differences are used by corporations to decide what blocks to target with toxic facilities. So we recently finished a highly experimental layer that estimates median…
-
Incinerator Victory in Muncy, Pennsylvania!
Just in time for the holidays, residents of the rural town of Muncy, PA just had their local borough council pass into law a set-back distance ordinance we wrote. It prohibits any new facilities requiring a state air pollution or waste permit from locating within 900 feet of an occupied dwelling, school, park, or playground. This effectively…
-
Maryland, Maryland, Quite Contrary-land
Since 2011, Maryland has been notorious for being the only state to classify trash as equivalent to wind power in a renewable energy mandate. Over half of the “renewable” energy used to meet the mandate still comes from smokestacks at paper mills, landfills, trash, and biomass incinerators in 12 states spanning New Jersey to Wisconsin to Tennessee.…
-
Zero Waste Hierarchy
You’ve probably heard the term Zero Waste before, but not been sure about what it meant The peer-reviewed definition of Zero Waste by Zero Waste International Alliance involves “designing and managing products and processes to systematically avoid and eliminate the volume and toxicity of waste and materials, conserve and recover all resources, and not burn or bury…
-
Spatial Justice Tests
– by Aaron Kreider, Energy Justice Network One of the main goals of Energy Justice Network’s Justice Map project is to demonstrate the role that income and race play in the siting of dirty facilities. You can use Justice Map (by clicking on Advanced Mode) to analyze the race and income of people who live within, say,…
-
Waste Done Right
– by Ruth Tyson, Energy Justice Network In 2012, Americans disposed of 251 million tons of trash, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The Story of Stuff Project neatly lays out the way materials move through our economy from extraction to production, distribution, consumption, and disposal. Most consumers don’t think beyond the “consumption”…
-
Families Get $4 Million For Fracking Water Contamination
In March, a federal jury awarded a total of $4.2 million to two families from Dimock, Pennsylvania whose drinking water wells have been contaminated by Cabot Oil and Gas when drilling for natural gas. “It’s been a battle,” said plaintiff Scott Ely, co-plaintiff with Ray Hubert, in a lawsuit against Cabot filed in 2009. “You’re…
-
Constitution Pipeline Permit Denied
– April 22, 2016, Energy Justice Network On April 22, the New York Department of Conservation refused to issue a water quality permit for the Constitution Pipeline, a 124 mile pipeline that would’ve carried natural gas from the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania to New York State. Accompanied by heavily armed U.S. Marshals wearing bulletproof vests, a Constitution Pipeline…
-
How To Reduce Premature Deaths Linked to Environmental Risks
[Phasing out combustion-based energy such as fossil fuels and biomass energy can save lives] – by Nancy C. Loeb and Juliet S. Sorensen, April 8, 2016, Truthout [[{“type”:”media”,”view_mode”:”media_large”,”fid”:”542″,”attributes”:{“alt”:””,”class”:”media-image”,”style”:”width: 333px; height: 221px; margin: 3px 10px; float: left;”,”title”:”Photo: Gianluca Di Natale”}}]]Millions of deaths around the world are preventable every year without any additional spending on research for treatment.…