Earth Day, meet Covid-19

This year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In 1970 the environment was a mess: big cities were beset with pollution and industrial environments were creating literally unliveable surroundings; Los Angeles was thick with a choking smog; wastes in the Cuyahoga River near Cleveland were burning; the natural world was suffering from the effects of pesticide use; chemical dumps seemed to be everywhere.

That first Earth Day was a huge success. Millions of people participated in parades, teach-ins, tree plantings, and other activities in a show of support for a cleaner, healthier world. In 1990 Earth Day became an international observance. It’s the most widely observed secular holiday on the planet. But have we made progress in those 50 years?

In some areas, we’ve done pretty well. Air pollution, for example, is less prevalent in urban environments than in past times. But air pollution is a comparatively easy target for mitigation--just turn down the source! Catalytic mufflers and limits on emissions from smokestacks have made a big difference, but we still have a long way to go.

Solid and liquid waste dumpsites scattered across the nation are not so conveniently dispensed with. The federal law officially known as the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act of 1980, termed the federal Superfund program, mandates the identification and cleanup of contaminated sites. The parties responsible for the contamination are required to pay for the cleanup or reimburse the Environmental Protection Agency for doing the job. About 40,000 federal Superfund sites, large and small, across the country have been targeted for cleanup. Approximately 1,600 of those sites considered the most highly contaminated have been listed on a National Priorities List (NPL).

As a cynic would have predicted, the government has found it difficult or inconvenient to dun the polluters for cleaning up their messes. Corporations come and go, right? It’s not clear who should receive the cleanup bill. The result has been that lately, taxpayers are paying for most of the cleanup. Whatever initial enthusiasm there was for this work has declined. During 2000-2015, Congress allocated about $1.26 billion of general revenue to the Superfund program each year. That’s chump change in comparison with the magnitude of the problem, and it’s been reduced still further under the Trump administration. After all these years, cleanup is proceeding on a mere handful of the more than 1200 sites on the NPL list that await cleaning. By the way, the US government may be the largest polluter, with the most intractable sites.

It will come as no surprise that low income and minority populations have suffered most from the adverse effects of toxic waste dumping. Back in the day, local authorities found it easy to grant permits for waste disposal on lands in proximity to low-income neighborhoods. In 1994, President Bill Clinton proposed a new Superfund reform bill, Executive Order (E.O) 12898, which called for federal agencies to make achieving environmental justice a requirement by addressing low-income populations and minority populations that have experienced disproportionate adverse health and environmental effects. The work goes on--at a snail’s pace.


While slow progress is being made in cleaning up past environmental messes, new ones appear. They don’t look like most of the old ones, those piles of full barrels, ground sites soaked with toxic materials, poisonous ponds. Consider the aftereffects of the frenzied drilling for gas and oil in the Marcellus shale formation in Pennsylvania. This is not old stuff; it’s a 21st-century story. It would take more space and patience than I have to recite the litany of environmental misdeeds done in the exploitation of this formation. What remains are thousands of played-out or abandoned wells, signified to the passerby by a mere stub of iron piping or an abandoned pumping station. But those thousands of wells, with their networks of horizontal drilling holes, will continue to leak oil, gas, and brines contaminated with a host of chemicals, spoiling the water in aquifers that people have depended on as their primary water source. Potential problems were evident from the very beginnings of the Marcellus development, but in the rush to make a financial killing, residents’ concerns were ignored by regulators and politicians. Now, people are often unknowingly living virtually on top of abandoned, plugged wells that leak inflammable methane. Who is responsible for cleaning up these messes? We seem not to have learned how to head off environmental disasters in the rush to make money.

Here’s another example: The covid-19 coronavirus pandemic has produced upheavals in global markets for petroleum products. Overcapacity has driven the price of oil to near zero. Not only is the market saturated with available stocks, but there is also a lack of storage capacity. Texas, the nation’s largest oil and gas producer, has seen thousands of layoffs and there will be more to come.
The flaring of excess methane gas at the wellheads is wasting billions of cubic feet of methane because it’s uneconomical to ship to market. Uneconomical? The message clearly is that if it isn’t economical, we’re just going to flare away, and in the process increase greenhouse gas concentrations. They could stop these affronts to the environment with strong regulation, but we’re talking Texas politics. "Environment" doesn’t seem to be in their vocabulary.

Yet another one: What do we do when chemicals widely used in various applications come to be regarded as profoundly toxic? The family of chemicals known as perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) developed largely at 3M and DuPont chemical companies seemed like miracle substances because of their ability to repel water, protect surfaces, resist heat, and many other useful properties. They were soon found everywhere: nonstick cooking ware, repellents in fabric, firefighting foams, shaving cream, the list goes on. These compounds are useful largely because they’re chemically quite inert. But the downside of that useful characteristic is that when they enter a living system they take something like 5 years to excrete. Early studies of toxicity in animals did not reveal toxic effects in chemical workers exposed to low concentrations in manufacturing facilities. But prolonged exposure to perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), one of them in particular, known as C8, was eventually seen as harming health: developmental damage to fetuses during pregnancy, low birth weight, accelerated puberty and distorted bones. The EPA website links PFASs to kidney and testicular cancer, liver tissue damage, impaired production of antibodies, and cholesterol changes. This presents a tough challenge; a family of chemicals that persist in the environment for long times, and are everywhere. They’re not very toxic, but enough so that over time they cause medical issues. Getting the genie back in the bottle looks like an intractable problem. We can’t undo what has been done, much of it without an understanding of how these substances could prove to be toxic. But we can be aggressive about not allowing the problem to get worse. While we’re at it, we might want to ask whether such problems can be anticipated. It’s strange: a search of the web turns up a lot of hits for the prudential rule as it applies to financial decision- and rule-making, but none found a prudential rule for environmental rule-making. Maybe I’m just not searching assiduously enough.

The global profit-oriented capitalist system that has called the shots for decades has brought the world to a bad place. Neoliberal capitalists want to run their shows with minimal regulation, and in the US they’ve pretty much had their way. But corporations’ frequent disregard for the larger social welfare as they focus on profits has begun to arouse palpable resentment. The covid-19 pandemic has exposed the indifference of corporations and many of the ultra-rich to the economic stresses many people face. People have begun to ask why society should run as it does. When people are being forced out of the labor market and pressed into homelessness and hunger, who comes to rescue them? When the environment teeters on the brink of runaway global warming, who will call a halt to continued pumping out of greenhouse warming gases? 

Some people have the notion that the new generation of really big business is comparatively innocent in terms of producing adverse environmental effects. What environmental harm could Google, Facebook, or Amazon produce? Aren’t some of them actively at work in addressing environmental problems? We know for sure that they are all enormous consumers of energy. The “absurdly quick delivery” madness among large sellers, particularly Amazon, but including copycat services from Target, eBay and Walmart, is sure to have negative impacts in terms of global warming. Google presents itself as embracing sustainability and environmental stewardship, but it is a massive consumer of energy.

The company is no doubt running its data centers as efficiently as possible, but the sheer enormity of their energy consumption requires millions of gallons of water per day. Water is becoming a critically stressed resource; some Google’s facilities are located in locales in Texas and South Carolina where water is already scarce. Legal battles over water rights have ensued. What will take priority, water for a data center, or water for peoples’ homes? Facebook seems to have a strong vision of how to minimize its environmental footprint, though, like Google's, it’s data centers are large consumers of energy. I’m making these points about the new giants simply to point out that they, like all large commercial enterprises, entail strong impacts on the environment. It would be too bad if they become the images of the bad guys in the poster for Earth Day 2030.

In many respects, it’s a scary time for ordinary people--financially, in terms of health, and the prospects of young people coming up through the school systems. We’re being prompted to ask questions about our personal lives and the society we’ve been living in. This viral disruption will require more than a patchwork response. We’re in the early days for the covid-19 pandemic. Epidemiologist Michael Osterholm points out that in the US only about 3% of the population has shown itself to be infected. Before the infection plays itself out probably 60% or so will have been infected. As he says, “we’re only in the second inning of a nine-inning game”. A long way to go and a lot we will have to learn. 

Back to the title of this blog: What would Earth Day have looked like environmentally on its 50th anniversary if the Covid-19 pandemic had not occurred? The almost magical effects of the virus have been remarked upon everywhere. My local paper, The Fort Myers News-Press, rhapsodizes on the clarity of the urban skies; wild animals allowing themselves to be seen; the eerie quiet. As the paper writes: “When people stay home, Earth becomes cleaner and wilder.”

Will humans get the message?