Despite his dubious claim that “I’ve won awards on environmental protection,” it’s doubtful President Trump will be remembered for his fierce advocacy for sustaining our Earth. In fact, the President has now proposed a whopping $3 billion cut to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget – slashing more than 3,500 EPA staff positions – and, just today, he appears poised to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris climate accord. This on yet another day when the news brings new evidence of how the risks of climate change have likely been widely underestimated. Under the President’s plan, the EPA’s environmental justice unit would be eliminated entirely.
That, of course, comes on the heels of naming the CEO of Exxon to head up the State Department and putting the country’s most notoriously anti-environment, pro-big-oil Attorney General in charge of the EPA.
But as Michelle Obama once reminded the nation, “When they go low, we go high.” And in this case, the solution to the President’s assault on the environment is to go high impact – as in, high impact litigation. If the government is about to withdraw from protecting the environment, private citizens in private lawsuits need to fill the gap.
Across the board, the courts are being called on to stop the worst of the Administration’s attacks. There’s a long, strong history of citizens turning to the courts to enforce environmental laws and regulations when the federal government refuses to do so.
The effectiveness of these “citizen suits” cannot be overestimated. Public Justice’s Environmental Enforcement Project has brought them again and again as a way to hold polluters accountable for turning a blind eye to pollution and environmental destruction. All too often, polluters can create huge costs by dumping toxins and wastes into our water and air, and “externalize” those costs by making other people (like people who breathe or drink water) bear the costs. If a lawsuit makes the polluter have to clean up their operations – to dump wastes responsibly, to treat wastes before dumping them into a river – then they have to “internalize” those costs.
This isn’t just economic jargon. It means that private lawsuits, by people actually hurt by pollution, can be a critical tool in the fight against climate change. If polluters have to bear the costs they create, then polluting energy sources will no longer be artificially subsidized in the market against renewable fuels that don’t pollute.
In West Virginia, for example, we’ve helped citizens take on the coal industry. And just this Tuesday, we won an important victory – along with our clients, The Sierra Club – where a federal district court agreed with us, after a full trial, that pollution from the Fola coal mine is responsible for degrading the local eco system in streams and rivers. Winning this trial sets the stage for meaningful action: in the coming weeks and months, the court will determine what actions the coal company must take in order to – literally – clean up their act.
Overall, we’ve filed more than 30 citizen suits in 14 states to hold corporate polluters accountable for their violations of federal environmental statutes regulating clean air, clean water, coal mining and hazardous waste. We’ve succeeded in forcing Patriot Coal to end its mountaintop removal operations – wherein the company stripped entire mountains in Appalachia in order to mine dirty coal. (More information about our work to end mountaintop mining in West Virginia is contained in this video. – the mining operations look like a military attack on the countryside, with gigantic machines that look like they’re out of Star Wars conducting the operations. Huge machines, but very few jobs for humans.)
In addition to coal pollution, another major drive of climate change is pollution from the widespread growth of gigantic factory harms. We won, for example, a citizen suit that helped bring clean drinking water to the residents of Yakima Valley, Washington, for the first time in years after we helped local residents take legal action against mega-dairies in the Valley that were contaminating water supplies with huge amounts of cow manure that was improperly stored and allowed to seep into the ground. (For more information on the Yakima case, watch this short video about our suit on behalf of local residents.)
And in Texas (in a suit not brought by Public Justice), citizens successfully sued Exxon for contaminating the air with millions of tons of pollution, resulting in largest penalty from a citizen suit in U.S. history.
Now, as the government steps back from its obligations to protect the environment, we (and other allies bringing citizen suits) are stepping up to fill the void and help communities fight back.
If you work at an environmental agency and see that agency failing to enforce the law, we want to know.
If you live in a community and its air, water or natural resources are being polluted or destroyed, we want to know.
Because when government attention on environmental protection is about as a low as it can go, we’re determined to go high impact.
Photo: The Larsen C Ice Shelf, as photographed by NASA