Environment

A collapse of garbage at a landfill in Cebu city, Philippines killed one worker, injured at least 12 and left 27 missing. Rescuers pulled multiple people alive from the debris as search efforts continued Friday.

BEDFORD, N.H. — Five Democratic presidential candidates, meeting Sunday to debate environmental issues for the first time in the 1988 campaign, blasted Reagan Administration policies and called for a variety of new laws and international summit meetings to control acid rain, nuclear waste, ocean dumping and other problems.

The five Democrats offered little disagreement or sharp criticism of one another in the two-hour televised forum. They joked, politely complimented one another on policies and achievements, and generally avoided the personal and political jabs that marked last week’s feisty Republican candidates’ debate in Houston.

Water Pollution Law

Former Arizona Gov. Bruce Babbitt appeared to speak the most forcefully and with the most detail, particularly about his experiences in Arizona cleaning up an asbestos dump, negotiating with Mexico on air pollution, and establishing what is considered the nation’s toughest groundwater pollution law.

Babbitt pledged to fight for the same strict groundwater standards on a national level if elected. “No contamination, no discharges, no degradation of the water,” he said.

Gov. Michael S. Dukakis of Massachusetts argued that his state was more successful getting polluters to pay for the cleanup of several hundred hazardous waste dumps than the federal Environmental Protection Agency. He chided both President Reagan and the Democratic Congress for lack of leadership.

“We haven’t been able to get the President’s attention, and frankly, there’s been paralysis in the Congress,” Dukakis said.

But several in the audience of about 300 campaign supporters and environmental activists hissed when, in response to a question, Dukakis refused to commit to a five-year ban on municipal incinerators. A political fight over locating such a facility is raging in Boston, and several dozen protesters showed up at the Sheraton Wayfarer Inn, the site of the forum, to demonstrate against incinerators.

Recycling Held Not Enough

“We’re running out of landfill space,” Dukakis argued. He said recycling was one answer, but not enough. “There’s no way we can deal with this without some sort of resource recovery.”

Sen. Albert Gore Jr. of Tennessee aimed several barbs at the “Reagan-Bush Administration.” He particularly targeted Vice President George Bush, whose campaign apparently gained after an impressive performance in the Houston debate.

“George Bush has been the principal figure in undermining environmental regulations,” by using the budget restraints “to shackle the EPA and the Department of the Interior,” Gore said.

Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois argued that states should share the burden of trying to reduce acid rain. Illinois’ smoke-stack industries produce some of the pollutants in the acid rain and snow that has devastated broad forest areas in the Northeast.

“We have to move in such a way so as not to penalize one region or state,” Simon said.

Asks Acid Rain Summit

“Paul, I don’t understand all this equivocating on acid rain,” Babbitt quickly responded, in perhaps the sharpest moment. Babbitt said the federal government should set and enforce strict air pollution standards, including shutting down factories, and called for a summit of North American leaders on acid rain.

“We’re downwind from Mexico, Canada is downwind from us,” he said. “It’s our continent, it’s our destiny, and it’s time for a treaty.”

Dukakis reiterated his pledge to stop the opening of the fully constructed nuclear power plant at Seabrook, N.H. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission voted Thursday to change a rule that Dukakis had used to block the plant. The new ruling allows local utilities to present adequate emergency community evacuation plans even if state and local officials don’t approve the plans.

“We’re going to do everything we can to stop Seabrook,” Dukakis said to loud applause. He did not elaborate.

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said a statewide referendum in Maine this Tuesday to close the 15-year-old Maine Yankee nuclear power plant would “send a message as profound” as the civil rights marchers sent in Selma, Ala. in the early 1960s. But Jackson offered few specifics about environmental programs.

‘Have Run for Hills’

“The most important thing is Democrats are here and the Republicans have run for the hills,” he said.

The sponsors, a public-interest group called Vote Environment, had invited all six Democrats and all six Republicans in the race to participate. Republican Alexander M. Haig Jr. spoke briefly in the conference center’s lobby, but quickly departed. None of the other Republican candidates attended.

The sixth Democrat, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, also did not participate. Campaign aides said Gephardt had a longstanding commitment to attend his 9-year-old daughter’s horse show at home in Virginia.

The round-table forum was the first time the Democrats have appeared together in New Hampshire, which holds the nation’s first primary Feb. 16. The Democrats will meet again today in New Orleans to debate social policy, and then again Saturday in Des Moines, for another environmental debate.

“It was the broadest based and most important discussion of these issues of any presidential campaign,” Jan Hartke, one of the organizers, said afterward. He applauded the candidates’ mastery of technical issues, and said the call for international summits “puts the environment on the same footing as arms control.”

Environmentalist groups so far have not focused support on any one Democratic candidate. That was unlikely to change after the forum, several activists said.

“There really isn’t that great a difference among the candidates,” said Jerry Schoen, a Sierra Club activist and computer programmer. “But this is a gift-wrapped issue for the Democrats.”

resh snowfall hit Italy’s Alpine resort of Livigno less than a month before the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics, where freestyle skiing and snowboarding events will be held, after officials raised concerns over reliance on artificial snow.

The Environmental Protection Agency under President Trump has cut federal limits on air and water pollution and promoted fossil fuels, a metamorphosis that clashes with the agency’s stated mission — to protect human health and the environment.

The administration says its actions will “unleash” the American economy, but environmentalists say the agency’s abrupt change in focus threatens to unravel years of progress on climate-friendly initiatives that could be hard or impossible to reverse.

“It just constantly wants to pat the fossil fuel business on the back and turn back the clock to a pre-Richard Nixon era” when the agency didn’t exist, said historian Douglas Brinkley.

A lot has happened this year at “Trump’s EPA,” as Administrator Lee Zeldin frequently calls the agency. Zeldin proposed overturning the landmark finding that climate change is a threat to human health. He pledged to roll back dozens of environmental regulations in “the greatest day of deregulation our nation has seen.” He froze billions of dollars for clean energy and upended agency research.

Zeldin has argued the EPA can protect the environment and grow the economy at the same time. He announced “five pillars” to guide the EPA’s work; four were economic goals, including energy dominance — President Trump’s shorthand for more fossil fuels — and boosting the auto industry.

A former New York congressman who had a record as a moderate Republican on some environmental issues, Zeldin said his views on climate change have evolved. Many federal and state climate goals are unattainable in the near future — and come at a huge cost, he said.

“We should not be causing … extreme economic pain for an individual or a family” because of policies aimed at “saving the planet,” he told reporters at EPA headquarters in early December.

But scientists and experts say the EPA’s new direction comes at a cost to public health and would lead to far more pollutants in the environment, including mercury, lead and especially tiny airborne particles that can lodge in lungs. They also note higher emissions of greenhouse gases will worsen atmospheric warming that is driving more frequent, costly and deadly extreme weather.

Christine Todd Whitman, a longtime Republican who led the EPA under President George W. Bush, said watching Zeldin attack laws protecting air and water has been “just depressing.”

“It’s tragic for our country. I worry about my grandchildren, of which I have seven. I worry about what their future is going to be if they don’t have clean air, if they don’t have clean water to drink,” said Whitman, who joined a centrist third party in recent years.

The history behind EPA

The EPA was launched under Nixon in 1970 at a time when pollution was disrupting American life, some cities were suffocating in smog and industrial chemicals turned some rivers into wastelands. Congress passed laws then that remain foundational for protecting water, air and endangered species.

The agency’s aggressiveness has always seesawed depending on who occupies the White House. The Biden administration boosted renewable energy and electric vehicles, tightened restrictions on motor-vehicle emissions and proposed greenhouse gas limits on coal-fired power plants and oil and gas wells. Industry groups called rules overly burdensome and said the power plant rule would force many aging facilities to shut down. In response, many businesses shifted resources to meet the more stringent rules that are now being undone.

“While the Biden EPA repeatedly attempted to usurp the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law to impose its ‘Green New Scam,’ the Trump EPA is laser-focused on achieving results for the American people while operating within the limits of the laws passed by Congress,” EPA spokeswoman Brigit Hirsch said.

Zeldin’s list of targets is long

Zeldin has announced plans to abandon soot pollution rules, loosen rules around harmful refrigerants, limit wetland protections and weaken gas mileage rules. Meanwhile, he would exempt polluting industries and plants from federal emissions-reduction requirements.

Much of the EPA’s new direction aligns with Project 2025, the conservative Heritage Foundation road map that argued the agency should gut staffing, cut regulations and end what it called a war on coal or other fossil fuels.

“A lot of the regulations that were put on during the Biden administration were more harmful and restrictive than in any other period. So that’s why deregulating them looks like EPA is making major changes,” said Diana Furchtgott-Roth, director of Heritage’s Center for Energy, Climate, and Environment.

But Chris Frey, an EPA official under Biden, said the regulations Zeldin has targeted “offered benefits of avoided premature deaths, of avoided chronic illness … bad things that would not happen because of these rules.”

Matthew Tejada, a former EPA official under both Trump and then-President Biden who now works at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said of the revamped EPA: “I think it would be hard for them to make it any clearer to polluters in this country that they can go on about their business and not worry about EPA getting in their way.”

Zeldin also has shrunk EPA staffing by about 20% to levels last seen in the mid-1980s.

Justin Chen, president of the EPA’s largest union, called the staff cuts “devastating.” He cited the dismantling of research and development offices at labs across the country and the firing of employees who signed a letter of dissent opposing EPA cuts.

Relaxed enforcement and cutting staff

Many of Zeldin’s changes aren’t in effect yet. It takes time to propose new rules, get public input and finalize rollbacks.

It’s much faster to cut grants and ease up on enforcement, and Trump’s EPA is doing both. The number of new civil environmental actions is roughly one-fifth what it was in the first eight months of the Biden administration, according to the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project.

“You can effectively do a lot of deregulation if you just don’t do enforcement,” said Leif Fredrickson, visiting assistant professor of history at the University of Montana.

Hirsch said the number of legal filings isn’t the best way to judge enforcement because they require work outside the EPA and can bog staff down with burdensome legal agreements. She said the EPA is “focused on efficiently resolving violations and achieving compliance as quickly as possible” and not making demands beyond what the law requires.

EPA’s cuts have been especially hard on climate change programs and environmental justice, the effort to address chronic pollution that typically is worse in minority and poor communities. Both were Biden administration priorities. Zeldin dismissed staff and canceled billions in grants for projects that fell under the “diversity, equity and inclusion” umbrella, a Trump administration target.

Zeldin also spiked a $20-billion “green bank” set up under Biden’s landmark climate law to fund qualifying clean energy projects. The EPA chief argued the fund was a scheme to funnel money to Democratic-aligned organizations with little oversight — allegations a federal judge rejected.

Pat Parenteau, an environmental law expert and former director of the Environmental Law School at Vermont Law & Graduate School, said the EPA’s shift under Trump left him with little optimism for what he called “the two most awful crises in the 21st century”: biodiversity loss and climate disruption.

“I don’t see any hope for either one,” he said. “I really don’t. And I’ll be long gone, but I think the world is in just for absolute catastrophe.”

Phillis, John and Daly write for the Associated Press.

South Korea has announced it’s ending bear bile farming over animal cruelty concerns. The controversial industry was used for traditional medicine, but questions over its effectiveness knocked its popularity in recent years.

Four residents of Pari, a low-lying Indonesian island, filed the complaint in January 2023.

A Swiss court has agreed to hear a legal complaint against cement giant Holcim, accusing the company of failing to do enough to cut carbon emissions.

NGO Swiss Church Aid (HEKS/EPER), which is supporting the complainants, said on Monday that the court had decided to admit the legal complaint. Holcim confirmed the decision and said it plans to appeal.

The complaint was filed in January 2023 by four residents of Pari, a low-lying Indonesian island that has suffered repeated flooding as rising global temperatures drive up sea levels. The case was submitted to a court in Zug, Switzerland, where Holcim has its headquarters.

According to HEKS, this is the first time a Swiss court has admitted climate litigation brought against a big corporation.

If successful, it would also be the first case seeking to hold a Swiss company legally responsible for its contribution to global warming, the group has previously said.

The lawsuit is also among the first climate cases brought by people in the Global South directly affected by climate change and forms part of a growing push for compensation for “loss and damage”, campaigners backing the case said.

The nongovernmental organisation supporting the plaintiffs said Holcim was selected because it is one of the world’s largest carbon dioxide emitters and the biggest so-called “carbon major” based in Switzerland.

A study commissioned by HEKS and conducted by the United States-based Climate Accountability Institute found that Holcim emitted more than 7 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 1950 and 2021 – about 0.42 percent of total global industrial emissions over the period.

Holcim has said it is committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2050 and is following a science-based pathway to meet that goal. The company says it has cut direct CO2 emissions from its operations by more than 50 percent since 2015.

The plaintiffs are seeking compensation for climate-related damage, financial contributions to flood protection measures on Pari Island, and a rapid reduction in Holcim’s carbon emissions.

Cement production accounts for about 7 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the Global Cement and Concrete Association.