Oil Refineries Dumped More Than a Billion Pounds of Chemicals in Our Water in 2021

We are looking down the barrel of a worldwide mass plant and animal extinction. And yet the U.S. government continues to let fossil fuel interests treat our planet, and us, like garbage. A new report says the Environmental Protection Agency is failing to enforce the Clean Water Act, allowing U.S. refineries to pour half a billion gallons of wastewater every day into waterways. According to the Environmental Integrity Project report, this resulted in upward of 1.6 billion pounds of chemical waste poisoning American waterways in 2021.

These chemicals are incredibly harmful to wildlife—to their reproductive systems, food and oxygen sources, and even biology. In just one example, a Bay area minnow, more than 80 percent were found to have spinal deformities due to selenium pollution, a chemical that has been dumped to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds in American waterways.

About 68 percent of the refineries examined in the report dumped into waterways designated as impaired—as in, these waters were already so polluted that they were not permitted to be used for fishing or swimming, or were not healthy for aquatic life.

The refineries are also notable sources of so-called “forever chemicals,” or PFAS, that have been linked to things like cancer, endocrine disruption, and fetal development complications. Refineries that have been specifically sampled for PFAS show alarming results: In 2020, a Colorado facility had a concentration of a PFAS variety 14,000 times higher than the EPA’s limit for drinking water.

The Clean Water Act directs the EPA to limit discharge of harmful refinery pollutants and to tighten those limits at least once every five years if possible. Instead, the report says, those standards have not been revised since 1985. Many chemicals are left unregulated, and many potential new innovations to enforce possible regulations are left untouched. And the EPA is remarkably failing to act in accordance with whatever authority it has now.

Records showed that nearly 83 percent of examined refineries exceeded permitted limits on water pollutants at least once between 2019 to 2021; this was a total of 904 violations involving excess dumping of cyanide, ammonia nitrogen, sulfide, oil and grease, and more. Only about 15 violators were penalized. One culprit, the Phillips 66 Sweeny Refinery near Houston, Texas, exceeded its permitted pollution limits 44 times (42 of which involved cyanide) from 2019 to 2021. The facility was penalized just $30,000.

“I have personally witnessed the dumping of untreated plant water into the southeast Texas watershed, which unfortunately drains into the Gulf of Mexico. The very waters upon which we depend for jobs, food, and recreation become more polluted every passing day,” said John Beard, founder and executive director of the Port Arthur Community Action Network. “If water truly is life, what will become of us when there’s no more clean, living water?”

The Florida High School Athletics Association is standing by its decision to require student athletes to give their schools detailed information about their periods, an unprecedented policy that is raising major concerns about privacy.

The FHSAA announced in October that it was changing its annual physical form for student athletes to a digital version instead of paper. The form includes optional but detailed questions about students’ menstruation cycles, including when they got their first period, when they had their most recent one, and how many weeks pass between periods. Previously, only one page of the paper form—on which a pediatrician would sign off on a student being allowed to play—would be submitted to a school. But the entire digital form will now be submitted.

Despite widespread public outcry, an FHSAA panel not only decided Tuesday night to stand by that change but also recommended the menstrual history questions be made mandatory.

The recommendation now goes before the FHSAA board of directors, which will meet in late February to make the final decision.

While students’ medical history is necessary for doctors, it is entirely unclear why a school needs all of that information—or what it would plan to do with it.

“I don’t see why (school districts) need that access to that type of information,” said Dr. Michael Haller, a pediatric endocrinologist in Gainesville with two teenage children.

“It sure as hell will give me pause to fill it out with my kid,” he told The Palm Beach Post when the decision was first made in the fall.

Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, people have been hypervigilant about third parties tracking menstrual data. Period tracker apps and the platform that hosts Florida’s new digital athletics form are not owned by medical institutions and therefore are not subject to health privacy laws. If subpoenaed for someone’s data, particularly in a state where abortion has been made illegal, companies would be required to hand it over.

Florida has made it clear it is cracking down on the rights of women, girls, and gender minorities. The state has banned abortion after 15 weeks, forbidden transgender girls from playing on girls’ sports teams, and barred state residents from using Medicaid to pay for gender-affirming treatments.

Many parents and doctors are worried that schools will use the menstrual data to monitor students for late or missed periods, a possible sign of pregnancy, or to out transgender students by watching for girls who don’t get periods or boys who do.

School administrators say the information will stay private, but there’s no guarantee it will. It’s a terrifying glimpse of our dystopian post-Roe world.

Television programming company DirecTV has dropped Newsmax, a far-right network, from its channel listing because of a fee dispute.

DirecTV said in a statement that they “made it clear to Newsmax that we wanted to continue to offer the network,” but that “Newsmax’s demands for rate increases would have led to significantly higher costs” the company would then feel compelled to pass on to their customers. The company went even further, plugging the outlets people could still pursue (even for free) if they still wanted to get their Newsmax fix.

In other words, the company’s decision does not seem, at least publicly, motivated by some ideological stand against misinformation or extremism. While DirecTV did drop conspiratorial network One America News last year because of its propagation of misinformation, the dropping of Newsmax appears to be just business.

Nevertheless, Republicans, both elected officials and media personalities, are doing everything they can to stir up outrage and conspiracy to make it seem like Newsmax was exercising more than just ostensible financial diligence.

Already, Representatives Michael Waltz and Jeff Van Drew and Senator Rick Scott have called for hearings into the company. Newly elected Monica De La Cruz has spent some of her inaugural time on the House floor to complain about the situation, calling it “another victory in the woke left’s efforts to cancel conservatives and limit free speech.”

De La Cruz’s concerns for free speech came the same week fellow Republican Florida Governor Ron DeSantis rejected an African American history class and public school teachers are removing books from their classrooms to comply with a Desantis-backed law that threatens felony prosecution.

All the while, the U.S. hurdles toward a debt crisis that could upend the global economy.

People can’t afford to go to the hospital, can’t go out in public without fearing being shot to death, and struggle to find an affordable place to live. Meanwhile, Republicans are using their precious time (that we pay them for!) to make people mad about something that never happened. Just another day in America.

Donald Trump will be reinstated on Facebook and Instagram in the coming weeks, after a two-year suspension, parent company Meta announced Wednesday.

The former president was banned from the social media platforms following the January 6 insurrection, over accusations that his posts helped foment the violence in Washington, D.C., that day.

“The public should be able to hear what politicians are saying so they can make informed choices,” Meta President of Global Affairs Nick Clegg said in a statement explaining the decision to allow Trump back online.

“We’ve put new guardrails in place to deter repeat offenses.”

One of those guardrails is Facebook’s independent Oversight Board, a panel of 20 people that helps with content moderation. The board upheld Trump’s initial suspension from Facebook but switched it from indefinite to two years long.

In theory, Trump will be held to the same standards as every other Facebook user when it comes to what he shares on the platform: Content is removed if it causes public harm. But if a Trump post qualifies as “newsworthy”—meaning Meta deems it provides more to public interest than causes harm—it could be left up.

Trump’s reinstatement means that he will be able to resume using Facebook to fundraise for his 2024 presidential campaign.

Meta’s decision to let Trump back on comes a few months after Elon Musk let the former leader back on Twitter. Prior to his suspension on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, Trump had gotten in trouble multiple times for sharing misinformation.

Trump has yet to post on Twitter since being allowed back on and has stuck to his Truth Social platform instead. But he is reportedly planning a grand reentry to his once favorite social network.

Trump has 34 million followers on Facebook and 23 million followers on Instagram, and he has previously spent millions on Facebook ads. Many experts worry that his being allowed back on social media will increase the spread of misinformation, particularly as the United States gears up for the 2024 election cycle.

One day after Twitter brought back Nazi, white nationalist, and Taliban fan Nick Fuentes to its platform, the company was compelled to ban him; Fuentes spent his inaugural evening back on Twitter proclaiming his “love” for Hitler, talking about the Unabomber’s “salient point,” and tweeting antisemitic conspiracies about Jews secretly controlling Western governments.

“Stop the Steal” organizer and Fuentes ally Ali Alexander, implicated in numerous investigations for his role in seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, was also suspended Wednesday.

While Fuentes and Alexander are gone, however, plenty of other inflammatory and dangerous accounts remain on Twitter. Neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer founder Andrew Anglin, who was reinstated in December, is still happily active, posting homophobic and antisemitic tweets in routine, and A/B testing whether his “anti-woman stuff” plays well with the Twitter algorithm. He expressed disappointment after Fuentes was suspended once again, tweeting, “Oh come on.”

Programmer Travis Brown, who tracks Twitter suspensions, noted that several other accounts were reinstated Tuesday.

These accounts, and others like them, come with records that at best are troublesome or in violation of content policies and, at worst, echo the same kind of rhetoric that Anglin and Fuentes espouse. Patrick Howley, for example, has complained about too many Black people at the Country Music Awards and written that “Zionist and Chinese institutions are genociding white people.”

The haphazard reinstatements—and subsequent bans, as if Twitter couldn’t have anticipated Fuentes behaving exactly as he does on every other platform he still is on—offers little faith in Twitter’s content and safety policies.

It’s been nearly two months since Musk tried welcoming Kanye West, or Ye, back to Twitter; Musk had to resuspend West fairly quickly after the disgraced artist appeared alongside Fuentes on Alex Jones’s show to peddle Nazi propaganda, Holocaust denialism, and support for Hitler. This is not Twitter’s—or its new leadership’s—first rodeo. And still, the company is tinkering with reinstating as many inflammatory accounts as possible and actually having a good deal of them stay while suspensions like Fuentes’s and West’s soak up most of the attention.

All this comes while “journalists” like Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss continue their tired charade of receiving Musk’s own files and wrapping them up as investigations into Twitter’s policy practices under the evergreen “Twitter files”  project. The project has had much of its source material come from the now CEO, who has had more than his fair share of mismanagement. On Tuesday, The Intercept revealed how Musk’s Twitter, in coordination with the Indian government, is censoring a documentary critical of right-wing Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Musk’s Twitter is indeed a win for free speech and transparency; Twitter is standing for free and maximized dissemination of vile hate, and transparently displaying how it’s doing so.