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I met my best friend, Ursula Guidry, in college: a gorgeous, bighearted pre-med student who grew up in Houston near four chemical manufacturing facilities. She became my bridesmaid, and I was hers. Ursula’s mom died when she was a kid, and her dad relocated to Port Arthur where their home overlooked a petroleum storage facility and was near five chemical plants, some just a mile away.
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Ursula died from cancer when her children were in preschool. We’ll never know if her death was pure “bad luck,” or whether it had something to do with growing up amidst plastics-manufacturing facilities.
What we know for certain is that the toxic chemicals emitted by those facilities can ravage the human body.
It’s against that backdrop that I watch Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin work feverishly to dismantle the safeguards protecting people from toxic chemical exposures. He’s exempting the biggest corporate polluters from restrictions on airborne mercury, formaldehyde, and other carcinogens, and has signaled plans to gut the rules protecting communities from chemical disasters, giving giant corporate polluters a free pass to release toxic chemicals and climate-heating gases. This is happening alongside efforts to phase out the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which provides assistance to communities facing catastrophic emergencies, and to zero-out the budget for the Chemical Safety Board, an independent federal agency that investigates the root causes of chemical disasters and makes recommendations to prevent them from reoccurring.
Zeldin also is proposing to revoke the Endangerment Finding, a 2009 scientific determination that the emission of climate-heating gases is harming public health and welfare. Stripping the EPA of the legal basis for controlling climate pollution would put floods, fires, and hurricanes on steroids at the same time that Zeldin dismantles protections against chemical…
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