This was the scene where Columbia students gathered last Thursday for a “peaceful protest art installation” and demonstration organized by the campus chapters of Jewish Voice for Peace and Students for Justice in Palestine. Hundreds of students demanded that Columbia publicly call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest its endowment from corporations complicit in Israeli apartheid, and end its academic programs in Tel Aviv.

The next day, Gerald Rosberg, chair of the Special Committee on Campus Safety, announced Columbia had suspended its chapters of JVP and SJP through the end of the semester, citing an “unauthorized event” that “included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.” The announcement quickly drew widespread criticism, including from hundreds of Jewish faculty who denounced the “vague allegations” that served as grounds for the suspensions.

But amid the backlash, StandWithUs, a self-described “non-partisan Israel education organization,” lauded Columbia’s decision. “StandWithUs sent several legal letters to universities like @Columbia, urging them to immediately hold these groups accountable for the hate, fear, and harassment they incite on campus,” the group wrote on social media. “We hope more universities will follow suit.” 

Alongside Israel advocacy groups like the Brandeis Center, the International Legal Forum, and the David Horowitz Freedom Center, StandWithUs has spent years trying to shut down criticism of Israel on college campuses, often by weaponizing civil rights law. The groups allege that, while the political speech may be protected by the First Amendment, it fosters a campus climate of antisemitism in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits federally funded programs from discriminating on the basis of race, color, or national origin. As students have ramped up pro-Palestinian demonstrations over the past month, Israel advocacy groups have escalated a pressure campaign of their own. 

Earlier this month, StandWithUs sent an open letter to thousands of universities addressed to the general counsel and vice president of student affairs, outlining actions colleges could take to ensure compliance with Title VI. The group’s recommendations include requiring student identification cards at protests, monitoring university communication channels for “biased statements about Israel,” and investigating student groups for ties to Hamas. The group has also sent a surge of direct letters urging administrators to clamp down on specific Palestine solidarity campus events. Meanwhile, on November 9, the Brandeis Center filed two Title VI complaints with the Department of Education against the University of Pennsylvania and Wellesley College. (The Brandeis Center also joined forces with the Anti-Defamation League to call on the presidents of nearly 200 universities to investigate their SJP chapters, alleging they could have ties to Hamas that would constitute “materially supporting a foreign terrorist organization.”)

“If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

According to Dylan Saba, a staff attorney at Palestine Legal, the groups tend to target “pretty mundane examples of pro-Palestine expression … because that’s precisely what these organizations are trying to get rid of.” But as Israel’s military assault over the past month has become “increasingly indefensible for the pro-Israel forces,” it’s spurred a new wave of Title VI threats.

“That’s what’s motivating the strategy to try to raise the stakes of Palestinian expression and organizing by getting universities to try to crack down on it,” said Saba. “If you can’t win the debate because the facts aren’t in your favor, it’s pretty sensible to try to stop it altogether.”

Crackdown at Columbia

The Title VI crusade adds even more fuel to the recent punitive actions against Palestine solidarity student groups. 

Since the start of Israel’s bombing of Gaza, students at Columbia have organized numerous protests, vigils, and rallies in a show of support for civilians in Gaza. As part of a nationwide “Shut it Down for Palestine” walkout on November 9, SJP and JVP arranged an art installation and rally.

One day later, the groups were suspended for the unauthorized event and “threatening rhetoric and intimidation,” making them ineligible to hold campus events or receive school funding for the remainder of the term. 

While university policy requires students to obtain a permit 10 days before an event, violations of policy usually result in a disciplinary proceeding against individual students, not an outright suspension of an entire organization, according to Katherine Franke, a law professor at Columbia University who has been serving as a faculty advocate for the sanctioned students. 

Franke noted that the organizations were suspended by a newly formed group, the Special Committee on Campus Safety, which was created with no advance notice and did not go through the standard University Senate Executive Committee approval process. Columbia’s website does not contain any mention of the Special Committee before the November 10 announcement, which did not elaborate on the new committee’s members or purview. 

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating.”

“We don’t know who’s on it, who created it, what its authority is, under what rules is it operating,” said Franke. Franke has asked Rosberg, the chair of the Special Committee, for more information about the new group and the specific rhetoric that led to SJP and JVP’s sanctioning. She says she has not received a response. 

Additionally, internet archives show Columbia quietly updated its student group event policy some time between June 12 and October 20 to include new language around the sanctioning of student organizations “for failure to obtain event approval and/or not abiding by terms of an approved event.”

“They edited the student conduct rules without any consultation with the groups that normally are required to be consulted,” said Franke. 

Columbia University did not respond to a request for comment.

During her 25-year tenure, Franke noted she’s seen “a lot of demonstrations,” from the Iraq War to 9/11. “All manner of things have been debated, protested, and the university’s structure was able to handle it,” she said. “But somehow, they had to create — without any consultation with any of the responsible governing bodies — a whole new way of dealing with these issues.”

Columbia is one of three private universities that have now sanctioned their SJP chapters in an unprecedented cascade of crackdowns on student organizing around Palestine solidarity. 

Earlier this month, Brandeis University announced an outright and total ban on its SJP chapter, claiming the group “openly supports Hamas.” On Tuesday, George Washington University suspended its SJP chapter from hosting on-campus events for three months.

Roz Rothstein, co-founder and CEO of StandWithUs, wrote in a statement to The Intercept that after the group sent letters to thousands of universities, “many responded privately thanking us for the letter or, in the days after receiving it, taking concrete action on their campuses, such as Columbia, Brandeis, and GWU banning SJP for the rest of the semester.” 

She added, “Other schools have notified us that they have launched independent investigations or task forces to address antisemitism. We look forward to seeing the results of those inquiries.”

Changing Standards

At Pomona College in Claremont, California, student organizers have also been challenged by a shifting web of guidelines. Samson Zhang, an editor of a student publication focused on leftist campus organizing called Claremont Undercurrents, noted that new policies seemed to arise in direct response to specific Palestine solidarity campus actions. 

In one instance, 150 students attended a vigil at the student services center. “It was very intentionally organized so that no club claimed it, and the messaging was that it was organized by everybody and nobody,” said Zhang. “That happened Friday, and by Monday they sent out an email with a new demonstration policy that an event is only compliant with the student code of conduct if there’s a specific student club that it’s registered under.” 

And, on November 7 — the day before a planned divestment protest — Pomona President Gabi Starr sent a letter to students and alumni with a reminder of campus demonstration rules. Claremont Undercurrents reported that one day before Starr’s email blast, StandWithUs sent her a letter expressing concern over the event. The letter urged the administration to take immediate action “to prevent discriminatory treatment of Jewish and Israeli students” and specifically noted that the administration has “the right to prohibit masks worn for the purpose of concealing identity.” Starr’s email similarly states that “masks that prevent recognition of individuals pose a challenge to the ability to maintain campus codes of conduct,” adding that students may be asked to remove them. 

In response to inquiries from The Student Life, a campus newspaper, Pomona’s spokesperson said Starr’s mention of masks “was in response to significant concerns related to our own campus — not in response to any outside organization.”

StandWithUs has targeted Pomona before. In April 2021, the Associated Students of Pomona College voted to ban the use of student government funds on items or companies that “knowingly support the Israeli occupation of Palestine” — a move that triggered a swift condemnation from Starr. That same day, StandWithUs sent a letter praising Starr for her statement and calling on her to use “whatever means at your disposal to invalidate this resolution.” Every student government representative that voted in favor of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions resolution that year was then doxxed on Canary Mission, a secretive website that posts public blacklists of Palestinian rights organizers.

One year prior, in February 2020, the David Horowitz Freedom Center wrote to Starr and Pitzer College President Melvin Oliver, claiming that the colleges had violated Title VI by fostering “pervasive, college-sponsored anti-semitism.” The Southern Poverty Law Center has classified Horowitz as an extremist, noting that “the Freedom Center has launched a network of projects giving anti-Muslim voices and radical ideologies a platform to project hate and misinformation.” 

“Political Cudgel”

A core ask from groups like the David Horowitz Freedom Center and StandWithUs is that university policies adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Association, or IHRA, working definition of antisemitism, which critics say falsely equates broad criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The IHRA definition found new footing in 2019, when then-President Donald Trump signed an executive order instructing federal agencies to “consider” the IHRA definition in Title VI enforcement. 

“IHRA expressly recognizes that criticism of Israel, similar to criticism of other countries, is not antisemitic,” wrote Rothstein of StandWithUs. “And it recognizes that some rhetoric and actions related to Israel do cross the line into bigotry.”

By eliding meaningful differences between critique of Israel and Jewish discrimination, said Saba of Palestine Legal, the groups warp claims of antisemitism into a “political cudgel” to be wielded against students voicing solidarity with Palestine.

The Brandeis Center’s recent Title VI complaint against the University of Pennsylvania conflates disparate events as uniform examples of campus antisemitism. The letter notes recent disturbing attacks against Hillel, a Jewish student organization, including bomb threats and an instance in which a Penn student vandalized the Hillel building and yelled “fuck the Jews.” But the letter also highlights Penn’s “Palestine Writes” literature festival, condemning the September event’s inclusion of speakers “known for their aggressive stance against the Jewish State.”

In November 2022, the International Legal Forum, an Israel-based organization dedicated to “fighting legal battles against terror, antisemitism, and de-legitimization of Israel,” filed a Title VI complaint against the University of California, Berkeley School of Law, after nine student groups banned supporters of Zionism from speaking at their events. In its complaint, the group wrote, “Zionism is an integral and indispensable part of Jewish identity.”

Since its founding in 2001, StandWithUs, which is registered as a nonprofit under the name “Israel Emergency Alliance,” has launched efforts to oppose “anti-Israel bias” in libraries, supported anti-BDS laws, and encouraged supporters to buy Caterpillar stock amid scrutiny over the construction company’s role in Israel’s demolition of Palestinian homes. The group recruits annual student fellows to serve as pro-Israel activists on American campuses nationwide and once invited Elvis Costello on a VIP trip in an attempt to convince the singer to change his mind about canceling concerts in Israel.

Last year, StandWithUs filed a Title VI complaint against George Washington University, after assistant professor of clinical psychology Lara Sheehi hosted a brown-bag lunch with a Palestinian professor, leading to a pressure campaign and an internal investigation that turned up nothing. “Many of the statements the complaint alleges were made by Dr. Sheehi were, according to those who heard them, either inaccurate or taken out of context and misrepresented,” the university said in a summary of its findings at the time, adding that Sheehi had “denounced antisemitism as a real and present danger” in classroom discussion. StandWithUs refuted this characterization. In February, Palestine Legal filed its own Title VI complaint against GWU for a “hostile environment of anti-Palestinian racism,” which cites the Sheehi case among others.

“The byproduct of all of this is that you have now a lot of obfuscation about what the meaning of antisemitism is and what constitutes antisemitism, which is very dangerous for Jewish students on campus,” said Saba. “It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students, which tend to come from the political right.”

“It makes it much more difficult to be able to identify and work to eliminate real instances of antisemitism and threats to Jewish students.”

Meanwhile, many members of the Jewish community are resisting these groups’ efforts to conflate Judaism and Zionism, noting that their faith inspires resistance to injustice, not blanket support for a regime. 

“A lot of institutions across the country, and also at the university, have pushed this idea of a hegemonic Jewish community that all shares the same political beliefs,” said Rafi Ash, a Brown University sophomore who was one of 20 Jewish students arrested during a November sit-in at an administrative building organized by BrownU Jews for Ceasefire Now. “We all have been kind of disturbed by the ways in which a Jewish identity has been twisted in a way that makes it political.”

While the Department of Education is expected to field a new influx of Title VI complaints from organizations representing Jewish students, Saba noted that groups like Palestine Legal have also filed complaints regarding instances of anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and Islamophobic discrimination on campuses. The Department of Education has never made a finding of antisemitic or anti-Palestinian discrimination in any of its investigations so far, though that could soon change as the Israel–Hamas war puts Title VI in the limelight. The American Civil Liberties Union has begun to take legal action over the First Amendment rights of Palestinian solidarity protesters.

“We are in touch with many, many, many student groups across the country, and we are seeing a pattern of heightened scrutiny and suppression,” said Saba. “Fortunately, despite the mass suppressive effort, students are continuing to organize, continuing to speak out, and are refusing to be silenced. We’re seeing one of the largest upsurges in pro-Palestine organizing and demonstration that we’ve ever seen.”

The post Student Protests for Gaza Targeted by Pro-Israel Groups for Alleged Civil Rights Violations appeared first on The Intercept.

The petrochemical industry is now pivoting to another solution: “advanced” recycling. The term, also known as chemical recycling, is used to describe a variety of approaches that can supposedly turn even the most hard-to-recycle plastics into “sustainable” fuels or oils and chemicals that can be used in new plastic production.

But a new, 159-page report, released today by Beyond Plastics and the International Pollutants Elimination Network, or IPEN, casts serious doubt on the technology’s ability to make even a modest dent on the world’s growing plastic burden. In the most comprehensive report on chemical recycling facilities in the U.S. to date, researchers looked at the operations of 11 companies across the country to examine the plastic industry’s claim that chemical recycling can significantly help reduce global plastic pollution.

“The science and data currently available do not support this claim and actually point to the conclusion that chemical recycling would support expansion of plastic production, while potentially causing unacceptable levels of environmental and social harm — as well as impacts on human health — through emissions, waste generation, energy consumption, and contaminated outputs,” the report’s authors write.

The 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste.

Researchers found that, collectively, the 11 facilities have the stated ability to process less than 1.3 percent of America’s annual plastic waste. Additionally, it was unclear if many of the facilities were even operating at their maximum stated capacity.

“For a lot of these plants, how much plastic they’ve actually processed is unknown,” Jennifer Congdon, a report contributor and deputy director of Beyond Plastics, told The Intercept. “There’s no requirement for public disclosure.”

Publicly Subsidized Failure

The lack of transparency surrounding chemical recycling facilities is especially concerning given the fact that five of the 11 plants have received public subsidies in the form of federal grants, state tax abatements, low-interest green bonds, or government loan guarantees.

The Brightmark Energy facility in Ashley, Indiana, for example, has received $4.55 million in grants and tax credits, as well as $185 million in tax-free bonds, according to the report’s findings. However, the plant is still operating in a test phase at one-fiftieth of its publicized capacity, four years after breaking ground.

Despite failing to achieve its production targets, Brightmark attempted to expand to Georgia in 2021 to build what would be the nation’s largest chemical recycling plant. The economic development group of Georgia’s Macon-Bibb County inked a tentative deal to provide $500 million in tax-exempt bonds to finance the construction of the plant, contingent on evidence that Brightmark’s Indiana plant was producing and selling product. Brightmark was unable to provide such evidence, and the project was officially killed in April 2022.

“The Brightmark example is really important, because they were not even fully operating and trying to expand into Georgia,” said Congdon. “Georgia said, ‘You show us that you’re actually making product and selling it, and then we’ll give you this money.’ That didn’t happen. When they’re being held to account to actually prove that they’re viable, in this case with Brightmark, it just didn’t work.”

“The math doesn’t work out.”

At the federal level, various incentives exist that could promote the continued expansion of chemical recycling, including the Department of Energy’s $25 million Strategy for Plastic Innovation, as well as the Inflation Reduction Act, which makes chemical recycling “approaches” eligible for a $10 billion tax credit program, though the report’s authors note that “it is not clear how such approaches are defined.”

“If we’re going to be putting money into projects that are going to address plastic pollution, it should be source reduction strategies,” Congdon said. “I would hope that any public official is doing their due diligence on whether or not they should be using public resources to finance these things. They should actually look into the viability and the pollution before making their choice, and I think the math doesn’t work out.”

A Regulatory Shell Game

Access to public coffers is not the only way the U.S. government has encouraged chemical recycling. Future projects may benefit from a recent spate of state-level laws that have lessened the regulatory burden on so-called advanced recycling. The bills reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing, which faces less stringent environmental guidelines. The American Chemistry Council, the country’s largest petrochemical industry group, has supported the bills with a lobbying push, claiming that solid waste facility permits are often inapplicable to chemical recycling and the change would simply regulate the facilities more accurately.

“There’s an enormous amount of industry-driven hype around chemical recycling and the main reason for that is they don’t want to see legislation at the state or federal level that restricts the production of plastic,” said Lee Bell, policy adviser to IPEN, a network of more than 600 nongovernmental organizations in over 125 countries. “It’s widely agreed that the only way to reduce plastic pollution in a substantive way is to cut production of plastic itself.”

Indeed, the United States’ support for chemical recycling appears to be an outlier in the international field.

At the 2023 Basel Convention, the leading international decision-making body on the movement and disposal of hazardous waste, delegates rejected the inclusion of chemical recycling in global guidance on plastic waste management.

“During the extended negotiations on the matter, over 50 countries objected to the inclusion of chemical recycling in the guidelines on the basis that there was no available independent data to demonstrate that chemical recycling constituted environmentally sound management of plastic waste,” states the Beyond Plastics report. “Despite 50 years of operation of these technologies, no empirical data was presented to demonstrate they met criteria for environmentally sound management.”

Bell, who was a member of the Basel Convention Working Group on the technical guidelines for environmentally sound management of plastic waste from 2019 to 2023, provided more background in an email to The Intercept.

“The Africa region spoke as a group opposing the inclusion of chemical recycling and they represented 54 countries, mainly on the basis that they did not want to become the destination for these technologies, the hazardous waste they create and the toxic emissions they produce, having already experienced the dumping of other wastes from the global north under the guise of ‘recycling,’” Bell wrote. “They were not alone and several other countries also had serious concerns about the lack of data associated with the industry.”

The data that is available about chemical recycling raises serious concerns for public health and environmental risks. A report from the National Resources Defense Council in February 2022 looked at state-level permit data and found that many chemical recycling facilities are permitted to release hazardous air pollutants and “chemicals known or suspected to cause cancer or other serious health effects like birth defects.”

The Beyond Plastics report also cites scientific literature that has found “emissions of persistent, cancer-causing compounds from the chemical recycling facilities or their fuel products,” including dioxins, volatile organic compounds, and heavy metals. The authors conducted a 5-mile analysis around each of the 11 plants using the EPA’s Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool, which found that “eight of the plants are located in areas with lower-than-average levels of income, compared to either state or national averages; and seven have higher-than-average concentrations of people of color than the rest of the state and country.”

“What data we do have raises red flags about this technology,” said Bell. “If we were to see wide-scale scale-up and build-out, we could foresee very, very significant emission impacts and very little to show for it in terms of recycled plastic production.”

The post Unproven “Advanced Recycling” Facilities Have Received Millions in Public Subsidies appeared first on The Intercept.

Head south on state Highway 96, past a stretch of soybean crops and tobacco fields, and you’ll arrive in Zebulon, North Carolina, population 8,665. There, on a quiet stretch of Industrial Drive, sits a nondescript commercial building. It’s easy to miss; the name on the front door is barely legible. But atop that humble three-acre lot lies a leading solution to the global plastic pollution crisis — well, according to the plastic industry.

The facility is home to the 24-hours-a-day, 7-days-a-week operations of Braven Environmental, a company that says it can recycle nearly 90 percent of plastic waste through a form of chemical recycling called pyrolysis. Traditional recycling is able to process only about 8.7 percent of America’s plastic waste; pyrolysis uses high temperatures and low-oxygen conditions to break down the remaining plastics, like films and Styrofoam, ideally turning them into feedstock oil for new plastic production.

The American Chemistry Council, the country’s leading petrochemical industry trade group, claims that chemical recycling will create a “circular economy” for the bulk of the world’s plastic, diverting it from oceans and landfills. Plastic giants have gone so far as to dub the process “advanced recycling,” but environmentalists say this is a misnomer because the majority of the plastic processed at such facilities is not recycled at all. In fact, researchers have found that the process uses more energy and has a worse overall environmental impact than virgin plastic production. Numerous companies have tried and failed to prove that chemical recycling is commercially viable.

Despite these challenges, lawmakers nationwide are now embracing the technology, thanks to a massive lobbying push from the ACC and other petrochemical groups. As of September, 24 states have passed industry-backed bills that reclassify chemical recycling as manufacturing. The change effectively deregulates the process, since manufacturing facilities tend to face less stringent guidelines than waste incinerators.

As one of only seven commercial facilities currently operating in the United States, Braven Environmental is at the vanguard of the growing chemical recycling boom. An Intercept investigation, however, found numerous issues at its Zebulon facility.

A review of meeting minutes, permit applications, and compliance documents reveals that Braven misled the public about the risks of its pyrolysis operation and has potentially endangered human health and the environment through “significant noncompliance” with hazardous waste management regulations. While the ACC has touted Braven as a sustainable success story, documents also show that much of the company’s pyrolysis oil was not converted into useful plastic or fuel — it was disposed of as highly toxic waste.

“Chemical recycling is really a greenwashing technique for burning up a bunch of petrochemicals in a new way, and it’s releasing tons of air pollutants into the environment,” said Alexis Luckey, executive director of Toxic Free NC, in an interview. “What we’re talking about is incinerating carcinogens and neurotoxicants in a community.”

“Hazardous Items, We Have None”

On April 8, 2019, the Zebulon Board of Commissioners held a joint public hearing with the town planning board to gather community feedback on several proposed construction projects. One of the developments on the docket was from a company called Golden Renewable Energy, based in Yonkers, New York. 

Golden Renewable — which changed its name to Braven Environmental in the North Carolina business registry in 2021 — was requesting a special use permit to “locate a refinery and the storage of flammable liquids” on a parcel of land zoned for heavy industry.

According to minutes from the hearing, Meade Bradshaw, former assistant planning director for Zebulon, explained that Braven must show the proposed development “will not materially endanger the public health, safety, or welfare” in order to be granted a special use permit. In response, Ross Sloane, Braven’s business development director, made a series of promises to this effect, painting the company as a safe, family-run operation.

“We’ve never had an incidence in an operation that’s been operating up in New York now for seven years,” Sloane said. “My entire family operates the machine, so I don’t want to lose sleep.”

While Sloane pointed to Braven’s operations in Yonkers as evidence of the company’s safety record, The Intercept’s review of New York State Department of Environmental Conservation records found no indication that the company’s facility in Yonkers has ever been legally permitted to conduct plastic pyrolysis activities.

An air quality permit completed on February 22, 2013, states that the facility’s function was the conversion of vegetable oil to biofuels — a far cry from advanced thermal decomposition of plastic waste. In July 2014, inspectors from the DEC visited the facility and observed plastic waste being accepted and processed without authorization. The company agreed to resolve the violations, pay civil fines, and apply for a modified permit to accept recycled plastics, but the permit was never completed. DEC staff inspected the site again in 2021 and confirmed that Golden Renewable had moved its processing equipment out of state. DEC public records did not contain any additional permit information, and the Yonkers operation is Braven’s only other facility.

Public hearing meeting minutes also show Sloane told the town that Braven does not handle any hazardous materials. “Any kind of material trash, landfill items, hazardous items, we have none,” he said. “We do not contain any kind of hazardous materials. We have nothing that goes into a drain. … It’s all biodegradable.”

This turned out to be false. According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act database, Braven’s Zebulon facility generated and shipped 9.6 tons of hazardous ignitable waste and benzene in 2021 alone. In March of that year, Braven registered with the EPA as a large quantity generator: a facility that generates at least 1,000 kilograms per month of hazardous waste.

One list of warnings in a Braven air permit application reads like a toxicologist’s worst nightmare: The pyrolysis oil may cause cancer and genetic defects, as well as damage to organs, fertility, and unborn children. Other hazards included being “extremely flammable” and “very toxic to aquatic life” with “long lasting effects.”

Stephanie Hall, a parent of students at a nearby K-12 charter school, voiced concerns about air emissions during the hearing in Zebulon. She pointed out that the Braven lot would be adjacent to a community college and a public housing community, as well as only 780 feet from the charter school.

Sloane offered reassurance that Braven would “have no smells or emissions that are emitted to the air.” But when a planning board member asked for more information, he backtracked.

“It’s not a zero-emission process,” he clarified. “We do have an emission of CO2. It’s the exact same CO2 that comes through in your gas logs at your home.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Michael Moreno, Braven’s co-founder and chief commercial officer, wrote, “Braven strives to operate its Zebulon facility safely, responsibly and in compliance with its permits and regulatory requirements. Any discrepancies found are proactively resolved with the agencies involved.”

Braven’s special use permit application notes that the facility will have an exhaust stack but still characterizes the operation as a “closed loop process where all by products are fully contained without being discharged into the atmosphere.” An emissions test report prepared for Braven in March 2020 contradicts this claim, revealing that, in addition to CO2, the company’s plastic pyrolysis emits air pollutants such as carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide, and particulate matter. The report also found that Braven would emit an estimated 5.14 tons of volatile organic compounds per year. It did not specify which VOCs were present, though known human carcinogens like benzene and styrene are commonly found in emissions from petrochemical operations. On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

On the day that I visited the Braven facility and adjacent lots, a faint acrid scent — like burning plastic — was detectable as far as 700 feet away.

Certain industrial facilities must annually report their chemical emissions for inclusion in the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Since pyrolysis facilities are classified by the EPA as waste incinerators, they’re required to meet Clean Air Act guidelines but are excluded from TRI reporting requirements. This makes it difficult to assess the full health risks that Braven and other plastic pyrolysis units could pose to surrounding communities. In April, more than 300 environmental and public health organizations filed a petition with the EPA for the inclusion of waste incinerators in the database.

Ilona Jaspers, director of the Center for Environmental Medicine, Asthma, and Lung Biology at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine, has studied emissions generated from the burning of plastic waste. She called the TRI’s lack of pyrolysis and waste incineration data “a giant loophole.”

“I am all for finding good ways to make plastics into something usable, but the danger of generating air toxics in the process is considerable,” she said. “When we looked at the list of chemicals generated in the emissions of the plastics, a lot of it is not good. It’s kind of terrifying what gets generated when you burn plastics.”

In addition to air pollutants, residents raised the risk of potential water contamination. Hall, a professional engineer with a background in water resources, noted during the public meeting in Zebulon that the building slated to house Braven’s operations was built in 1994, so the lot would not have established stormwater control measures to treat any potential runoff. “You may want to include some sort of sand filter or proprietary stormwater device to help with any incidental spills,” she suggested, since the lot lies near a Federal Emergency Management Agency floodplain.

“When that industrial park was developed, there were no regulations for stormwater control,” Bradshaw, the former assistant planning director, told The Intercept. “Because they’re just occupying an existing building … from a site standpoint, it did not need to meet current regulations. But the commissioners, as part of the special use permit, could’ve made that a condition if they wanted to.”

At a subsequent session, the planning board unanimously recommended denial of the permit, based on “lack of evidence and testimony” showing Braven would not endanger public health and safety. But the planning board’s decision was “just a recommendation,” Bradshaw noted, and did not dictate the final decision. The Board of Commissioners unanimously voted to approve the special use permit on May 6, 2019, under the sole condition that masonry screening be conducted around the fuel tanks.

Braven was up and running by March 2020. Four months in, one major company had already bet big on the nascent operation’s long-term success: To further its “corporate responsibility” goals, Sonoco agreed to deliver its waste plastics to Braven for the next 20 years.

Significant Noncomplier

As part of an unannounced hazardous waste compliance inspection, an environmental specialist from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, or DEQ, visited Braven’s Zebulon facility on September 26, 2022. The details of the resulting compliance report paint an alarming picture of a business operating in stark contrast to the health and safety promises made to Zebulon residents three years prior.

Inspectors cited Braven for numerous regulatory violations, including accumulating more than 400 containers of hazardous waste without a permit over the course of two years, as well as failing to “manage waste material in a manner to prevent it from discharging to the ground and storm drain system.”

The report details one incident in April 2022, when Braven sent 31,080 gallons of hazardous waste to a rented warehouse facility about one mile down the road. The transfer was conducted by a local trucking company, not a licensed hazardous waste transporter, and the warehouse was not permitted to receive such waste. The containers, which contained toxic chemicals like toluene and ethylbenzene, were then disposed of by a waste management service, though the transportation manifests for the disposal contained numerous inaccuracies.

The report also states that Braven generates light, medium, and heavy cut oils through plastic pyrolysis but has been unable to find a buyer for the heavy cut oils. As a result, the oil accumulated in a tank until it was eventually discarded as hazardous waste — twice. “The facility has been unable to demonstrate that it has been or can be legitimately used or recycled,” inspectors wrote.

“It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

“There’s very little actual monitoring data from these facilities that are doing plastic pyrolysis,” Veena Singla, a senior scientist at the Natural Resources Defense Council, told The Intercept. “It’s an open question for a number of these facilities what it is they’re actually producing and what it’s used for.”

Even Braven’s purportedly recyclable products pose substantial risks. In June 2021, Braven announced a “long-term agreement” to supply pyrolysis-derived oils to Chevron Phillips Chemical. The press release did not state outright what the oil will be used as feedstock for, stating only that it will help Chevron “achieve its circularity goals.” However, ProPublica reported in February that one Chevron refinery in Mississippi is turning pyrolysis oil into jet fuel; according to EPA documents, air pollution from the fuel production process could subject nearby residents to a colossal 1 in 4 cancer risk.

The Intercept confirmed that some of the pyrolysis oil at this Chevron facility is indeed supplied by Braven: The chemical name and unique registry number listed in an EPA record obtained by ProPublica matches the details of Braven’s pyrolysis oils found in a North Carolina air quality permit exemption application. Additionally, in July 2022, the EPA published notice in the Federal Register of several new pyrolysis oils manufactured by Braven, including the same one on the EPA record.

Some residents within one mile of Braven were already at an increased risk for environmental carcinogens before the business moved in: One nearby census tract has worse particulate matter and ozone exposure, hazardous waste proximity, and air toxics cancer risk than over 90 percent of the country.

During the town hearing, Sloane had emphasized Braven’s “proactive” safety features; the special use permit application promised “daily inspections.” The compliance investigation, however, noted numerous deficiencies in emergency preparedness, including the absence of a fire extinguisher in the main room where containers of flammable waste were accumulating, some of which were left open and unlabeled.

According to the report, Braven staff admitted that personnel had not conducted weekly inspections, and they were unable to provide documentation that an engineer’s certification had been completed for a hazardous waste tank. Neither safety data sheets for the pyrolysis oils nor an emergency contingency plan had been completed with all required information, and the plan had not been distributed to local emergency authorities.

Additionally, inspectors observed during the visit that oil-contaminated stormwater was being pumped from a containment pit into a storage tote, but the connecting hose was leaking and “dark staining was evident” on the paved area between the pit and the storm drain.

Christopher Serrati, Braven’s manager of operations, told inspectors at the time that the concrete surrounding the storm drain had been “power washed in the past to remove staining.” The report noted an absorbent sock had been placed around the storm drain, and dark staining was present on soil adjacent to the property’s stormwater outfall, indicating hazardous waste may have been discharged to the ground.

Following an assessment period, the North Carolina DEQ cited Braven as a “significant noncomplier” and issued the company an “initial imminent and substantial endangerment order” on April 28, 2023. Braven has not received any state or federal penalties.

“This is an ongoing state lead enforcement matter, and EPA is currently not involved. EPA cannot further comment regarding the facility’s compliance or enforcement activities,” wrote an EPA spokesperson.

As part of a spill remediation plan, the DEQ required that Braven test both stormwater and soil from the contamination sites. Four of the contaminated stormwater samples tested positive for high concentrations of benzene, according to a report submitted to the agency in January. The report notes, however, that Braven believes the high benzene levels can be attributed to oils that were left in the sampling totes.

Top/Left: Braven Environmental received a special use permit to store flammable liquids on Industrial Drive in Zebulon, N.C. Bottom/Right: Birds sit atop a water tower in downtown Zebulon, N.C. Photos: Schuyler Mitchell/The Intercept

“In the past, all waste including dike water was shipped as hazardous waste and therefore, our crew did not realize the new operations and they inadvertently used the old empty oil totes for dike stormwater storage,” wrote Braven. The report states that going forward, “Braven will use only clean totes to store dike stormwater, if any, to avoid any potential hazardous waste conditions for the stormwater totes.” Braven has also installed an oil/water separator for stormwater discharge.

However, Braven’s claim that contaminated stormwater had previously been disposed of as hazardous waste appears to contradict notes in the initial compliance investigation. “Records dated April 2022 documenting shipment of rainwater … were provided after the inspection and document the material was previously disposed of as non-hazardous,” inspectors wrote.

Singla, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, called the storm drain discharge a “big concern.”

“We know that when there’s spills or leaks from industrial facilities, benzene can contaminate surface water, groundwater especially,” Singla said. “If there’s any built environment over that groundwater, the benzene can migrate up through the soil into indoor spaces and then contaminate the air, and people can be exposed that way.”

Related

How the Plastics Industry Is Fighting to Keep Polluting the World

Another report submitted by Braven in June notes “site-specific groundwater investigations have not been conducted,” though a contractor completed a reconnaissance survey of potential “wells, springs, surface-water intakes, and sources of potable water” within 1,500 feet of the facility and did not observe any apparent water supply wells. The contractor said it also contacted the county for more information on potential water sources in the area but did not receive a response.

In late August, a new remedial action oversight report was posted to the DEQ’s public records database. A state chemist’s review of Braven’s soil samples found “evidence of elevated hexavalent chromium and arsenic” in the site’s underlying soil. The state’s report attributes these findings to “a release of waste,” since the results were above the levels found in background samples. Both arsenic and chromium are considered occupational carcinogens by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The state offered Braven two remediation options: complete additional sampling and remove the contaminated soil, or close the impacted areas as a landfill. According to Melody Foote, a public information officer from the DEQ’s Division of Waste Management, Braven completed the additional sampling in late September. The DEQ is waiting for the sampling results and findings report, which is expected in three to four weeks.

Zebulon Commissioner Shannon Baxter called the noncompliance report “extremely disturbing” and noted that the public hearing testimony given in 2019 “appears to be in conflict with how Braven is actually operating.” Baxter was previously a member of the planning board and recommended denial of Braven’s permit in 2019. She noted that her views should not be interpreted as representative of the entire Board of Commissioners.

“I had my concerns as a member of the Planning Board, which is why we voted to recommend denial of the Special Use Permit,” Baxter wrote in a message to The Intercept. “Now, as a Commissioner, I am troubled about how these violations will affect the safety of our Community, especially the students attending school down the road from the Braven facility.”

Aggressive Expansion

A troubled record hasn’t deterred the petrochemical industry from throwing its weight behind Braven in recent months. The company has announced three major executive hires since April, including a chief operating officer, development director, and president and CEO. Heath DePriest, the new COO, previously served in leadership positions at Phillips 66, a petroleum company. A press release notes that CEO and President Jim Simon held roles at the refinery subsidiary of Koch Industries.

In June, Braven announced a new “strategic framework agreement” with another Koch Industries subsidiary, Koch Project Solutions, to “support Braven’s aggressive expansion plans.” The press release cited a new project to be built in the Gulf Coast region, which will allegedly produce 50 million gallons of pyrolysis oil per year.

Braven’s past expansion plans, however, have not materialized. In 2020, the company was the subject of a number of splashy headlines for its plans to invest $32 million in Cumberland County, Virginia, a rural region west of Richmond. Promising the creation of more than 80 new jobs, the project marked the first economic development opportunity for the county since 2009. Braven was slated to break ground in late 2021, but the year quietly came and went, until a sole public update arrived via an article in a Cumberland County newspaper: “Braven No Longer Coming.” The article, published in January 2022, did not explain why Braven had pulled out, and the company declined to comment at the time.

Braven has also been the subject of several legal actions. In 2015, sisters Joan Prentice Andrews and Jane Prentice Goff filed a lawsuit against Golden Renewable in New York, which also named four executives, including co-founders Moreno and Nicholas Canosa, as defendants. The suit claims that the sisters had collectively invested a total of $650,000 in Golden Renewable’s “bio-energy business” after Canosa had given the false impression that the company was “imminently signing a contract” to sell its biofuels to the Pentagon. The suit’s charges included wire fraud, mail fraud, and violations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The case was settled out of court and voluntarily dismissed less than one month after the defendants were summoned.

The following year, a New York court ruled that Golden Renewable owed a different plaintiff over $10,000 in a civil debt lawsuit. The company was also released from a New York state tax warrant in 2018 after paying an outstanding balance of $16,522. In January 2020, Moreno was released from another New York tax warrant along with his wife, totaling over $300,000. After stepping down as Braven’s CEO in April, Canosa remains on the company’s board of managers. Moreno currently still serves as Braven’s chief commercial officer.

In April, Braven announced it had completed a financing round led by institutional investors Fortistar, Arosa Capital, and Avenue Capital, where Moreno also serves as senior managing director. While Fortistar and Arosa have investments in the energy sector, Avenue backs businesses in financial distress — or as it calls them, “good companies with bad balance sheets.”

But any bad balance sheets that Braven might have are unlikely to dissuade the numerous major petrochemical companies now banking on chemical recycling. Last year marked the ACC’s highest lobbying spend on record, up to nearly $20 million. That same year, the group shelled out more than $265,000 for Facebook and Twitter ads focused on promoting chemical recycling. One ACC ad effort included the sponsorship of a promotional video specifically for Braven, which features Canosa and Moreno alongside the ACC’s associate director of plastics sustainability.

Dow, Shell, and Chevron have all invested in developing their own plastic pyrolysis technology, while Exxon Mobil launched one of the largest chemical recycling plants in North America earlier this year, the first of 13 facilities it says it will launch by the end of 2026. Worldwide, the advanced recycling market is projected to grow by 3,233 percent in less than a decade, from $270 million in 2022 to more than $9 billion by 2031.

As chemical recycling spreads, we know from existing studies that the facilities are most likely to harm communities that are already vulnerable and marginalized.

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both.”

“We found that these facilities are commonly sited in places where the surrounding community is disproportionately low income, or disproportionately people of color, or both,” said Singla, who authored a report for the Natural Resources Defense Council on the environmental justice impact of chemical recycling.

Meanwhile, North Carolina could soon become the 25th state to take up the reclassification of chemical recycling. In April, three Republican state Senators introduced Senate Bill 725, which would amend the state’s waste management laws to explicitly note “solid waste management does not include advanced recycling.”

Braven, the only advanced recycling facility in North Carolina, was already exempt from obtaining a solid waste permit, according to Foote, the public information officer. Foote told The Intercept that since Braven processes “recovered material” — defined in state laws as “material that has known recycling potential, can be feasibly recycled, and has been diverted or removed from the solid waste stream” — it is not regulated as “solid waste.”

There has been one recent development that could slow chemical recycling down. In June, the EPA unveiled new proposed rules under the Toxic Substances Control Act that would establish reporting requirements for 18 substances derived from plastic pyrolysis. The agency would require companies to submit their chemical feedstocks for review so the agency can screen them for “impurities,” including PFAS, dioxins, heavy metals, bisphenols, and flame retardants.

The public comment period ended on August 19. The EPA is currently reviewing responses and is targeting early next year for follow-up action, according to a spokesperson.

The ACC, American Petroleum Institute, and Dow were among those who submitted comments urging the EPA to withdraw the proposed new rules.

“The ACC would welcome the opportunity to meet with EPA leadership to clarify misconceptions about advanced recycling,” the ACC wrote, “and invite Agency officials to an advanced recycling facility for a first-hand sense of their operations.”

In response to The Intercept’s request for comment, Ross Eisenberg, president of America’s Plastic Makers from the ACC’s Plastics Division, wrote in a statement, “Progress towards a circular economy can only be achieved with smart, cohesive approaches that avoid inconsistent and conflicting approaches by regulators. … ACC remains committed to working with EPA as a constructive stakeholder in the development of effective, practical, and responsible policies.”

Braven already appears to be pulling from the ACC’s playbook in its efforts to curry favor with state lawmakers. Democrat Deborah Ross, who represents the North Carolina congressional district that includes Zebulon, made a trip to Braven’s facility on August 25.

“I enjoyed meeting and learning from Braven’s innovative leaders and employees this morning in Zebulon,” Ross is quoted as saying in a Braven press release. “I look forward to applying the insights and information I gained during my visit to the important discussions in Congress about advanced recycling technologies.”

The Intercept emailed the compliance report to Ross’s office and asked whether Braven had mentioned the inspection and ongoing remediation efforts before, during, or after the representative’s visit.

“Congresswoman Ross does her best to accommodate invitations she receives from constituents and visits dozens of businesses in her district every year — these tours and constituent meetings should never be interpreted as expressing support for any particular company’s policy positions or business practices,” wrote a spokesperson. “She was not aware of this investigation before touring Braven, nor was it discussed during or after her visit. As a vocal supporter of environmental protections, she takes these allegations seriously and strongly supports NC DEQ’s work to hold companies in our state accountable for harmful waste or activities that threaten our people and our environment.”

The post They Promised “Advanced Recycling” for Plastics and Delivered Toxic Waste appeared first on The Intercept.

The changes to public records laws first came to light when North Carolina’s Republican-controlled General Assembly released its $30 billion budget on Wednesday, following months of negotiations. The bill includes raises for state employees, cuts to income taxes, and an expanded school voucher program — as well as sneaky language that will deal a major blow to government transparency in the state. 

Buried deep in the 625-page budget is a provision overturning a state law that made legislators’ redistricting communications and drafting documents part of the public record once the new electoral maps became law. 

The repeal of that provision will go into effect in 10 days, dropping a veil of secrecy over a contentious issue that has roiled North Carolina state politics for decades. 

“It’s critical to understand from the public’s perspective how rules related to voting and elections come into being.”

“Electoral maps are the core of representative democracy. It’s critical to understand from the public’s perspective how rules related to voting and elections come into being,” said Brooks Fuller, director of the North Carolina Open Government Coalition. “This was a really important carve-out, and it’s very clear from the way that it’s written that the General Assembly thought this was important to North Carolinians. Apparently that’s changed.”

While the state’s public records act grants broad exemptions for messages sent between lawmakers and their staff during the legislative drafting process, one statute included a special carve-out for redistricting. The law noted that “present and former legislative employees may be required to disclose information otherwise protected” by legislative confidentiality laws if that information pertained to redistricting plans that had been enacted.

After both chambers of the Legislature swiftly voted to pass the budget on Thursday, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper announced Friday morning that he would let it go into effect without his signature, citing the bill’s failure to expand Medicaid. While Cooper had initially said he was “strongly considering” vetoing the budget, Republicans hold an overriding, veto-proof majority in both chambers of the Legislature. (The House gained its Republican supermajority after Rep. Tricia Cotham controversially changed her party affiliation in April.)

Additional sections of the budget chip away at the state’s public records act more broadly, stipulating that legislators have sole discretion over whether to “reveal any document, supporting document, drafting request, or information request made or received by that legislator while a legislator.” 

North Carolina lawmakers were already designated custodians of their own records but had to claim a specific exemption in order to withhold requested documents. The new language tightens the legislative privileges that were already in place, granting lawmakers the authority to decide which of their records they want to make public and which they want to destroy or dispose of.

“This is profoundly contrary to the state’s commitment to open and transparent government,” said Sarah Ludington, director of the First Amendment Clinic at the Duke University School of Law. “There is literally nothing to be gained by increasing the secrecy of government actions.”

Supreme Court Case

The move to shield legislative records from the public, particularly those related to redistricting, is especially troubling given the long and heated legal battle over gerrymandering in the state. 

On June 27, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 against North Carolina state legislators in a key redistricting case, Moore v. Harper. The suit made its way to the nation’s highest court after Republican lawmakers appealed the North Carolina Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to strike down a gerrymandered congressional map, ruling that it violated the state’s constitution. 

The U.S. Supreme Court case was closely watched by legal scholars, as the petitioners invoked an extreme reading of the controversial “independent state legislature theory” to argue their side.

North Carolina Republicans contended that the United States Constitution grants state legislatures unchecked authority over the administration and regulation of federal elections — even if it entails partisan gerrymandering that flies in the face of judicial rulings. The same theory was also pushed by President Donald Trump’s allies in their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. As House speaker, Rep. Tim Moore led the Republicans’ Supreme Court appeal — a case that bears his name — and now serves as a central figure in the state budget negotiations.

While the Supreme Court decision marked a cautious victory for the democratic process, the North Carolina high court had already reversed its own ruling on the gerrymandering case in April. “Courts are not intended to meddle in policy matters,” Chief Justice Paul Newby wrote in the majority decision.

The ruling cleared the way for the Republican-dominated Legislature to draw electoral districts that would heavily favor the party. It also spoke to the see-sawing nature of North Carolina state politics: The state Supreme Court struck down the gerrymander in 2022, when it held a Democratic majority. Following the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans flipped the court and proceeded to reverse the decision.

“Our state is so incredibly purple,” said Ludington. “If our state was districted so that our state representatives actually mirrored the voter registrations in the state, we would have razor-thin majorities in both House and Senate at the state level.”

“Whichever party’s in charge, the only way to hold them accountable is to have robust rights of access to documents that show their deliberations.”

Ludington emphasized that the public records changes in the budget are a “transparency and accountability issue” rather than a partisan one. “Whichever party’s in charge, the only way to hold them accountable is to have robust rights of access to documents that show their deliberations,” she said. 

North Carolina’s Democratic Party has also participated in legally dubious gerrymandering over the course of the state’s history. In a major 1993 case, the Supreme Court found that a “bizarre” Democratic-drawn congressional map violated the Constitution as an act of racial gerrymandering because it attempted to combine as many Black voters as possible into a single district across 160 miles. 

Democrats ruled the state Legislature for more than 100 years until 2010, when the Republican Party took control and redrew the electoral maps to give their party an edge. Since then, redistricting has sparked a spate of lawsuits from groups like the NAACP and Common Cause. 

The public records law was broad enough to allow lawyers to get discovery documents for cases like the recent constitutional litigation, but the new changes will restrict everyone’s access to the records, including reporters investigating government wrongdoing.

“Formerly we could use the public records act to compel disclosure of critical public information,” said Fuller, the North Carolina Open Government Coalition director. “Now, we’re totally at the whims of our benevolent legislators, if they choose to be. We don’t have a lot under these new laws that’s going to compel the sharing of information.”

The post North Carolina GOP Hides Redistricting Process From State Public Records Law appeared first on The Intercept.

“It’s a drastically medically underserved area already, so our services really were essential to the community here,” Sandra Duran, director of communications for Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, told The Intercept. “We had patients coming to this health center from Arizona, from neighboring states, and it really became such a beacon of hope for so many.”

Bordering Mexico to the south and Arizona to the east, Imperial County is home to both the arid Colorado Desert and a severe medical desert. The rural county has one of the highest teen birth rates in California, and the loss of the Imperial Valley clinic leaves El Centro residents without another abortion provider for roughly 90 miles. The region has the second-lowest median income of any California county, with 17.3 percent of its residents living below the poverty line. The U.S. Census estimates that 86 percent of the county’s population is Hispanic or Latino.

“Maternal healthcare in El Centro is pretty bleak,” Eleanor Grano, a reproductive rights advocate who grew up in the city, wrote in a message to The Intercept. She noted that the El Centro Regional Medical Center closed its maternity ward in January, consolidating with a hospital about 15 miles away.

“We see a lot of patients who are low-income. We see a lot of patients who don’t have health insurance,” said Duran. “We see a lot of patients where Planned Parenthood is their primary source of health care, who do not have anywhere else to go to get access to basic health care services.” 

Some of these patients are also clients at WomanHaven, a domestic violence response agency in El Centro that provides emergency shelter and legal assistance to survivors. WomanHaven’s executive director, Gina Vargas, called Planned Parenthood “a great need in the community.”

Vargas noted that, as a facility located in a border town, WomanHaven sees many domestic violence survivors who lack documentation. “One of the common fears is that when they do have children, they’d be stripped of them,” Vargas said. “So they endure the abuse for a longer period of time, because they’re not informed of what their choices are. A lot of them are not allowed to take care of their health or reproductive care, because that abuser also holds that control over them.”

Duran, of Planned Parenthood, said that the facility had seen a substantial increase in out-of-state patients since 2022, particularly due to the lack of reproductive health care access in neighboring Arizona, where abortions are currently banned after 15 weeks.

The fall of Roe subjected Arizona residents to several confusing legislative shifts regarding the status of abortion care. Arizona providers initially halted abortion services after the Dobbs decision out of concern for a 2021 “personhood” law that granted legal rights to unborn children. Services restarted in July 2022, when a federal judge ruled the law could not be used to levy criminal charges against abortion providers. In December, after another protracted legal battle, an appeals court struck down a Civil War-era law that would have enacted a near-total ban on abortion in the state.

The Calexico Chronicle, an Imperial Valley news outlet, reported that fire crews were dispatched to the Planned Parenthood around 1:45 a.m. on Tuesday. The blaze had begun in a pile of items donated to the Salvation Army Thrift Store, which shares a fence line with the clinic.

“At this time, we are unsure of the cause of the fire and are working with officials to complete a full investigation,” Darrah DiGiorgio Johnson, president and CEO of Planned Parenthood of the Pacific Southwest, said in a statement. While the Imperial Valley clinic is closed, Planned Parenthood is directing patients who need in-person services to other clinics in San Diego and Riverside counties, while continuing to provide gender-affirming care through telehealth.

Although the cause of the fire is unknown, the loss of the clinic is a stinging reminder of another recent fire at a Southern California abortion clinic. On March 13, 2022, Planned Parenthood’s Costa Mesa Health Center in Orange County was firebombed with a Molotov cocktail. Last month, charges were announced against a third man for his alleged involvement in the attack. “Officials allege that Batten, along with two other men, including a U.S. marine, conspired to attack a women’s health clinic because it had provided reproductive health services,” The Guardian reported.

A report from the National Abortion Federation found a “sharp increase” in violence directed at abortion clinics last year, including arson, burglaries, death threats, and invasions. While President Joe Biden’s administration has prosecuted some of this anti-abortion extremism under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances, or FACE, Act, it has also used the same federal law to crack down on reproductive rights advocates. Earlier this year, the Justice Department announced FACE Act charges against four abortion rights activists for allegedly spray painting a crisis pregnancy center: a type of facility that claims to offer reproductive health services but disseminates misleading, anti-abortion information.

The Imperial Valley Planned Parenthood itself faced opposition from anti-abortion groups. The clinic opened amid substantial pushback and was initially only able to provide non-abortion services, as El Centro’s fire chief declined to sign off on a fire safety clearance. The clearance was granted after Planned Parenthood sued the chief and the city of El Centro. 

“We’ve seen some really tough times. And unfortunately this is just another dark day in those times,” Duran said. “But we’re absolutely committed to rebuilding in the community. … This absolutely will not stop us from fulfilling our mission and getting the people the care that they need.”

The post Clinic Fire Deals Blow to Abortion Access on California-Arizona Border appeared first on The Intercept.

“We’ve been taking people’s information and compiling a list,” said McGuire. “We’re going to take it to Norfolk Southern to try to get them to assist with veterinary costs.”

The list will be one of several requests for compensation made by East Palestine residents to Norfolk Southern after one of its trains derailed on February 3, releasing hazardous chemicals and igniting a large blaze. Fearing an explosion, officials ordered residents to evacuate and conducted a controlled burn of the cars’ spilled contents, which included a toxic chemical called vinyl chloride. Five days later, residents were permitted to return home. But as reports have mounted of mysterious symptoms afflicting both humans and pets, and new information has surfaced about previously unreported toxic chemicals detected at the crash site, East Palestine residents are wondering if there’s still cause for concern.

A prime worry is the train’s release of vinyl chloride. The chemical — which is primarily used to make a plastic called polyvinyl chloride, or PVC — is classified as a Group A human carcinogen by the Environmental Protection Agency and releases even more toxins when burned. PVC is commonly found in many products, including water pipes, medical devices, and vinyl flooring and siding. The environmental and health effects associated with the plastic’s production are well documented. The process exposes workers and surrounding communities not only to vinyl chloride, but also to asbestos and the industrial “forever chemicals” known as PFAS. What’s more, PVC is made with fossil fuels extracted from hydrofracking sites, which unleash enormous amounts of greenhouse gases that fuel the climate crisis.

Despite these risks, global PVC usage is on an uptick, and its market is projected to grow. While the latest disaster has brought renewed attention to the dangers of vinyl chloride, the incident is but one symptom of a troubling larger trend — one that’s been abetted by industry groups like the Vinyl Institute, which has poured millions of dollars into convincing the public, with the help of Democratic and Republican lobbyists alike, that PVC is safe and sustainable.

Deadly Fires and Damaging Pollution

The Vinyl Institute has long been a powerful force in Washington, D.C., but its dealings are rarely scrutinized. Founded in 1982, the group describes itself as “the voice for the PVC/vinyl industry” and represents vinyl, vinyl chloride monomer, and vinyl additive manufacturers, with an industry valuation of $54 billion. Its roster of members includes four petrochemical giants with disturbing safety records: Formosa Plastics, Westlake, Shintech Inc., and OxyVinyls, an affiliate of Occidental Petroleum’s OxyChem subsidiary.

Both Formosa and Westlake have seen multiple fires and explosions at facilities where chemicals for PVC are manufactured. In 2004, five workers suffered fatal injuries when vinyl chloride caused a massive blast at a Formosa PVC plant in Illinois; other flammable chemicals caused similar events in Point Comfort, Texas, in 2005 and 2013. Westlake experienced two explosions within five months at its Louisiana plants, injuring at least 29 workers total in September 2021 and January 2022. Shintech, a subsidiary of Shin-Etsu Chemical Co. and the world’s largest PVC producer, made local headlines in 2011 when two of its workers died after being overcome by an undetermined chemical at the company’s vinyl chloride plant in Plaquemine, Louisiana.

All four companies have reached settlements in cases brought by the federal government under the Clean Air Act. According to data from the nonprofit watchdog Good Jobs First, Formosa, Westlake, Shintech, and OxyVinyls have been cited a collective 245 times for safety and environmental violations since 2000, totaling a whopping $50,414,804 in fines. These fines include penalties from the Federal Railroad Administration for violations of hazardous materials transportation laws, an issue at the heart of the East Palestine disaster.

When reached for comment, a Westlake spokesperson referred The Intercept to a June 2022 press release on the company’s latest settlement. “Westlake’s commitment to safety is fundamental to the company’s values, and that commitment is to both our employees and to the communities in which we operate,” stated the release. Shintech and OxyVinyls did not respond to requests for comment.

The companies have also faced civil lawsuits, such as in 2019, when a judge deemed Formosa a “serial offender” and found its Point Comfort plant in “enormous” violation of state-issued permits and federal clean water laws. The company agreed to pay $50 million for its unlawful discharge of billions of plastic pellets into Lavaca Bay, making it the largest Clean Water Act settlement filed by private citizens. “At Formosa we firmly believe that economic development and environmental protection follow the same path and are the way that business must be conducted. Over the past several years, we have been integrating the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) into our company culture and we will continue along that path,” said Fred Neske, Formosa’s executive director of environment, safety, and communications, in a statement.

These incidents might come as a surprise to anyone who reads the Vinyl Institute’s website, which describes the vinyl industry as one with “a commitment to sustainability and a track record of continuous improvement.”

“Certainly, PVC is not sustainable,” said Dr. Jimena Díaz Leiva, science director at the Center for Environmental Health. “It’s a plastic that generates an enormous amount of greenhouse gas emissions and requires the use of very many toxic chemicals in its manufacture. I think any claims of sustainability are really misleading.”

Promoting and Defending

The vinyl lobby has poured millions of dollars over the years into convincing lawmakers otherwise. One of the Vinyl Institute’s stated priorities is to “promote and defend the image and reputation of vinyl and the industry from those who make false claims and disparage our products in the public discourse.” To accomplish this, the group spent $540,000 last year — its highest spend on record, up from $336,000 just two years ago.

A number of firms have been employed to assist with these efforts. In 2019, the group brought on the legal outfit Hogan Lovells, whose lobbyists include Ivan Zapien, former chief of staff to New Jersey Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez and former director of outreach for the House Democratic Caucus. Zapien’s Hogan Lovells biography boasts of his “deep networks across both House and Senate Democrats.” At the Vinyl Institute’s 2020 Vinyl360 conference, these networks were on full display: The event featured a conversation with Menendez’s then-chief of staff Fred Turner.

The Vinyl Institute added theGROUP to its cadre of influence peddlers in 2021. Since then, disclosures show that lobbyists Jorge Aguilar, Sudafi Henry, and Kwabena Nsiah have “monitored proposals relating to the manufacturing, production and taxation of products made with polyvinyl chloride.” All three have deep ties to the Democratic Party’s establishment. Aguilar worked for Rep. Nancy Pelosi for nearly a decade, including as executive director of her campaign for Congress, and served on campaigns for conservative anti-abortion Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar and former President Barack Obama. Henry and Nsiah are both connected to President Joe Biden; Henry served as his director of legislative affairs from 2009 to 2017 and Nsiah as the chief of staff to senior Biden adviser Cedric Richmond from 2019 to 2021. Nsiah has also worked as a policy adviser to the House Democratic Caucus, a senior adviser to the congressional Joint Economic Committee, and as an aide to former Rep. Xavier Becerra, now Biden’s secretary of health and human services. Politico has described theGROUP as one of the “fastest-growing, Democrat-heavy firms,” noting that the firm’s annual lobbying revenues “more than doubled from $3.6 million in 2020 to $7.5 million in 2021.” Hogan Lovells and theGROUP did not respond to requests for comment.

The Vinyl Institute’s lobbyists are not limited to Democrats. Its ranks include Stuart Jolly, the former national field director for Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, who worked with the industry group from 2017 to 2020. Jolly has long been active in conservative politics, including helping launch a Koch-funded political advocacy group called Americans for Prosperity and serving as the political director of one of the leading super PACs behind Trump’s 2020 campaign. During the same time as his efforts with the Vinyl Institute, he was subcontracted as a D.C. lobbyist by the government of Qatar.

“They are some of the best people that I’ve had an opportunity to work with,” said Jolly, when asked about the Vinyl Institute. “They love the environment like everybody else.”

Leaching and Breaching

The lobbyists work in support of the Vinyl Institute’s policy aims, which include pressuring Congress to require “open competition” in designing and bidding on water infrastructure, in order to ensure that PVC pipes are included in considerations. Critics have argued that the phrase “open competition” is misleading, as most states do not prohibit plastic water pipes. A 2017 New York Times story noted, “Opponents of the industry-backed bills, including many municipal engineers, say they are a thinly veiled effort by the plastics industry to muscle aside traditional pipe suppliers.”

Bluefield Research predicts that 80 percent of domestic water pipes will be made of plastic by 2030, despite studies suggesting that plastic pipes can leach chemicals into the water supply and that gasoline and other pollutants in soil and groundwater can breach the pipes’ walls. Additionally, Leiva, of the Center for Environmental Health, noted that as climate change intensifies, so does the risk of wildfires around urban areas, which can melt plastic pipes. “This can release a lot of toxic chemicals, things like dioxins, which are really, really potent toxics.”

In May 2019, more than 50 leaders in the vinyl industry convened in Washington to ask Congress to co-sponsor the Water Quality Protection and Job Creation Act, which proposed an increase in federal funding for water infrastructure, while also including carveouts for open competition. In a news blurb on the lobby group’s site, Dick Heinle, chair of the Vinyl Institute and general manager of the vinyl division of Formosa Plastics, is quoted as saying, “It is critically important that members of Congress hear directly from the vinyl industry before they vote on legislation like infrastructure, trade, and open competition. Our meetings in D.C. made a difference in growing more support for the industry.” The bill has not yet been signed into law.

The group has mobilized against efforts to ban toxic chemicals and decrease plastic reliance, including opposing the MICRO Plastics Act of 2020 and the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act of 2021. The vinyl industry also fought the Alan Reinstein Ban Asbestos Now Act, which proposes phasing out the “manufacturing, processing, use and commercial distribution of all six types of asbestos” over two years. At a hearing in June 2022, vinyl representatives argued against the asbestos ban, claiming it would “potentially create a major public health crisis in the availability of drinking water.”

In response to a request for comment, the Vinyl Institute’s vice president of marketing and communications, Susan Wade, stated that the group “supports an open bidding process because it allows for transparency and increased competition where all water pipe material options can bid.” Wade added that the Vinyl Institute opposes the Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act “because, if passed, plastic production will increase overseas in countries that have occupational safety and health regulations and environmental protection laws that are commonly less stringent than the regulations in the United States.”

Disclosures show the group’s lobbyists discussing the legislation and regulation of polyvinyl chloride with lawmakers and advocating for the weakening of the EPA’s Environmentally Preferable Purchasing program. The EPP encourages governments to purchase products determined to have fewer negative effects on human health and the environment, which, perhaps tellingly, the vinyl industry claims harms its ability to thrive.

Regulations concerning polyvinyl chloride particularly impact low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, where most PVC manufacturing plants are located. In a brief on vinyl chloride, the Natural Resources Defense Council called “exposure to this toxic chemical not only an issue of health and the environment, but also an issue of environmental justice.”

“It feels like an inevitability that we’ll have more disasters like East Palestine, given the growing dependence on and production of plastics and the lack of oversight.”

But thanks to strong congressional allies, the PVC industry isn’t slowing down. All four of the Vinyl Institute’s full members have announced multimillion– or billion-dollar expansions to their PVC production capabilities in recent years. Next month, vinyl manufacturers from across the country will attend the Vinyl Institute’s annual Congressional Fly-in in D.C. As fly-in guests attend meetings at the Hogan Lovells office and chat with members of Congress at the Capitol Hill Club, residents of East Palestine will likely still be rebuilding after the vinyl chloride spill, attending health checkups, and seeking guidance on how to keep themselves safe.

“It feels like an inevitability that we’ll have more disasters like East Palestine, given the growing dependence on and production of plastics and the lack of oversight,” said Leiva. “It’s really unfortunate that PVC is still in the conversation knowing what we know about its toxicity. I don’t think that it has any place in our world.”

The post The Myth of Safe Plastics Persists, Despite Risk of Disasters Like East Palestine appeared first on The Intercept.

“The more information that is gathered, the more powerful the system becomes,” the narrator tells us. “The piece of the puzzle missing … is you.”

This is “NextCity,” Cubic Transportation Systems’ idea of a smart city: an urban area that uses technology and networked data to optimize functioning and mobility.

Over the past decade, Cubic has taken the first steps toward actualizing its vision by snapping up contracts for the development of mobile-based, contactless fare collection systems in eight of America’s 10 largest public transit networks. Gone are the days of cumbersome tokens and flimsy farecards; now, millions of bus and subway riders can pay their fare directly by hovering a smartphone or credit card over a reader.

Transit authorities have embraced tap-to-pay technology for its convenience and speed, but privacy advocates are worried that the new fare collection systems pose serious surveillance and security risks. The concerns came to the fore as New York City’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or MTA, rolled out OMNY, a fare payment system backed by Cubic that’s slated to fully replace MetroCards by the end of 2023. Nevertheless, Cubic’s widespread use of touchless, mobile-based reader technology is sprouting up everywhere — including places like San Francisco and Miami, where public transit riders would need to dig deep into city documents to find Cubic’s roles.

Cubic is a privately held corporation with broad and varied interests. In addition to its transit operation, Cubic is a vast military contractor doing hundreds of millions of dollars in business with the U.S. military and sales to foreign militaries. The company supplies surveillance technologies, training simulators, satellite communications equipment, computing and networking platforms, and other military hardware and software. Most of the headlines Cubic garners, though, stem from its increasingly indispensable role in public transit systems across the world.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it.”

As Cubic’s quiet grip on fare collection takes hold in more cities, the company’s ability to process rider data grows with it, creating a sprawling corporate apparatus that has the extraordinary potential to gather up reams of information on the very people it is supposed to serve. In some cases, its access to that information is explicit in the transit systems’ privacy policies.

“I’m deeply concerned about how the development of smart cities creates growing incentives for companies like Cubic to aggregate our data and then sell it to police, ICE, and other agencies,” said Albert Fox Cahn, founder and executive director of the Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “Right now, our data is a huge part of the product, with almost no safeguards against these sorts of abuse.”

Cubic did not respond to a request for comment.

Turnstiles and Military Systems

The privacy concerns around Cubic would be acute even if its interests were limited to transit, but the company wears dual hats as ubiquitous public service provider and defense contractor.

Cubic Transportation Systems is but one division of Cubic Corporation. The company’s other concerns revolve around providing technologies to U.S. and other security forces. The defense contractor, Cubic Mission and Performance Solutions, handles Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Cyber, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance — or C5ISR — capabilities for the U.S. military. And Cubic also owns a variety of subsidiaries, including Abraxas Corporation, which supplies counterintelligence and cybersecurity software to agencies working in national security.

Since 1992, U.S. government agencies have awarded Cubic’s defense wing and its subsidiaries billions of dollars in contracts, including more than $42.1 million from the Department of Defense this year alone. One of Cubic’s largest contracts came in 2020, when the Pentagon awarded the company $193.3 million for work on training systems, with over half of the money allocated to foreign military sales in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Morocco, Oman, Poland, Qatar, Singapore, Australia, and the U.K.

Cubic has also provided key support for U.S. drone operations. The company received $1.4 million from the U.S. Air Force in 2018 for Predator/Reaper training software, and in 2020, it signed a cooperative agreement with U.S. Special Operations for the research and development of intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance technologies related to drones. Cubic also sells surveillance technologies; a subsidiary that sells video enhancement software has clients including the New York Police Department, U.S. Secret Service, and military criminal investigators.

The defense contracting business runs in parallel to the transit work — where Cubic’s reach is also international. The company has implemented contactless payment technology in other major cities globally, including London, Sydney, and Vancouver. It controls about 70 percent of the market for public transit fare collection across the U.S., U.K., and Australia.

In 2013, when the Chicago Reporter flagged that the company responsible for Chicago’s Ventra system — cards for public transit — had national security ties, a Cubic Corporation spokesperson insisted that the transportation and defense wings were “entirely separate entities and not connected through anything but ownership.”

In annual reports, however, the company emphasized the benefits of its “Living One Cubic” ethos. The reports describe the touchless reader at the center of Cubic’s transit business as “an innovation developed through engineering collaboration” across both divisions of the company. The 2019 annual report also cites the launch of a new internal product management system that will facilitate the sharing of “technical information and data amongst our engineering teams and the overall company.”

The notion of “One Cubic” is also on display in lobbying disclosures. While Cubic has spent massive sums on more than two decades of defense-industry lobbying, Cubic Corporation has put lesser, though still significant funding into lobbying on transit issues; in 2015, the company started directing its resources into “promot[ing] Cubic transportation technology solutions.” In 2019, the company pushed for the “adoption of integrated fare payment and mobility as a service solutions” — corporate jargon for its mobile-based fare collection systems and public-private transit partnerships.

Often, Cubic Corporation’s defense and transportation lobbying is targeted at the same lawmaker or handled by the same firm, with disclosures listing House and Senate defense authorizations alongside federal transportation appropriations.

For Bill Budington, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the soft wall between Cubic’s transportation and military businesses raises questions that have yet to be addressed by transit authorities about the risks that personal data could move between the two sides of the company.

“I think it depends on the overlap, and whether the technologies employed are bleeding over to the other side of the company,” said Budington. “And whether the typical concerns, when it comes to the privacy and security of data that’s being handled for the public, are lessened by the fact that you’re part of the intelligence community that is looking for targets and employing military technologies overseas.”

He added, “That is something that should be raised to the public, and there should be a public debate about it. And I don’t think that there has been.”

Vague Privacy Policy

The Cubic Corporation’s privacy policy outlines the notably lenient guidelines governing the use of data provided both through Cubic’s own website and its contracts with clients. The sharing of personal information is permitted among recipients, including Cubic’s family of companies, affiliates, and subsidiaries; external auditors; police, regulators, government agencies, and judicial or administrative authorities; and third parties connected with mergers and acquisitions.

The company also says it may share information “where disclosure is both legally permissible and necessary to protect or defend our rights” and in “matters of national security.” Personal data may be stored for up to 10 years.

Cubic’s privacy policy allows data sharing between corporate divisions only if it’s for the product being delivered, not for ancillary business practices. However, Cahn said that it’s difficult to know what corporate firewalls are truly in place when dealing with private companies.

“I think this highlights one of the broader design tensions with smart cities infrastructure,” Cahn said. “Oftentimes, we have a misalignment of incentives, where companies have every reason to look for ways to monetize our most intimate data, or as a government tracking tool, rather than having incentives to truly keep that information protected.”

The guidelines for the MTA’s touchless system OMNY have been criticized for their weakness. The Surveillance Technology and Oversight Project found in a 2019 report that the policy permits the MTA and Cubic to store users’ personal data indefinitely, allowing law enforcement and other government agencies access to that and other information. The touchless system’s predecessor, the MetroCard, which Cubic designed and implemented in 1992, already enables enforcement agencies to track users’ whereabouts.

“There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

Recent media reports noted that, because OMNY links credit card information to a user profile by design, location tracking could be connected to names, payment cards, and any other information web tracking and data scraping could tie to the account. According to TransitCenter, a group focused on improving public transportation in cities, OMNY would elevate tracking capabilities to a “near-instantaneous” level.

The MTA’s OMNY privacy policy stipulates that Cubic and other vendors must adhere to privacy practices “at least as stringent” as those in the OMNY policy. Other Cubic-designed systems, though, do not disclose such restrictive rules. The Chicago Ventra program policy simply authorizes the sharing of personal information with Cubic, provided it “maintain[s] the confidentiality of the information” and uses it only as necessary for administering the program.

Budington, of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Intercept that phrases such as “necessary to provide services” or “as permitted by law” raise red flags. This vague language cannily obscures any specifics of what the company is doing with the provided data.

“This is why we at EFF are big advocates for city council ordinances when surveillance technologies are employed on a population,” he said. “There should be some kind of oversight body that is making sure the new surveillance technology that’s employed isn’t going to violate the privacy rights of individuals.”

Public Service, Private Equity

Cubic Corporation had been publicly traded since it was founded in 1959, but in May 2021, Veritas Capital and Evergreen Coast Capital paid roughly $3 billion to take the company private. Veritas also owns the Department of Homeland Security’s biometrics database and has acquired business units of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, and other defense contractors. One critic has suggested that Cubic’s recent acquisition by the private equity firms could exacerbate the company’s lack of interest in safeguarding users’ data.

Cubic’s defense industry ties highlight a stark paradox: Public transit is widely viewed as an essential public service, but the private contractors that enable the systems may have corporate incentives that don’t align with the goal of a common good. For instance, though the MTA has pushed back against privacy advocates’ concerns, Cubic’s own documents emphasize that it has broad ambitions for the use of rider data.

A brochure for the back-end analytics tool that Cubic offers to transit agencies boasts that the technology can enable transit authorities to search and visualize large datasets to “make discoveries” and “identify trends.” The software can also aggregate and anonymize personally identifiable information, turning that information into “an analytics-ready dataset that can be securely consumed for research, monetization schemes, and other internal and external purposes.” Experts have noted that even purportedly anonymized data holds privacy risks, as it is often possible to re-identify users with their personal information.

The company’s vision for NextCity would join data collected by Cubic with other smart-city infrastructure to “build a model for real-time data gathered across a transportation network.” Cubic Corporation’s annual reports outline how it aims to expand its portfolio beyond fare collection to include ride and bike sharing, tolls and parking, and traffic congestion reduction. Toward these ends, Cubic Corporation has acquired multiple companies in recent years that are focused on smart city technologies, including GRIDSMART, which supplies cameras to enable real-time traffic monitoring, and Delerrok, an electronic fare-collection system.

For now, cities with Cubic’s mobile-based payment systems also offer the option to purchase fare cards with cash, albeit for an additional $5, at select retailers. Individual people concerned with their privacy might opt for this method despite the convenience of OMNY and similar systems.

Despite the workarounds, transit authorities in major metropolitan areas are increasingly letting any notion of privacy fall by the wayside. As an increasing number of metropolitan areas embrace the concept of smart cities, the privacy risks associated with the technology are poised to grow — until, eventually, everyone’s choice between convenience and privacy might be made for them.

The post Meet the Military Contractor Running Fare Collection in New York Subways — and Around the World appeared first on The Intercept.

For the 17 years that the Josephs have lived in Wake County, North Carolina, they’ve been patrons of the local EMS subscription program. They pay an annual household fee of $60, and in exchange, Wake County EMS promises to waive any costs of 911 ambulance services not covered by insurance. When the Josephs needed to call an ambulance once before, their subscription covered them as planned.

Yet this time, a $236 insurance bill landed in the Josephs’s mailbox. Because an ambulance from neighboring Johnston County had been dispatched to their home, the ride was not covered under the Wake County plan. Johnston County EMS has its own subscription program, but the counties don’t offer reciprocal coverage.

“I wasn’t even aware at the time what ambulance it was,” said Bobbie. “I didn’t care at that moment, because the main thing I knew was that I needed attention immediately, and I was not able to move.”

The Intercept found at least 24 states, from California to Pennsylvania, where public, non-profit, or for-profit EMS agencies have adopted similar models. Almost all of them trumpet the central benefit of relieving consumers from the pitfalls of surprise ambulance bills, while also providing the departments with supplemental funding. Change Healthcare, an EMS billing and health care technology company, states on its website that subscription programs present “new revenue opportunities” for EMS agencies and that they’re gaining traction nationwide.

When half of emergency ground ambulance rides result in often exorbitant out-of-network charges, paying a flat yearly or monthly fee for blanket protection might seem like a no-brainer. But it wouldn’t be unreasonable to wonder why it’s necessary for these programs to exist at all.

In a nation that deprioritizes health care for the sake of profit, emergency ambulance rides are not uniformly funded or operated as a public service. A network of regulatory failures have plagued the United States’ fragmented and underfunded EMS system for decades; in the absence of federal legislation, vulnerable patients are forced to bear the brunt of the economic burden.

Some Surprises Act

“No more surprise billing. No more,” President Joe Biden declared in February. His promise referred to the newly implemented No Surprises Act, but it was only partially true. While the bipartisan law offers a broad set of protections to safeguard patients from surprise medical bills, ground ambulance services are one glaring omission.

Citing insufficient data and the unique difficulties of federally regulating a complex world of local providers, the act instead required that the government convene the Ground Ambulance and Patient Billing, or GAPB, Advisory Committee. In November 2021, nearly one year after the No Surprises Act was signed into law, the Biden administration finally announced that it would be soliciting committee nominations. An accompanying press release from the Department of Health and Human Services stated that the committee would be required to submit a report recommending ways to protect patients from surprise ground ambulance bills within 180 days of its first meeting.

More than eight months later, it’s not clear if the committee has ever met. The administration has not shared any updates on the status of the GAPB Advisory Committee’s members, dockets, meetings, or promised report — or any reason as to why the committee appears to have stalled. The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to The Intercept’s requests for comment.

As long as this bureaucratic impasse endures, patients could continue to be saddled with an aggregate $129 million in surprise ground ambulance bills every year. The New York Times previously noted that the rate of out-of-network bills for ground ambulance rides is “substantially higher” than many of the medical specialities actually covered under the No Surprises Act.

Air ambulance rides — in which a medical helicopter is dispatched due to the patient’s remote location or urgent condition — are covered under the act, after garnering attention in recent years for their own staggering out-of-network bills. According to Erin Fuse Brown, a law professor and director of the Center for Law, Health & Society at Georgia State University, similar market failures contribute to both air and ground ambulance surprise billing. Patients will always need to use emergency services, regardless of whether a provider is in their insurance network.

“They’re going to get called no matter what, “ said Brown, who has researched out-of-network air ambulance billing and legislation. “So then they might as well just stay out-of-network, and not expend the resources to negotiate the discount.”

A patient can’t control which service shows up when 911 is called — rendering the value proposition of these programs dubious.

Like EMS agencies, air ambulance companies also frequently offer subscription programs to purportedly protect subscribers against surprise bills. Despite their similarities, there’s one fundamental difference: The majority of air ambulance companies are owned by private equity firms, but nearly two-thirds of emergency ground ambulance rides are performed by government-based organizations.

Whether the service is public or private, a patient can’t control which service shows up when 911 is called — rendering the value proposition of these programs dubious. Bobbie Joseph learned this firsthand when she received her surprise bill, but other ground ambulance subscription programs have similar caveats. Unless an EMS agency’s website clarifies outright, it can be difficult for the person in need to know whether there are other ambulance services in their region that could potentially be dispatched.

“YOU PAY NOTHING!”

Some ground ambulance membership programs reviewed by The Intercept marketed themselves directly to Medicare beneficiaries — who cannot receive surprise bills, because Medicare is prohibited from “balance billing,” or charging patients for what their insurance didn’t cover, for emergency ambulance rides under federal law.

If an ambulance provider picks up a Medicare patient, they must accept Medicare’s reimbursement rate as their full payment, so a Medicare recipient’s bill would only reflect their deductible and copay.

“One of the things that was dubious about the practices of air ambulances is that they seemed to be indiscriminately marketing these membership programs, even to people who couldn’t be balance billed under law, because they were Medicare beneficiaries,” said Brown. “So if the ground ambulance providers are being very careful to screen out individuals and households who may have Medicare or Medicaid coverage, I think that’s a step in the right direction.”

But this isn’t always the case. “John Doe is billed $1512 for EMS transport to a hospital. He is a Medicare recipient,” states the brochure for New Haven, Indiana’s EMS subscription program. “YOU Pay $250.00 WITHOUT New Haven Subscription EMS. WITH New Haven Subscription EMS, YOU PAY NOTHING!”

Similarly, a FAQ sheet for an EMS subscription program in Caroline County, Maryland, asks why someone should subscribe if they already have “Medicare or other insurance.” The response states, “Medicare and most insurance plans will not cover 100% of the bills incurred for ambulance service. … If your insurance reimburses EMS any portion of the bill, we accept it as payment in full. However, if the insurance company denies the claim, you will NOT be charged anything further.”

Brown noted that the terms of these ground ambulance subscription programs are not immediately obvious. If they’re agreeing to waive balance billing for Medicare patients, she said, then they’re misleading, because Medicare does not balance bill. If they’re waiving cost-sharing altogether, like copays or deductibles, then Brown is concerned that they may violate federal fraud and abuse laws, such as the Anti-Kickback Statute, which makes it illegal for a health care provider to advertise financial incentives to attract potential patients if the provider bills its services to a federal health care program.

In 2003, the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General ruled that one ambulance subscription program was legal as long as it collected more subscription revenue than it wrote off in copays and deductibles, but the advisory opinion only applied to the nonprofit emergency ambulance service that requested it.

Since then, while some state and federal courts have examined air ambulance subscription programs, their ground ambulance equivalents have largely avoided federal scrutiny. A 2012 report from the U.S. Fire Administration cites subscription programs as a potential funding alternative for EMS services but advises that departments “seek legal advice when setting up a subscription program so that requirements of Medicare and Medicaid are met by the approach taken.”

“The majority of states have simply not addressed it one way or the other, so it’s not expressly prohibited or expressly permitted,” said Douglas Wolfberg, founding partner of EMS law firm Page, Wolfberg & Wirth.

Ambulance subscription programs might also run into legality issues under certain states’ insurance laws. In all New England states except Vermont, for example, ambulance subscriptions are considered to be insurance businesses and must be licensed as such. In other states, some membership programs explicitly clarify that they are not insurance policies — despite essentially operating in the same way.

Overall, ground ambulance subscription programs appear to operate in a legal gray zone, and without much regulation or oversight, the door remains open for potential consumer abuse.

Pointing Fingers

The growing adoption of EMS subscription programs nationwide underscores the financial issues that many public departments have faced for decades. The EMS Systems Act of 1973 provided over $300 million in funding for the development of a nationwide EMS system, but in 1981, the Reagan administration effectively dismantled the program by moving the principle funding from the federal government to the states. States were then given broad discretion over how to use the funds, and many did not allocate them toward EMS services.

“Some of these publicly operated ambulance services might be facing financial sustainability issues, and somewhere along the lines may have decided to directly bill as a way to finance themselves,” said Krutika Amin, Kaiser Family Foundation’s associate director for the program on the Affordable Care Act. “Contracting with insurance companies might require a level of administrative work that they might not have resources for.”

“If you’re working with a public fire department, the people who work there aren’t trained in network negotiation,” said Madeline O’Brien, a research fellow at Georgetown University’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “It’s very difficult for them to come to the table, and to know the rate that they should be charging, or how to even start with negotiations.”

Insurance companies often place the blame on ambulance providers, arguing that their billed rate is far too high. Indeed, uncovering the true cost of ambulance transportation is a difficult task. Wake County EMS Assistant Chief of Community Outreach Brian Brooks told The Intercept that a ride with basic life support is $600; Palo Alto, California, Fire Chief Geo Blackshire put the average cost of an ambulance ride at around $2,000. A recent investigation by Kaiser Health News and NPR reported that three nearly identical ambulance rides, each performed by a different Illinois public fire department, resulted in bills ranging from $1,250 to $3,606.

Conversely, emergency services professionals argue that federal Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement rates are too low, which leads them to increase prices and bill patients directly. The website for the Morgan County, Colorado, EMS states outright that “declining reimbursements by Medicare/Medicaid and commercial carriers” have caused the ambulance service to only be able to collect 35 to 45 percent of the amount billed, which “inherently impacts the fee for services.”

In April, Palo Alto launched a new EMS subscription program called Palo Alto FireMed, after receiving feedback that it could benefit the community. According to Blackshire, a significant amount of the city’s transports are provided to patients with Medicare or Medicaid, and in those cases, the EMS doesn’t fully recoup their costs. “Palo Alto FireMed is just another means for us to try and break even on what it costs to run this program,” said Blackshire.

Palo Alto FireMed was inspired by the Huntington Beach Fire Department’s subscription program, which launched in 1990. Long before surprise billing debates reached a national fever pitch, the goal of the program was primarily revenue generation: to increase response times for medical emergencies and improve equipment and supplies.

But in today’s expensive health care landscape, subscription programs might not be all that beneficial for some cash-strapped EMS departments.

“I would venture to say that we are not breaking even,” said Brooks. “There’s no benefit for us whatsoever. It’s completely just a way to ease the financial burden for somebody who has to be transported.”

Today, responsibility for EMS oversight is split among various federal agencies. The structure and funding of departments varies greatly, and while some are taxpayer-supported, others might rely fully on patient billing for their income or be volunteer-run. Given the high overhead costs of maintaining a 24-hour EMS program, some municipalities have outsourced their services to private ambulance companies entirely.

“I still don’t entirely understand how they managed to not be regulated by legislation,” said Caitlin Donovan, senior director of public relations at the National Patient Advocate Foundation. “To me, the more obvious solution is to bring back a public service that’s paid for in tax dollars.”

Other legislative solutions can be found by looking at states that have passed their own laws to remedy surprise ground ambulance bills, including by setting standard ambulance rates that must be reimbursed by out-of-network providers.

But until the federal government enacts across-the-board legislation, many Americans in unprotected states might have to turn to imperfect supplemental programs for peace of mind against surprise bills.

“I think that there’s really a frustration with the movement of ground ambulance legislation at the federal level,” said O’Brien, of Georgetown’s Center on Health Insurance Reforms. “Until you can bring those experts together and start having that conversation, this is kind of at a standstill.”

The post Ambulance Rides Still Aren’t Protected From Surprise Billing — and Subscriptions Do Little to Help appeared first on The Intercept.

Conservatives have been sounding the alarm over America’s declining birthrates for years. Against this baby bust backdrop, fear of sterilization has emerged as a troubling talking point on the right.

In the leaked draft opinion that would overturn Roe v. Wade, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito referenced claims that abortion rights advocates might actually be striving to suppress the size of the Black population. “It is beyond dispute that Roe has had that demographic effect,” Alito wrote. “A highly disproportionate percentage of aborted fetuses are black.” Alito cited Justice Clarence Thomas, who warned in 2019 that abortion could become a “tool of eugenic manipulation.”

At first glance, this reasoning doesn’t make much sense — a self-elected medical procedure is essentially the opposite of a state-mandated sterilization campaign, and abortion bans will disproportionately harm people of color. The eugenics analogy exploits America’s legacy of violence against Black people in a naked ploy to score political points, justifying infringement on bodily autonomy, ironically, in the name of bodily autonomy. But the logic also echoes concerns about sterilization found in much of the right’s anti-trans panic: Recent bills targeting transgender youth have gained significant traction by invoking the specter of infertility. Taken together, this rhetoric reveals a creeping pro-natalist agenda — one that parallels the playbook of 20th century authoritarian regimes, including Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Nazi Germany, and Francoist Spain.

Prior to 2020, no state had introduced a ban on gender-affirming medical care for trans youth; today more than 58,000 trans young people across 15 states risk losing access to care. One way Republicans have gained this unprecedented ground is by arguing that certain gender-affirming care causes infertility and the state must intervene to save children from sterilization. In a February legal opinion, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton argued that gender-affirming procedures met the state’s criteria for child abuse, mentioning children’s fundamental or constitutional “right to procreate” more than a dozen times. Like Alito and Thomas, he noted that forced sterilization has historically “harmed many vulnerable populations, such as African Americans, female minors, the disabled, and others.”

Most gender-affirming medical care for trans youth is not sterilizing, and puberty-delaying medication has been safely used for decades. Guidelines from leading medical organizations generally do not recommend genital reconstruction surgery before the age of 18. As for hormone treatments, Dr. Joshua Safer, executive director of the Mount Sinai Center for Transgender Medicine and Surgery, told The Intercept that fertility can usually be regained once the hormone regimen is ceased for a length of time.

“Most adolescents start hormone therapy later in puberty,” Safer said. Concerns over irreversible infertility, he added, “do not apply to the majority of trans youth, simply because they don’t decide to begin treatment until they are already at a stage in puberty where fertility preservation can work.”

While it’s ridiculous to equate reproductive or gender-affirming health care with forced sterilization, Republicans have been able to comfortably weaponize this language in part due to the progressive movement’s own dark history with eugenics. During the early 20th century, scores of Black, Indigenous, and Puerto Rican women were forcibly sterilized at the hands of the state. Planned Parenthood’s founder Margaret Sanger supported eugenics and espoused birth control as a tool for demographic control.

“Part of what’s so outrageous is the true vulnerability that people face when it comes to their bodily autonomy is real. It’s just being weaponized against them through false pretense,” said Jules Gill-Peterson, an associate professor of history at Johns Hopkins and the author of “Histories of the Transgender Child.” “We see how much residue is left there, and how many sparks are available for people to weaponize those histories. They can sort of substitute the reality.”

There’s another layer to the right’s eugenics rhetoric: Various nationalist authoritarian regimes throughout history have employed pro-natalist or “positive eugenics” methods in attempts to combat the demographic threat of declining birthrates. In 1925, Mussolini launched an aggressive domestic policy known as “Battle for Births,” which banned abortion, restricted access to contraception, and incentivized reproduction via tax breaks and welfare benefits.

This ideology was mirrored in the regime of Francisco Franco in 1940s Spain, which not only made abortion and contraception illegal but also classified them as crimes against the state. As historian Helen Graham has noted, Franco viewed pro-natalism and a conservative notion of “ideal” womanhood as “the fundamental guarantor of social stability” following the Spanish Civil War. Catholic religious doctrine worked in tandem with the regime’s socioeconomic push to boost reproduction.

Similar events played out in Nazi Germany: Abortion and contraception were banned, traditional gender roles were reimposed, and economic benefits were awarded to women who focused on homemaking. These policies were explicitly tied to the belief in the superiority of the Aryan race; promoting the expansion of the white population went hand in hand with the compulsory sterilization and genocide of those deemed racially inferior.

It’s worth noting that these authoritarian approaches to population goals emerged in the period following World War I into World II, when unprecedented mass casualties had fomented a growing anxiety about birthrates worldwide. In the wake of over 6 million deaths globally from Covid-19, it might not be a coincidence that fertility panic has crept into the current wave of Republican legislation.

The endgame of constructing a “traditional,” white, Christian nation is an undercurrent in much of the right’s rhetoric.

Today the endgame of constructing a “traditional,” white, Christian nation is an undercurrent in much of the right’s rhetoric. A growing number of Republicans have cited declining national birthrates in increasingly explicit references to the “great replacement theory” — the white supremacist myth that white, native-born Americans are being systematically wiped out by nonwhite immigrants. This idea was bluntly conveyed by former Iowa Rep. Steve King in a 2018 interview: “If we continue to abort our babies and import a replacement for them in the form of young violent men, we are supplanting our culture, our civilization,” he said. The following year, Trump officials praised Hungary’s right-wing populist prime minister for his “procreation, not immigration” policies. Fox News host Tucker Carlson has stoked panic about America’s “fertility crisis” and declining sperm counts.

America’s mainstream right likes to argue that birthrate panic is about the nation’s population and economic prosperity as a whole, rather than a specifically white population. Historical precedent complicates this. While efforts to boost birthrates in Italy and Spain did not involve the same eugenicist measures as Germany, historians have noted how narratives of national and racial identity are often deeply intertwined.

“Spanish race hygiene through population expansion was to be a decisive arm in preventing the decline of the white race,” historian Mary Nash wrote in her account of racial policy under Francoism. In Italy, population growth was focused on both increasing the quantity and improving the “quality” of the Italian race. Over time, fears of “race pollution” became increasingly pronounced.

A form of this logic was even present in early anti-abortion activism in the United States. Amid an increase in immigration in the 19th century, the American Medical Association fought to ban abortions, arguing that they “threatened the Anglo-Saxon race.” Pushing for a blanket, rather than selective, abortion ban was the AMA’s method to counter this perceived demographic threat.

This history of the eugenics movement also highlights how state interventions in reproduction have long been tied to the construction of an overtly racist national identity. Gill-Peterson noted that the abstract image of “The Child” emerged in the 20th century as an explicit figure of white reproductive nationalism, in whose name “racial hygiene” policies were enacted.

The right’s attacks on trans youth have also seized upon this history of moral panic in the name of “The Child.” The idea plays out clearly in bills’ names — see Alabama’s Vulnerable Child Compassion and Protection Act or Missouri’s Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act.

On May 13, the Texas Supreme Court ruled that parents of transgender children could be investigated for child abuse. Activists have expressed concern that child abuse allegations will raise the potential for trans youth to be removed from their homes and placed in the foster care system.

The moral panic over gender-affirming health care and abortion is an attempt by the state to dictate a vision of what America’s families can and should look like.

“That state power is really awful and cruel and abusive when directed at trans youth,” said Gill-Peterson. “But it already exists and is regularly directed at Black and Latino and disabled families all the time.”

Just as pro-natal regimes enforced patriarchal family units, the moral panic over gender-affirming health care and abortion is an attempt by the state to dictate a vision of what America’s families can and should look like, and to control their fundamental construction via forced birth and forced adoption. Trans people have become the Republican Party’s new favorite scapegoat because they don’t fit into this conservative structure.

This nexus of converging birthrate panic, “great replacement” rhetoric, and expanded government authority over bodily autonomy presents a sinister omen for America’s future. While the majority of Americans who oppose abortion and trans rights may not be actively thinking in terms of population goals, the pro-natalism of the anti-trans and anti-abortion movements inherits from these complicated histories of state power and reproductive intervention.

In order to fully grapple with the ramifications of the impending Roe v. Wade reversal, it is critical that the left understands these interconnected movements and their relationship to a burgeoning nationalist authoritarianism.

The post The Right’s Creeping Pro-Natalist Rhetoric on Abortion and Trans Health Care appeared first on The Intercept.