Latest news with #ClimateandEconomicJusticeScreeningTool
Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Ohio grid disparities leave some areas with older, outage-prone equipment
Ohio consumer and environmental advocates are calling on state regulators to address disparities within FirstEnergy's grid after a recent report found disadvantaged communities are more likely to rely on older, more outage-prone equipment. Areas defined as disadvantaged under the Biden administration's Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool were twice as likely to have low-voltage circuits compared to other parts of FirstEnergy's Ohio territory, according to the study by the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. Equipment was also generally older and had less capacity for normal and overload situations. The results reflect historical patterns of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities, the report says, but the full scope of the problem — including across Ohio's other utilities — is unclear due to the lack of information from utilities and regulators. 'The public availability of any utility data is very, very limited in Ohio,' said report author Shay Banton, a regulatory program engineer and energy justice policy advocate for the Interstate Renewable Energy Council. The Ohio Environmental Council submitted the report as part of FirstEnergy's pending rate case before the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio and is asking regulators to address the topic in an evidentiary hearing set for May 5. The state of the local grid matters when it comes to the reliability of customers' electric service, their ability to add distributed renewable energy resources like rooftop solar, and a community's potential to attract business investments that could improve its economic conditions. Regulated electric utilities file reliability reports each spring that focus on two commonly used metrics. The system average interruption frequency index, or SAIFI, shows how many outages occurred per customer. The customer average interruption duration index, or CAIDI, measures the average length of time for restoring service to customers who lose power. The annual reports also list factors involved in outages, with breakouts for transmission-related service problems and major events. Major events such as severe weather are considered statistical outliers that don't count for calculating whether utilities meet their company-specific standards for CAIDI and SAIFI. While weather accounted for the majority of time Ohioans went without power last year, equipment failures also triggered thousands of outages. For the ninth year in a row, at least one Ohio utility company failed to meet reliability standards, reports filed this month show. Both AEP Ohio and FirstEnergy's Toledo Edison missed their marks for the average time before power is restored for customers who experience outages. The Public Utilities Commission of Ohio also collects data on the worst-performing circuits. Individual circuits serve anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand customers. However, the state doesn't post these reports online or disclose the circuit's exact locations, which could be used to show whether they are concentrated in disadvantaged communities. The SAIFI and CAIDI metrics used by state regulators did not show significant disparities between disadvantaged neighborhoods and other areas in FirstEnergy's territory. But Banton said those reliability metrics rely on averages for large groups, which can obscure disparities. They said that utilities should also be required to publicly report the number of customers experiencing frequent service interruptions and the number of customers who faced long outages. Utilities in Ohio tend to be reactive in dealing with circuit problems, Banton said. Communities can face longer outages if utilities wait for equipment to fail before replacing it. Instead, Banton wants utilities' capital investments to address current disparities and then prevent them from recurring in the future. 'The bottom line is that consumers should get reliable service, and utilities are obligated to provide reliable service,' said Merrilee Embs, a spokesperson for the Office of the Ohio Consumers' Counsel, which did not work on the report. The group is concerned about whether utilities' capital improvement spending directly benefits customers — an issue that relates to grid disparities. 'FirstEnergy's (and other Ohio utilities') failure to implement grid modernization plans in a way that benefits residential consumers likely contributes to grid disparities such as those described in the [study],' Embs wrote via email after reviewing the report. FirstEnergy has challenged the Ohio Environmental Council's objections about grid disparities in its rate case. Meanwhile, the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio is due to consider revisions to the annual reliability reporting requirements by Sept. 30, 2026. The commission will likely start accepting comments on the rules later this year, said spokesperson Matt Schilling. The quality of a neighborhood's grid influences more than whether residents' lights stay on. 'These inequities can have serious consequences for customer access to distributed energy resources, which can save money,' said Karin Nordstrom, a lawyer for the Ohio Environmental Council. Rooftop solar or other distributed clean energy can add to traffic on local grid circuits, posing a challenge for equipment that's older or has lower voltages or capacity. Those circuits generally can handle less grid traffic, Banton said. In contrast, newer, high-voltage circuits tend to have 'less bumps and less potholes [along with] better on-ramps.' The grid's quality and capacity also impact an area's economic development. Historically, utilities have focused capital investment on places where people are moving or where they expect new industrial demand. That approach exacerbates inequity, Banton said. Even if businesses otherwise wanted to move to disadvantaged areas, poor electrical infrastructure may lead them to go elsewhere to avoid huge costs for upgrading the local grid, they said. 'The energy transition is in full effect, but many of the communities that suffer first and worst from climate change are not able to make the transition due to underinvestment in infrastructure,' said Tony Reames, a professor of environmental justice at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability, who did not work on the new report. He served at the U.S. Department of Energy as deputy director for energy justice and principal deputy director for state and community energy programs during the Biden administration. Because utilities have failed to invest in and maintain the grid evenly throughout their service territories, an equity-based approach to infrastructure modernization should make sure resources now go to areas that were left behind, Reames said. He supports the report's call for more granular data, including details on customers with repeated or prolonged outages. The report also calls on utilities to publish maps showing grid capacity, and information about which census tracts are served by each circuit and substation transformers. 'I often say, 'The data you don't have is the problem you don't see,'' Reames noted. 'Difficulties accessing data or the lack of certain data availability are sometimes a result of entities not wanting to confirm issues that are anecdotally known.' Love Canary Media and find our reporting valuable? Please consider financially supporting our work with a donation. Thank you!
Yahoo
16-04-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Minority communities much more likely to have sewage in waterways
Across the U.S., rivers are in crisis. One of the major issues they face is contamination by sewage and other forms of pollution, but some communities are impacted more than others. In Philadelphia, trash littered part of the Cobbs Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River, not far from where people live. Jerome Shabazz, who runs the non-profit Overbrook Environmental Education Center in Philadelphia, took CBS News along to clean up some of the trash. "If we go back and look at the before and after shots, you'll see that just the short period of time that we were here is going to make a difference," Shabazz said. What's not an easy clean-up is dealing with the raw sewage that runs into another nearby creek, making it too contaminated to wade or fish in. The smell was evident. "You don't need a scientific test to tell you there's sewage coming out of there. You just need a nose," Shabazz said. Nationwide, there are more than 7,000 pipes called outfalls where wastewater from buildings and stormwater from rain flow together to the treatment facility. When there's too much rain, by design, sewage overflows into creeks and rivers. CBS News compared data from the now-archived Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool with outfall locations and found lower income, minority communities are twice as likely to have sewage dumping into a river or creek. The Screening Tool combines data from the U.S. Census, other government agencies and nonprofits to identify communities where people are marginalized, underserved and disproportionately burdened by pollution. "We see a lot of derogatory conditions in neighborhoods amongst people who don't have the political influence to fight back," Shabazz said. var pymParent = new ' {}); "The urgency of now" Some of these systems are well over 100 years old, built before environmental regulation. Rebuilding is cost-prohibitive, but in Philadelphia, there's a natural solution: protecting what's left of the city's marshland. "I think nature-based solutions where you're looking within the landscape, and I think every city, every township needs to be taking a look at this," said Lamar Gore, who runs the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Philadelphia. The marsh works like a sponge, soaking in rainwater and reducing the chance of a sewer overflow. But during heavy rain, raw sewage is still getting dumped in the river and can flow into the marsh. "It slows it down. It allows for the opportunity to break that sewage down," Gore said. There's very little room to expand the marsh because it's surrounded by homes, industry and Philadelphia International Airport. "These are the things that should have the urgency of now," Shabazz said. It's only a partial solution – but Shabazz says it's worth a try. "We really can't accept this on a basic human level as being normal, and I think we should do everything we can to try to remediate it so that people can enjoy and appreciate the built-in natural environments where they live, work and play," he said. National environmental reporter David Schechter and a team of CBS journalists spent five days traveling the length of the Delaware River to explore problems facing America's waterways. Watch "An American River" on Saturday, April 19, at 1 p.m. ET on CBS News 24/7. Sneak peek: The Detective's Wife Watch: Blue Origin's first all-women flight crew launches to space Harvard University in a battle of beliefs with the Trump administration
CBS News
16-04-2025
- General
- CBS News
Minority communities twice as likely to have sewage polluting nearby river or creek, CBS News analysis shows
Across the U.S., rivers are in crisis . One of the major issues they face is contamination by sewage and other forms of pollution, but some communities are impacted more than others. In Philadelphia, trash littered part of the Cobbs Creek, a tributary of the Delaware River , not far from where people live. Jerome Shabazz, who runs the non-profit Overbrook Environmental Education Center in Philadelphia, took CBS News along to clean up some of the trash. "If we go back and look at the before and after shots, you'll see that just the short period of time that we were here is going to make a difference," Shabazz said. What's not an easy clean-up is dealing with the raw sewage that runs into another nearby creek, making it too contaminated to wade or fish in. The smell was evident. "You don't need a scientific test to tell you there's sewage coming out of there. You just need a nose," Shabazz said. Nationwide, there are more than 7,000 pipes called outfalls where wastewater from buildings and stormwater from rain flow together to the treatment facility. When there's too much rain, by design, sewage overflows into creeks and rivers. CBS News compared data from the now-archived Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool with outfall locations and found lower income, minority communities are twice as likely to have sewage dumping into a river or creek. The Screening Tool combines data from the U.S. Census, other government agencies and nonprofits to identify communities where people are marginalized, underserved and disproportionately burdened by pollution. "We see a lot of derogatory conditions in neighborhoods amongst people who don't have the political influence to fight back," Shabazz said. Some of these systems are well over 100 years old, built before environmental regulation. Rebuilding is cost-prohibitive, but in Philadelphia, there's a natural solution: protecting what's left of the city's marshland. "I think nature-based solutions where you're looking within the landscape, and I think every city, every township needs to be taking a look at this," said Lamar Gore, who runs the John Heinz National Wildlife Refuge in Philadelphia. The marsh works like a sponge, soaking in rainwater and reducing the chance of a sewer overflow. But during heavy rain, raw sewage is still getting dumped in the river and can flow into the marsh. "It slows it down. It allows for the opportunity to break that sewage down," Gore said. There's very little room to expand the marsh because it's surrounded by homes, industry and Philadelphia International Airport. "These are the things that should have the urgency of now," Shabazz said. It's only a partial solution – but Shabazz says it's worth a try. "We really can't accept this on a basic human level as being normal, and I think we should do everything we can to try to remediate it so that people can enjoy and appreciate the built-in natural environments where they live, work and play," he said. National environmental reporter David Schechter and a team of CBS journalists spent five days traveling the length of the Delaware River to explore problems facing America's waterways. Watch "An American River" on Saturday, April 19, at 1 p.m. ET on CBS News 24/7. Taylor Johnston and Grace Manthey contributed to this report.
New York Times
21-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Government Science Data May Soon Be Hidden. They're Racing to Copy It.
Amid the torrent of executive orders signed by President Trump were directives that affect the language on government web pages and the public's access to government data touching on climate change, the environment, energy and public health. In the past two months, hundreds of terabytes of digital resources analyzing data have been taken off government websites, and more are feared to be at risk of deletion. While in many cases the underlying data still exists, the tools that make it possible for the public and researchers to use that data have been removed. But now, hundreds of volunteers are working to collect and download as much government data as possible and to recreate the digital tools that allow the public to access that information. So far, volunteers working on a project called Public Environmental Data Partners have retrieved more than 100 data sets that were removed from government sites, and they have a growing list of 300 more they hope to preserve. It echoes efforts that began in 2017, during Mr. Trump's first term, when volunteers downloaded as much climate, environmental, energy and public health data as possible because they feared its fate under a president who has called climate change a hoax. Little federal information disappeared then. But this time is different. And so, too, is the response. 'We should not be in this position where the Trump administration can literally take down every government website if it wants to,' said Gretchen Gehrke, an environmental scientist who helped found the Environmental Data and Governance Initiative in 2017 to conserve federal data. 'We're not prepared for having resilient public information in the digital age and we need to be.' While a lot of data generated by agencies, like climate measurements collected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is required by Congress, the digital tools that allow the public to view that data are not. 'This is a campaign to remove public access,' said Jessie Mahr, the director of technology at the Environmental Policy Innovation Center, a member group of the data partnership. 'And at the end of the day, American taxpayers paid for these tools.' Farmers have sued the United States Department of Agriculture for deleting climate data tools they hope will reappear. In February, a successful lawsuit led to the re-publication of the Centers for Disease Control's Social Vulnerability Index. A banner at the top of the C.D.C. webpage now notes that the Department of Health and Human Services was required to restore the site by court order. The Public Environmental Data Partners coalition has received frequent requests for two data tools: the Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool, or CEJST, and the Environmental Justice Screening Tool, or EJScreen. The first was developed under a Biden administration initiative to make sure that 40 percent of federal climate and infrastructure investments to go to disadvantaged communities. It was taken offline in January. EJScreen, developed under the Obama administration and once available through the E.P.A, was removed in early February. 'The very first thing across the executive branch was to remove references to equity and environmental justice and to remove equity tools from all agencies,' Dr. Gehrke said. 'It really impairs the public's ability to demonstrate structural racism and its disproportionate impacts on communities of color.' Just a dozen years ago, the E.P.A. defined environmental justice as 'the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income.' The E.P.A.'s new administrator, Lee Zeldin, recently equated environmental justice to 'forced discrimination.' Nonprofit organizations used both screening tools to apply for federal grants related to environmental justice and climate change. But the E.P.A. closed all of its environmental justice offices last week, ending three decades of work to mitigate the effects on poor and minority communities often disproportionately burdened by industrial pollution. It also canceled hundreds of grants already promised to nonprofit groups trying to improve conditions in those communities. 'You can't possibly solve a problem until you can articulate it, so it was an important source of data for articulating the problem,' said Harriet Festing, executive director of the nonprofit group Anthropocene Alliance. Christina Gosnell, co-founder and president of Catalyst Cooperative, a member of the environmental data cooperative, said her main concern was not that the data won't be archived before it disappears, but that it won't be updated. Preserving the current data sets is the first step, but they could become irrelevant if data collection stops, she said. More than 100 tribal nations, cities, and nonprofits used CEJST to show where and why their communities needed trees, which can reduce urban heat, and then applied for funds from the Arbor Day Foundation, a nonprofit organization that received a $75 million grant from the Inflation Reduction Action. The Arbor Day Foundation was on track to plant over a quarter of a million new trees before its grant was terminated in February. How hard it is to reproduce complex tools depends on how the data was created and maintained. CEJST was 'open source,' meaning the raw data and information that backed it up were already publicly accessible for coders and researchers. It was put back together by three people within 24 hours, according to Ms. Mahr. But EJScreen was not an open source tool, and recreating it was more complicated. 'We put a lot of pressure on the last weeks of the Biden administration to make EJScreen open source, so they released as much code and documentation as they could,' Dr. Gehrke said. It took at least seven people more than three weeks to make a version of EJScreen that was close to its original functionality, and Ms. Mahr said they're still tinkering with it. It's akin to recreating a recipe with an ingredient list but no assembly instructions. Software engineers have to try and remember how the 'dish' tasted last time, and then use trial and error to reassemble it from memory. Now, the coalition is working to conserve even more complicated data sets, like climate data from NOAA, which hosts many petabytes — think a thousand terabytes, or more than a million gigabytes — of weather observations and climate models in its archives. 'People may not understand just how much data that is,' Dr. Gehrke said in an email. It could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars per month just in storage fees, she said, without including the cost of any sort of access. She said they were talking to NOAA personnel to prioritize the most vulnerable and highest impact data to preserve as soon as possible. So far, the data they've collected is largely stored in the cloud and backed up using servers around the globe; they've worked out pro bono agreements to avoid having to pay to back it up. Some data have, so far, been left alone, like statistics from the Energy Information Administration, among other agencies. Zane Selvans, a fellow co-founder of Catalyst Cooperative said the group had worked for the past eight years to aggregate U.S. energy system data and research in the form of open source tools. The goal is to increase access to federal data that is technically available but not necessarily easy to use. 'So far we've been lucky,' Mr. Selvans said. 'Folks working on environmental justice haven't been as lucky.'
Washington Post
08-02-2025
- Politics
- Washington Post
A sample of the government webpages Trump doesn't want you to see
When President Donald Trump took office, dozens of government webpages disappeared as part of his plan to reshape the U.S. government to his liking. Not even NASA was spared. Catherine Rampell is a Post Opinions columnist; Amanda Shendruk and Flavio Pessoa are Post Opinions graphics reporters. Not found: That was the resounding message across federal websites this week, as the Trump administration has disappeared thousands of taxpayer-funded websites. Though some pages have been restored, those still missing contain decades' worth of information critical to scientists, physicians, urban planners, businesses and families. CDC PEPFAR data dashboard Current / Archive CEJST Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool Current DHS 2025 Strategic Plan Current / Archive DOI Acquisition Sustainability Current / Archive DOI Blog post: An Agenda Rooted in Environmental Justice Current / Archive EPA EJScreen: Environmental Justice Screening and Mapping Tool Current / Archive EPA NCEE Seminar: Efficiency, equity, and cost-recovery tradeoffs in municipal water pricing Current FDA Identifying and Measuring Artificial Intelligence (AI) Bias for Enhancing Health Equity Current / Archive NGA History (National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency) Current / Archive NIH Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) Current / Archive NIST Diversity in the Manufacturing Workforce Current / Archive US Marshals Federal Performance-Based Detention Standards Current / Archive USDA Climate Change Across USDA Current / Archive USDA Climate Change Resource Center Current / Archive Some pages have been taken down while the administration scrubs them of references to transgender people, diversity, equity and inclusion, 'gender ideology,' and related wrongthink banned by the president's recent executive orders. CDC National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey Current / Archive Census Sexual Orientation & Gender Identity (SOGI) Data Current / Archive DOD Black History Month Current / Archive DOJ Civil Rights Division: LGBTQI+ Working Group Current / Archive DOJ Office for Victims of Crime: Responding to transgender victims of sexual assault Current / Archive DOJ Working with LGBTQ Communities Current / Archive DOT Screening Tool for Equity Analysis of Projects (STEAP) Current FDA Minority Health and Health Equity Research and Collaboration Current / Archive HHS Protecting the Rights of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Intersex (LGBTQI+) People Current / Archive NCES Fast Facts: LGBTQ+ Pride Month Current / Archive NIH Sexual & Gender Minority Research Office Current / Archive NIST Zero Tolerance Harassment Policy Current / Archive NOAA National Ocean Service Diversity Current / Archive NRC Special Emphasis Programs and EEO Advisory Committees Current / Archive OJP Grants Aimed at Combatting Rise in Hate Crimes Current / Archive OJP Teen Dating Violence Current / Archive OPM Diversity and Inclusion FAQ Current / Archive SAMHSA Guidance for Improving Staff Engagement: Integrating Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) in SOAR Work Current / Archive U.S. Army U.S. Army Women's Museum Current / Archive USDA Climate Solutions Current VA LGBTQ+ Veteran Care Current / Archive Others have been deleted or altered for unknown reasons. Here's just a small sample of data series, reports and tax forms that have gone missing: ATSDR CDC Social Vulnerability Index Current / Archive ATSDR Environmental Justice Index 2024 Update Current / Archive Census Household Pulse Survey Technical Documentation Current / Archive Census Survey of Business Owners (SBO) Current FEMA 2022–2026 FEMA Strategic Plan Current / Archive IRS Form 5578: Annual Certification of Racial Nondiscrimination for a Private School Exempt From Federal Income Tax Current / Archive USAID Entire website Current / Archive USPTO Veterans Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program event series Current / Archive And here are examples of funding programs and pages offering health advice that are nowhere to be found. As of publication time, they were all inaccessible. It's unclear when they will come back online — if at all. CDC Health Education Curriculum Analysis Tool (HECAT) Summary Fact Sheet Current / Archive CDC CDC clinical practice guideline: PrEP for the prevention of HIV infection in the United States Current / Archive FDA Guidance: Evaluation of Sex-Specific Data in Medical Device Clinical Studies Current HeadStart Mothers and Babies: An Intervention to Prevent Postpartum Depression Current / Archive HeadStart The Importance of Schedules and Routines Current / Archive HRSA Supporting Care for Women with Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) Current / Archive NASA SERVIR Current / Archive NIH Office of Research on Women's Health Current / Archive ODNI Semiannual reports from ODNI's Office of the Inspector General Current / Archive Story continues below advertisement Advertisement
