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Utah Senate President Loses Primary After Data Center Backlash
The president of the Utah State Senate, who championed a huge data center beside the Great Salt Lake, was defeated in his Republican primary on Tuesday night, one of the most high-profile signs of the voter backlash to data center projects. The vote to oust the Senate president, J. Stuart Adams, was a stunner.
Mr. Adams was one of the longest-serving and most powerful politicians in Utah, a solidly Republican state, and had won earlier re-elections with little opposition. Mr. Adams lost his Senate seat to Stephanie Hollist, a former university lawyer, who accused Mr. Adams and Utah’s political establishment of lacking transparency and ignoring their own voters by approving a data center project backed by the celebrity investor and “Shark Tank” personality Kevin O’Leary.
Mr. Adams did not directly represent the 40,000-acre proposed site of the data center in Box Elder County, a fast-growing farming and industrial area about 60 miles north of Salt Lake City.
US Court Rejects EPA Bid to Ease Regulations for Coal-Fired Power Plants
A U.S. federal appeals court on Friday rejected the Environmental Protection Agency’s bid to withdraw Biden-era limits on soot pollution from coal-fired power plants and factories, in a setback for the Trump administration’s deregulatory efforts.
The EPA under President Donald Trump last year asked the appeals court to invalidate the 2024 rule, arguing the agency had acted unreasonably by failing to consider costs while setting the standard. The court rejected the petition, leaving the annual limit of 9 micrograms per cubic meter of fine particulate matter, known as PM 2.5, in place.
“After initially defending the new rule, the EPA now moves to vacate the rule on the grounds that it exceeded its statutory authority and acted unreasonably by failing to consider costs. Because these arguments lack merit, we deny the petitions for review and the motion for vacatur,” the ruling said. The EPA under Biden had said the tighter limits would avoid more than 800,000 cases of asthma symptoms, 2,000 hospital visits and 4,500 premature deaths.
In Hartford, New Study Shows Link Between Lead Contamination and Housing Discrimination
Historically Black neighborhoods in Hartford that faced discriminatory redlining policies are most likely to be contaminated with high levels of lead in the soil, according to a new study from the University of Vermont. Those neighborhoods — Clay-Arsenal, Downtown Hartford and Sheldon-Charter Oak — were rated “least desirable” by federal housing officials in the 1930s, receiving the lowest possible ‘D’ grade and marked red in the city’s historical redline maps.
Banks often denied mortgages to those living in redlined areas or charged higher interest rates, even if the borrower was able to pay back the loan. “The number one parameter that determines whether a block has a risk for high lead level is the historic redlining rate,” said Nico Perdrial, one of the study’s authors and professor of geoscience at the University of Vermont.
Today those neighborhoods have large Latino populations, and in the case of downtown Hartford, a sizable white community. They’re also 20 percent more likely to have high levels of lead in the soil. Within those neighborhoods, soil surrounding multi-family homes are 40 percent more likely to be contaminated.
Ingesting or inhaling lead can cause brain damage and slow development in children, even at low levels, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. “Those [neighborhoods] that were at the time ‘non-desirable’ were also those that were polluted the most,” Perdrial said, “and today this pollution remains in the soil.”
Stein to Chemours: ‘Pay to Help Us Clean up the Pollution’
Officials and environmental groups in North Carolina are blasting Chemours’ proposed $450 million federal settlement over PFAS pollution, saying the deal will do little for the state. The U.S. Justice Department on Wednesday announced the multistate agreement, touting it as the federal government’s first comprehensive settlement over per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances pollution.
Under the terms of the settlement, Chemours is expected to pay the Environmental Protection Agency and West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection a $22.5 million civil penalty over three years, and pump in $90 million over 15 years “to further reduce PFAS emissions and enhance certain existing off-site drinking water programs,” according to a company release.
The company will spend an estimated $60 million installing pollution controls for surface water discharges and air emissions at its West Virginia plant, cover an estimated $280 million in costs to provide clean drinking water for more than a decade to residents of communities around its facilities in West Virginia and New Jersey, and “evaluate options and implement corresponding controls to reduce releases of PFAS and other toxic chemicals from its facility in North Carolina,” according to the U.S. Justice Department.
Gov. Josh Stein expressed doubts about whether North Carolina, one of three states named in the agreement, will actually receive any portion of those funds. “It’s entirely possible that North Carolina doesn’t get a dime from this federal settlement,” Stein said Wednesday afternoon during home visit with a Wilmington-area family that uses a state-funded water filtration system to remove PFAS from their drinking water.
EPA Touts Crackdown on Smuggled Pesticides in L.A. Visit
The Los Angeles Times reported:
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is ramping up its enforcement of illegal pesticides smuggled through the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, officials said during a visit to L.A. on Thursday. Since President Trump began his second term in January 2025, EPA has blocked more than 2.4 million pounds of illegal pesticides from entering the country, said Lee Zeldin, the agency’s administrator. Much of it comes from China, but some comes from Mexico and, on the East Coast, from Africa.
“We’re very alarmed by any chemical that anyone would seek to bring into this country that our own government hasn’t had the opportunity to vet, to research to fully understand,” Zeldin said. “That’s why it’s so important that these products get stopped at the border.” The announcement came just hours after the Supreme Court handed a major victory to the makers of the weedkiller Roundup, shielding it from thousands of lawsuits from states alleging the company failed to warn people the product could cause cancer.
Speaking from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection warehouse in Carson, Zeldin pointed to a white bottle with a yellow label reading “SNIPER” — an illegal pesticide product commonly imported from abroad and sold online — that was recently intercepted at the Port of L.A. complex. Sniper contains dichlorvos, or DDVP, a highly toxic insecticide that is not registered or approved for use in the U.S. It is known to cause neurological problems, convulsions and comas, with children particularly at risk.
Bay Contains Microplastics 10 Times Smaller Than Previously Measured, New Study Finds
A pilot study by the San Francisco Estuary Institute captures plastic particles in the Bay that are 10 times smaller than measured before, the width of a human hair. These smaller microplastics may account for the vast majority of those present in the water.
The study could inform broader research on plastics and human health, coastal ecosystems and the ability of the sea to trap carbon from the earth’s atmosphere. The term “microplastics” encompasses many different materials, said SFEI lead scientist Diana Lin. “They include tire-wear particles and fibers from our clothing,” said Lin.
“It’s from the food that we eat, the air that we breathe. It’s in the dust from our carpets, from ripping plastic items where little particles get threaded.” SFEI has previously measured particles as small as 0.1 millimeter. “Here we’re down to 20 microns (0.02 millimeters),” Lin said about the pilot study.
