Water scare latest attack on Pa. by plastics | Will Bunch Newsletter

Once again, America has gone zero days without a horrific mass shooting. The news that a 28-year-old former student entered a Christian grade school in Nashville with two high-powered AR-style weapons and killed three little kids and three grown-ups inspired a lot of “thoughts and prayers” from Tennessee lawmakers who recently banned drag shows to protect children but will do nothing on guns. Can things ever change?

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📮 Two new features this week! Here’s one in the form of a question. Would Democrats have a better chance of keeping the White House if the Republicans nominate Ron DeSantis or Donald Trump? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

Sometimes random headlines in the news aren’t as random as you think. Consider these three seemingly unrelated stories, all from Pennsylvania.

The first is the news that everyone around these parts is talking about this week: the roughly 8,100-gallon spill of hazardous chemicals at a plant in lower Bucks County that entered the Delaware River, threatens to enter a main water plant for Philadelphia, and has caused a massive run on bottled water across the region.

Also this weekend, across the state: Officials at Shell’s brand new $6 billion plastics plant on the Ohio River north of Pittsburgh warned residents that maintenance problems would cause another round of elevated flaring — the latest in a string of incidents since the facility’s November opening that have turned the night sky orange while exceeding the expected yearly limit for air pollution in little more than a month.

Meanwhile, nearby in East Palestine, Ohio, the fallout from February’s toxic train wreck of chemical cars on the Norfolk Southern line continued last week as Pennsylvania’s Blackhawk School District, roughly 15 miles away, filed a federal lawsuit claiming that its schoolchildren were endangered after “toxic fires and deadly plumes dumped a lethal cocktail on its buildings, property soil, and water supplies where deposits of the toxic materials have been found.”

But there is a connection between those three environmental calamities and a lot of things you do every day — from the bag that came home with your items from the drug store to the rubber duckie in your kid’s bathtub — and it can be summed up in one simple word: plastics.

Unfortunately, this boomer journalist has used up his lifetime quotient of Benjamin Braddock jokes from 1967′s The Graduate, but suffice it to say that what was the substance of the future more than a half-century ago is now looming large over your present — and not always in a good way.

Look, we can stipulate that a lot of positive and innovative things — I’ll mention life-saving medical devices, at the risk of sounding like an oil lobbyist — are made from plastics, and these polymers shouldn’t or won’t ever be totally banned. But when so much of a $600 billion global market goes toward excess packaging, store bags or that rubber duck, is it worth the pollution pain? I’d suspect there’s a growing number of Philadelphia residents terrified that a glass of tap water this week might cause cancer who would answer, “No!”

And here’s the thing we’re not talking about here in Pennsylvania: If you feel like suddenly we’re hearing a lot more about the witches’ brew of toxic or hazardous or just plain dirty and smelly chemicals used to make these polymers, there’s a reason for that. Worldwide production of plastic has nearly doubled since the start of the 21st century, as oil-and-gas giants look for profitable uses of their fossil fuels while a climate-change-weary world looks increasingly to transition toward wind or solar power or electric cars.

In Pennsylvania, where billions invested in fracking natural gas has teetered on the edge of being a boondoggle despite rising well production, industry officials have looked to the process that uses ethane, a component of natural gas that’s prevalent in this region’s Marcellus Shale rock formations, to make plastics as an economic savior. That’s why Shell located its plant — highly sought after by economic development officials — in Beaver County, and it’s why more trains carrying chemicals like the highly toxic vinyl chloride, which derailed in East Palestine on its way to a yard near Pittsburgh, are crisscrossing Pennsylvania.

And it’s why more bad things are happening to the environment.

“This has been a very bad month for people in Pennsylvania who want to drink clean water and breathe clean air,” Judith Enck, a former regional administrator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama years who now teaches at Bennington College and heads a group called Beyond Plastics, told me on Monday.

The problem is that Big Oil and Gas, with its massive war chest, lobbyists, and campaign contributions, remains committed to pushing cheap plastic in developing parts of the world such as Africa or Asia as part of what Enck has called “Plan B” for an industry determined to keep drilling even as traditional uses of fossil fuels fade.

It doesn’t have to go down this way. The Beyond Plastics campaign urges substitutes for polymers, from a drastic reduction in the use of plastics for packaging to replacing polyvinyl chloride pipes for drinking water with alternatives such as stainless steel or recycled copper. Activists such as Enck also hail the growing number of localities banning single-use plastic bags that are clogging landfills (a list which in the Philadelphia area now includes Radnor Township, where a plastic-bag ban took effect on March 15.)

Since the disaster in East Palestine, Enck’s group is also calling for a nationwide ban on vinyl chloride, the known carcinogen that was contained in five of the derailed cars and tends to be manufactured in poorer communities in the Deep South, for widespread use in consumer plastics. Enck noted that the substance was banned by the federal government in aerosols in 1974, during that brief window when environmentalists seemed to have the upper hand. “We researched it and we believe the EPA has the authority to ban vinyl chloride,” she said.

But here in Pennsylvania, a new governor in Josh Shapiro will need to start making some decisions on future facilities proposed by Big Plastics or other oil-and-gas proposals using criteria that clearly weren’t applied to the massive Shell plant in Beaver County — weighing the long-term environmental risks against the sometimes overblown promises of jobs. Or we can risk more panics like this week’s water scare in Philly, compounded by the irony that this was a huge boon to the bottled water industry — which globally causes 25 million tons of plastics waste every year.

Question: What is Philadelphia’s water crisis? There is no evidence that the spilled chemicals have entered the city’s drinking water. People are buying bottled water which they can’t afford because of this hyperbole. — via Andy Farquhar @AndrewCFarqua1 on Twitter

Answer: Andy, you make a good point, and I made sure that the subject line for this newsletter called the situation in Philadelphia “a water scare,” which is probably a more accurate description of the current situation. I will say that city officials are right in characterizing the threat that these highly toxic chemicals pose to Philly’s water supply, in aggressively monitoring it, and in sharing what they know with the public. But I think we can all agree City Hall has done an awful job on the messaging — in sending confusing mixed signals about the timing of any risk, in failing to grasp that any mention of a health threat from tap water will cause a stampede for bottled water, and in the bizarre non-presence of Mayor Jim Kenney. If anything positive comes from this, it’s a reminder of what to look for in terms of leadership from the 10 candidates running to replace Kenney — an election that cannot happen soon enough.

I’ve written a lot of obituaries in my overlong journalism career, starting as a summer intern at Newsday in 1980 when I spelled the dead man’s name wrong. But this one is the hardest: On Friday, our family said goodbye to Bella, our beloved little 5-pound maltipoo. She would have been 15 this summer, and like a lot of pet owners, I half-convinced myself she could live forever. And so part of the shock was how fast it happened; as recently as Wednesday, I took her and her dog-step-sister Daisy, the red golden retriever, to our favorite dog park, although she was already showing signs of the kidney disease that claimed her life. Now I look over at the sofa where she sat when I write these newsletters and it is very difficult to process that she is not there.

I wanted to write here about Bella’s passing for a couple of reasons. She and Daisy were featured in the very first edition of this newsletter, in an essay on how I survived the isolation of the pandemic with their companionship, and they’ve appeared several times since — though not as often as Donald Trump. And Bella deserved the attention, even if she hadn’t demanded it with her frequent yapping. She was always surprising me, like when she was a puppy and we took her to the 4-mile trail at Ridley Creek Park and I expected to carry her, but she walked every inch. Or the way she always understood every word you said to her, like she had a dog ChatGPT brain or something. Bella showed me that creatures will always defy your expectations.

But in the end, Bella taught me something that a lot of readers who’ve had a dog or cat or some other pet also know, which is that our time together is way too short, and that every second is precious — with any of our loved ones. Even the more annoying two-legged variety. It’s a weird feeling because, to be honest, I wasn’t much of a pet person the first half of my life. Now that Bella is gone, I know there will be many good days and a few bad days to come — but the days will never be quite the same.

Second new feature: a blast from the voluminous past of this column and its ancestor, my Attytood blog. On this date 12 years ago, I wrote a blog post with a headline that’s even more tantalizing in 2023 than it seemed at the time: Ivana Trump’s bras, the Iraq war, and why the NYT’s Keller still doesn’t get it. The piece hammers at two of the major themes of my nearly 20 years as an opinion writer: that old-fashioned notions about journalistic “objectivity” haven’t met the growing threats to democracy, and the utter lack of accountability for the Iraq mistake that marked its 20th anniversary this month. What’s up with the recently departed Ivana and her bras? You’ll have to read the entire post to get the scoop.