26 November 20
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Garrison Keillor | A Modest Proposal to Head Off the Next One
Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
Keillor writes: "It's a dangerous time, when families gather for Thanksgiving and pass the deadly virus from the young to the elderly and kill them off."
This will be very hard on the Republican Party. Gamma and Gampy in South Dakota think the communistic Bidenists are the threat but actually it’s Oliver and Olivia home from the U. The kids see COVID as inapplicable to them, like dementia or hair loss, and return to the farm to cough on the cranberries and kill off Elmer and Gertrude. A generation, wiped out. By 2032, South Dakota’s two senators may be 30-year-old artisanal Democrats.
These are, as evangelicals keep pointing out, the Last Days. Forest fires, hurricanes, over-regulation, the closure of churches, face mask requirements, everything points toward apocalypse. But what if the world does not end? Somebody has to fix the highways, send out the Social Security checks, distribute the vaccine. Competence is required.
Back in the sixth grade some boys campaigned for a dog to be class president. We were just discovering our sense of irony and wanted to exercise it. And then in 2016, it actually happened and there he was on the inaugural platform, a big woofer who didn’t know the NSA from the NIH from the end of a broom handle, and the Clintons and Obamas and Bidens were all shaking hands with the goofus and he was counting the crowd and wondering why he wasn’t getting a bigger cut of souvenir sales.
Now, as he tools around his golf course while red states are inundated with COVID patients and his lawyers litter the courts with motions to coronate him, we need to figure out how to defend the country against the next tyrant who is likely to be more competent than he. The problem is us Democrats: half of the voting public is repelled by us and no wonder. We lack discipline and we have no sense of humor. At a time of real suffering and meanness, we listen respectfully to people who feel that their personal identity is a political issue. Height-challenged people, for example, who feel overlooked. We put them on a pedestal. This strikes most people as odd.
Face it. The American people don’t enjoy democracy. Italians do, the French mostly do, and Danes are devoted to it. They have ten political parties in the Danish parliament, plus some independent members who couldn’t find any of the ten to agree with. The idea of a two-party system is abhorrent to Danes; to them, an election is an exercise of individuality.
Americans want a Moses. Trump is more psychosis than Moses but the next one is likely to be worse unless we unite behind Kamala and cancel the 2024 Democratic primaries.
Did you see Kamala and Pence on the split screen? It was the Homecoming Queen/Valedictorian versus the Lunchroom Monitor. America prefers a charming intelligent woman to an angry dullard, hands down. Let Joe do the hard stuff that makes you unpopular, and meanwhile Kamala’s approval ratings soar into the seventies. There are people who know how to accomplish this.
In three years, Snoozin’ Cruz and Two-Cents Pence and Rotten Cotton will be raging in Iowa and New Hampshire, doing eye pokes and carrying on urination contests, and the Democratic Party will be quiet, all of our fools staying in their rooms, our socialists socializing among themselves, the police defunders zipping their lips, there will be Kamala on the ballot, no communists, just a goddess of goodness and light supported by 100% of Democrats. Discipline.
Americans tend to be loose and so we admire discipline and that’s the appeal of authoritarianism. We Democrats need to learn from this. The woofer got elected because he knew nothing and was proud of his ignorance and never once admitted it: that is discipline. You and I have apologized hundreds of times. He, never.
Life can be hard. Deer hunting season is here, which is also the mating season for deer, a nasty coincidence: you’re with a beautiful female with big brown eyes and you paw the ground and snort and wave your antlers and then you smell beer and see a fat man with a red cap pointing a stick at you and there is a burst of flame and she gallops away and he walks over and slits your throat. It’s tragic. There’s nothing I can do to prevent it. But we can defeat the next Trump by closing ranks behind Kamala now and stop the nit-picking. Shut up, fellow Democrats, and form straight lines.
President-elect Joe Biden. (photo: Joe Raedle/Getty)
Biden Searches for Attorney General to Restore Justice Dept.'s Independence, Refocus on Civil Rights
Devlin Barrett and Matt Zapotosky, The Washington Post
Excerpt: "After years seemingly at the center of every major political fight in Washington, the Justice Department is about to get new leadership, and President-elect Joe Biden's choice for attorney general will have to balance competing demands within his party on thorny issues of civil rights, the environment and the department's traditional independence from politicians."
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Purdue Pharma has pleaded guilty to criminal charges over the handling of its prescription painkiller OxyContin. (photo: Toby Talbot/AP)
Purdue Pharma Maker of OxyContin Pleads Guilty to Criminal Charges Related to US Opioid Crisis
Reuters
Excerpt: "Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to criminal charges over the handling of its addictive prescription painkiller OxyContin, capping a deal with federal prosecutors to resolve an investigation into the drugmaker's role in the US opioid crisis."
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Amy Coney Barrett. (photo: Samuel Corum/NYT)
The Supreme Court Fight Over Trump's Last-Ditch Effort to Rig the Census, Explained
Ian Millhiser, Vox
Millhiser writes: "Donald Trump will no longer be president in two months. But an unconstitutional memorandum he handed down last July could potentially shape both US policy and American elections for the next decade, if the Supreme Court, scheduled to hear the case on November 30, allows that memo to take effect."
The Court must decide whether to follow the Constitution’s clear text — or to rubber-stamp an illegal effort by Trump.
onald Trump will no longer be president in two months. But an unconstitutional memorandum he handed down last July could potentially shape both US policy and American elections for the next decade, if the Supreme Court, scheduled to hear the case on November 30, allows that memo to take effect.
The Constitution provides that “representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed.” Nevertheless, Trump’s memo claims that “aliens who are not in a lawful immigration status” should not be counted when seats in the House of Representatives are allocated following the 2020 census.
The memo, in other words, violates the unambiguous text of the Constitution, as well as federal laws governing who should be included in census counts.
An estimated 10.6 million undocumented immigrants live in the United States, and nearly 20 percent live in California. So the nation’s largest blue state could lose as many as three House seats if Trump succeeds in his plans to cut these immigrants out of the apportionment count. (It is likely that the red state of Texas would also be hit hard — but Texas’s Republican legislature is likely to draw gerrymandered maps that would impose the cost of any lost House seats on Democrats. California uses a bipartisan redistricting commission to draw legislative lines.)
The courts have thus far approached Trump’s memo with considerable skepticism. Four different three-judge panels have all unanimously concluded that Trump may not exclude undocumented immigrants from the census count. That means that a dozen judges, some appointed by Democrats and some by Republicans, all agree that Trump’s memo is unconstitutional.
The legal questions in these cases, in the words of one lower court that rejected Trump’s arguments, are “not particularly close or complicated.”
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. New York, one of the four cases challenging Trump’s unconstitutional memo.
The mere fact that the Court will hear this case does not necessarily mean that a majority of the justices are inclined to side with the lame-duck president. The justices normally get to pick and choose which cases they want to hear — ordinarily, four justices must agree to hear a case before it can be argued in the Supreme Court. But federal law sometimes requires the Court to decide cases that involve time-sensitive, election-related issues, such as how many seats each state will have in the next House of Representatives.
New York is one of these rare cases that arise under the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction. The justices cannot simply ignore this case even if they agree with the lower courts that ruled against Trump.
So it’s possible, perhaps even likely, that the Supreme Court will agree with the unanimous consensus of the lower court judges who’ve considered Trump’s memo and rejected it. Nevertheless, with six conservatives on the Court — including three Trump appointees — there is no guarantee that Trump will lose.
Trump claims he gets to decide who counts for purposes of apportionment
Trump’s memo claims that the Constitution’s provisions, governing who should be counted for purposes of apportionment, should not be read literally. “Although the Constitution requires the ‘persons in each State, excluding Indians not taxed,’ to be enumerated in the census,” Trump says in his memo, “that requirement has never been understood to include in the apportionment base every individual physically present within a State’s boundaries at the time of the census.”
He’s not wrong that some foreign nationals, who may be physically present in the United States during a census, are not counted. Tourists, foreign diplomats, international businesspeople, and other non-citizens who temporarily visit the United States typically are not included in the census. “The term ‘persons in each State,’” Trump’s memo fairly reasonably notes, “has been interpreted to mean that only the ‘inhabitants’ of each State should be included.”
This general premise — that only “inhabitants” of a state, and not temporarily foreign visitors, should be counted by the census — is fairly uncontroversial. But Trump then claims the power to decide who counts as an “inhabitant” for census purposes. “Determining which persons should be considered ‘inhabitants’ for the purpose of apportionment requires the exercise of judgment,” his memo argues.
And Trump, according to his lawyers, “validly exercised that judgment in deciding to exclude illegal aliens ‘to the maximum extent feasible and consistent with the discretion delegated to the executive branch.’”
But Trump’s lawyers do not cite an actual statute giving Trump the power to determine who counts as an “inhabitant” of a state, and the federal laws governing the census suggest that Trump does not have this power. Those laws provide that the secretary of commerce shall report the “total population by States” to the president once the census is done counting individuals, and they require the president to “transmit to the Congress a statement showing the whole number of persons in each State” once he is done reviewing the census. These references to the “total population” and the “whole number of persons” suggest that the president may not pick and choose who is counted.
Moreover, as the lower court that ruled against Trump in New York held, “it does not follow that illegal aliens — a category defined by legal status, not residence — can be excluded” from the census by claiming that they are not “inhabitants” of a state. “To the contrary,” the court explained, while quoting from Merriam-Webster’s dictionary, “the ordinary definition of the term ‘inhabitant’ is ‘one that occupies a particular place regularly, routinely, or for a period of time.’”
Many undocumented immigrants reside in a state for “many years or even decades,” the court continued. These immigrants are as much “inhabitants” of those states as any other resident. Two of the judges who joined this opinion, it is worth noting, were appointed by Republican President George W. Bush.
Unable to cite any legal authority giving Trump the power to decide who is an “inhabitant” of a state, Trump’s brief points to a handful of other sources — some legal, some otherwise — which are at least somewhat consistent with the outgoing president’s understanding of who counts as an “inhabitant.”
Trump’s brief, for example, quotes a line from a 1992 Supreme Court decision, which says that the determination of whether a particular individual should be counted by the census may “include some element of allegiance or enduring tie to a place” — though it’s unclear what quoting this line adds to Trump’s argument because an undocumented immigrant who has long resided in the same state has an “enduring tie” to the place.
Similarly, Trump’s brief points to The Law of Nations, a 1758 treatise by the Swiss lawyer Emmerich de Vattel, which defined the term “inhabitant” to include “strangers, who are permitted to settle and stay in the country.”
American courts do not typically rely on 262-year-old books by European authors to override the unambiguous text of the Constitution. And there’s also a glaring problem with relying on Vattel to determine who should be counted by the census. As one of the plaintiffs’ briefs in the New York case explains, “Vattel defined ‘inhabitants’ as ‘distinguished from citizens’ — i.e., in his lexicon, only noncitizens were classified as ‘inhabitants.’”
Thus, if the Supreme Court were to rely on Vattel’s definition of an “inhabitant” to determine who should be counted by the census, it would exclude US citizens from the count. House apportionment would be determined solely based on how many non-citizens were lawfully residing in each state.
New York is an early test of the new Supreme Court majority’s commitment to the rule of law
The Supreme Court hears a lot of difficult cases, but Trump v. New York is not one of them. Trump’s memo is at odds with clear constitutional text. Trump’s brief offers little support for his arguments. Every judge to consider Trump’s memo has ruled against it. And it’s not even clear that the justices would have agreed to hear this case in the first place if it didn’t fall within the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction.
But the case is also being heard by a deeply conservative Court that appears emboldened by the confirmation of new Justice Amy Coney Barrett to move the law dramatically to the right — especially in cases impacting elections.
New York, in other words, will be an early test of just how emboldened the Court’s new majority has become. If the justices back Trump in New York, despite clear constitutional text to the contrary, then that’s a worrisome sign about the future of the rule of law in the United States.
In any event, the Court is likely to decide this case very quickly. By law, Trump must inform Congress of how House seats will be apportioned among the states by January 10, 2021.
Outdoor dining. (photo: Cindy Ord/Getty Images)
When Does 'Outside' Become Inside? We Asked the Experts
Katie Way, VICE
Way writes: "Months ago, the movers and shakers at the CDC told us it was safe - to an extent, at least - to gather outdoors in a distant, mask-wearing fashion."
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Iván's house in Barra del Motagua, July 2018. (photo: Colectivo 84)
Climate Change Haunts a Ghostly Border in Honduras
Areli Palomo, NACLA
Palomo writes: "'To see what you want to see will take us a while,' Iván tells me just in front of his house. 'That stone that you are looking for is already cast out into the sea.'
Iván is a tiny, thin fisherman who was born and lives in Barra del Motagua, a community in the northern Honduran municipality of Omoa, perched at the border with Guatemala. He has agreed to guide me and Marcos, a young biologist from nearby Cuyamel, to see the obelisk-shaped landmark that draws the boundary between Honduras and Guatemala. The challenge is that the obelisk—or what’s left of it—is sinking.
The fisherman looks at me with doubt. The burdens and misfortunes that he has long fought seem to now colonize his facial expressions, banishing him to some corner of himself where he waits for something or someone to call him back. Iván’s house is barely standing. His community and neighboring Barra de Cuyamel are being swallowed up by the sea.
The tide has been encroaching on these communities, as well as their houses, croplands, and water sources, for the past 10 years. The situation is increasingly driving locals to flee, leaving behind a ghostly border. The devastation brought by Hurricanes Eta and Iota, the strongest to hit the Atlantic this year, exacerbate this grim picture—haunting warnings of what climate change is set to bring to this vulnerable region.
The strange and desolate beach stretches for miles. We walk past vegetation buried in the sand, dry palm trees, dead mangroves, and lots of trash, which the rivers and tides manage to carry here from as far away as Guatemala City.
Parts of some of the houses in these two communities are already under water. Iván says many residents have already left. Some have headed further inland to rent homes in Cuyamel, but “most of them went to the United States,” he explains. There’s mostly one reason: “The sea took them out.”
Biologist Gustavo Cabrera, who has worked in the area for years, had offered a sobering assessment. “The sea keeps gaining ground,” he told me during an interview the day before I met Iván. “It has already swallowed 70-80 percent of the towns of Barra de Cuyamel and Barra del Motagua. A kilometer of coastline has been lost in less than 10 years.”
The Sea Came Here to Stay
Barra del Motagua and Barra de Cuyamel are located inside the National Park Cuyamel-Omoa (PANACO), which the government officially declared a protected area in 2011. The wetland system inside PANACO’s specially protected core area is fundamental for the preservation of the second most important coral reef system in the world, known as the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System (MBRS). In 2013, the international Convention on Wetlands, also known as the Ramsar Convention, declared PANACO a site of international importance.
The wetland ecosystems and water sources are also key for the daily survival of the surrounding communities.
According to the government’s Cuyamel-Omoa Biophysical Diagnosis of 2017, there are four reasons why the sea is invading the Omoa coast: Rising sea levels as a result of climate change, coastline changes due to the construction of infrastructure like embankments, the change of course of the Motagua River as a result of Hurricane Mitch in 1998, and the collapse and disfigurement of agricultural and residential lands due to a 2009 earthquake. The earthquake accelerated the sea level advancement already underway. As a result, according to the diagnosis, “it is presumed that the communities remained below sea level, facilitating the invasion of waters into continental soil and also the intrusion of seawater in extensive cultivation areas.”
Nowhere to Go
The path to the obelisk is long. The entire beach is infested with little insects that bite at the speed of a machine gun: gnats. As we walk, the gnats escorting us, Iván explains what the area looked like before the salty water took over. There was an estuary, mangrove, fish in these habitats, houses, arable land, and more people. Like the mangrove and the vegetation, the community is disappearing.
A 2017 report by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation titled Justice and Climate Change in Honduras mentions possible relocation for residents in areas like Omoa. The issue has been on the table for years. According to the study, the Omoa mayor’s office had identified a piece of land to relocate the families from these two communities at least three years ago. But the land was privately owned, and “the people of the community couldn’t afford and the municipality resisted paying” the asking price of 3 million lempiras, $119,520. Omoa mayor Ricardo Alvarado, who has now been in office for more than a decade, told Honduran media outlet Contra Corriente in 2018 that the municipality had a plot of land in a nearby town to accommodate the relocation of 80 families. However, authorities declared the areas of Barra del Motagua y la Barra de Cuyamel where these families live uninhabitable in 2012, and government responses to the emergency have been slow.
At the beginning of 2020, heavy rains hit the Gulf of Honduras in the Caribbean, which put all the communities along the Atlantic coast area on alert, including the communities in Omoa. Although authorities announced the evacuation of Barra de Cuyamel and Barra del Motagua, some families did not leave because, to date, the relocation plans remain temporary.
I ask Iván if he would consider relocating. “Relocate? Not really,” he says. Despite talk from the mayor’s office about such plans, he says, it’s unclear what relocation would look like, and where residents would go. “I think it’s going to be near Cuyamel...something like that,” Iván continues. “That’s what I’ve heard the mayor say...he says sometimes to one place, then to another place and...” Iván keeps talking, but an absurd tedium takes over.
After clambering into Iván’s canoe, we ride as far as we can towards the border through a small river. But we get to a fence that blocks our way. It is private property, Iván says, looking at me, his words dry. It belongs to the palmeros—the owners of oil palm plantations. Before I can ask more questions, the canoe jerks as the biologist tries to stand up. Iván shouts at him to sit. As we rock, I see on the other side of the barbed wire some houses that are still standing. But they, too, will be swallowed up.
The Palm Plantations Took Root
Since 2006, Honduran agricultural export policy has focused on oil palm plantations, with plans to expand cultivation by 28,000 hectares focusing on four departments: Yoro, Atlántida, Colón, and Cortés, where PANACO is located. Palm oil is used in the production of processed foods and as biodiesel, which is part of international “clean energy” schemes. Palm blankets large swathes of land along Honduras’s north coast and has also encroached on PANACO. Beyond the relentless advancement of the sea in the area, palm monocultures are driving the destruction of natural resources, including in this protected area. Oil palm expansion also aggravates social conflicts and has been linked to human rights abuses and assassinations of social leaders in Honduras and other countries.
In the Omoa wetlands, communities are squeezed between oil palm—associated with land grabbing, ecological disaster, migration, and at times drug trafficking—and the rising sea.
Protected areas such as PANACO are divided into a core zone and a buffer zone. In theory, according to the PANACO management plan, the core zone is destined for absolute conservation. In other words, no deforestation, no diverting the course of the rivers, no modification or alteration of the area, and definitely no palm plantations.
The wetlands are crucial to maintain the balance between saltwater, fresh water, the reproduction of edible fish, and the barrier reef that provides economic sustenance not only in Omoa, but also in other areas across Mexico and Central America.
This map, elaborated with Sentinel 2 images from the European Space Agency (ESA), shows that palm covers 17.1 percent of the wetland area in the core zone and that only 44.22 percent of the wetland remains. Cattle ranching, which occupies 35.68 percent of the core zone, is one way of introducing palm. Diverting the course of the rivers to flatten the land and deforest it is a common practice in cattle ranching, which serves as a precursor for cultivating plantations can be cultivated after grazing cattle. Thus, palm gains ground, just as the sea.
As the Friedrich Ebert Foundation’s 2017 climate justice study highlights, one of the main problems to overcome in addressing climate change is the worldview that sees natural resources and the environment as commodities, and this approach is ubiquitous in Honduran environmental and development policy. The influence of the United States and its mercantilist vision of resources and the environment is particularly present in the government’s Country Vision 2010-2038 and National Plan 2010-2022. According to the report, these documents offer “a clone” of the Sustainable Territorial Development plan prepared by the Center for Economic and Social Research of the country’s largest business lobby, the Honduran Council of Private Enterprise (COHEP), which is funded by USAID.
PANACO, its sea, its palms, and all the stories behind its destruction are part of the catastrophic consequences of climate change that are already underway. According to a 2008 study by the International Organization for Migration (IOM), refugees from climate change will number 200 million by 2050.
Haunting the Border
At the border, I finally glimpse the obelisk. Iván says it used to be inland, where its base sat in the waters of the estuary. But when the sea advanced, it dug up the marker and broke it. Now the base is uncovered, and it looks like a mangrove with its roots outside, in the open, abandoned and waiting for the sea to swallow it.
In her 2008 book Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination, sociologist Avery Gordon links haunting to social violence. She writes: “Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life…What is distinctive about haunting is that it is an animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known, sometimes very directly, sometimes more obliquely…[G]hosts appear when the trouble they represent and symptomize is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view.”
Indeed, Iván says that he only gets scared when the sea is angry, when it knocks on his door and wants to come in. He laughs nervously at a reality that seeps like the saltwater under the foundations of his house and dampens the walls.
This ghostly border offers a haunting warning. The sea was only the trigger, unleashing the consequences of a capitalism without borders. The flooding provoked by Eta and Iota in inland and coastal communities of Honduras this year and the advance of the sea, palm, and migration are the products of that system. In the end, the ghost of the border will come knocking at our doors, just as the angry sea knocks at Iván’s.
Chad Holland, a Georgia resident who lives near Plant Mitchell, which is owned by Georgia Power. (photo: Robin Rayne/ProPublica)
A Power Company's Quiet Land-Buying Spree Could Shield It From Coal Ash Cleanup Costs
Max Blau, ProPublica
Blau writes: "Over the past several years, utility giant Georgia Power has embarked on an unusual buying spree, paying top dollar for people's property in places where cheap land was easy to find."
Georgia Power paid top dollar to buy land from residents living near waste sites at its power plants. Environmentalists fear it’s a tactic to forestall the cleanup bill from new regulations for coal ash.
In 2016, it bought a veterinarian’s 5-acre lot in the rolling hills of northwest Georgia for roughly double the appraised value. The following year, it acquired 28 acres of flood-prone land in southwest Georgia’s pecan belt for nearly four times what the local tax assessor said it was worth. By the year after that, it had paid millions of dollars above the appraised value for hundreds of acres near a winding gravel road in a central Georgia town with no water lines and spotty cellphone service.
Two things united the properties: They were all near coal-fired power plants that generated toxic waste stored in unlined ponds at those sites. And they were all purchased after the Environmental Protection Agency finalized new regulations in 2014 governing the disposal of such waste, known as coal ash. All told, the utility paid over $15 million for nearly 1,900 acres close to five of its 12 power plant sites, according to an investigation by Georgia Health News and ProPublica.
The costly land purchases offer an enormous potential payoff to Georgia Power, one of the largest producers of coal ash waste in the country, the investigation found. They may allow the utility to forestall millions of dollars in cleanup costs outlined by the December 2014 regulations.
The Atlanta-based company is trying to convince regulators to allow it to leave more than half of its coal ash — around 48 million tons — in unlined ponds at plant sites spread across the state. Environmentalists believe the safest way to dispose of coal ash is to move it from unlined ponds into landfills that have a protective, and more costly, liner to prevent contaminants from seeping into groundwater — the source of drinking water for people who depend upon wells.
Unlined coal ash ponds frequently leak contaminants into groundwater, according to a pair of analyses of industry-reported data conducted by advocacy groups Environmental Integrity Project and Earthjustice. Recent Georgia Power tests of groundwater show that coal ash contaminants appear to be migrating out of the ponds at some plant sites, according to experts who reviewed company filings.
The new regulations require utilities to clean up contaminants if they are found at high enough levels beyond the boundaries of their plant sites. By extending those boundaries through land purchases, Georgia Power could push back the day it has to deal with its legacy of pollution, according to a dozen environmental experts, regulators and activists.
Betsy Southerland, former director of the Office of Science and Technology in the EPA’s Office of Water, said Georgia Power’s purchases can “move their fence line far enough out” so the higher levels of coal ash contaminants will dilute enough to fall under enforceable maximum contamination levels by the time they reach the new property border.
“It does not surprise me at all that Georgia Power is looking to acquire additional buffer lands,” said Stan Meiburg, a former EPA acting deputy administrator who reviewed Georgia Power filings obtained by GHN and ProPublica. “It gives them more ability to keep an eye on any contamination before this reaches property boundaries.”
Utility officials contend that their preferred methods of closure, which depend on the specifics of each site, are safe.
Georgia Power spokesperson John Kraft said in a recent statement that the purchased properties were intended for use as a construction buffer while the company closes its unlined ponds, a lengthy process that includes pumping water out of the disposal site and burying the remaining coal ash in place. He did not respond to direct questions about whether the purchased land would help the company delay cleanup costs.
He noted that the company, a subsidiary of the Southern Company, the nation’s second-largest energy provider, has hired experts to monitor test wells positioned around the ash ponds for signs of groundwater contamination. Based on the results of those tests, he added, the company “has identified no impact to drinking water.”
But neighbors who continue to live near coal-fired plants are suspicious of the way Georgia Power has quietly purchased the properties. The utility has required those who sell it land to sign contracts that release the company from future legal claims and forbid the sellers to voice concerns about polluted drinking water wells. They worry that Georgia Power will eventually walk away from its waste, leaving local communities exposed to the long-term risk of poisons seeping into well water — and the potential negative health care outcomes that may follow.
Federal and state regulations require Georgia Power to monitor the coal ash disposal sites for 30 years. That’s not long enough to protect those who want to set down roots for life.
When Chad Holland moved to Albany, Georgia, in 2007, just down the road from Plant Mitchell, he didn’t think twice about his water source. A private well provided the water his family used for drinking, cooking and bathing. But this past spring, while scrolling down his Facebook feed, he saw a post about coal ash.
The 49-year-old alcohol sales supervisor soon began to wonder if his water had been contaminated by waste dumped less than a mile from his family home. So he set out in search of answers.
“I had never thought anything of it,” Holland told GHN and ProPublica. “I wanted to know what was in the pond.”
A Moment of Reckoning
On Dec. 22, 2008, more than a billion gallons of a toxic slurry of coal ash and water breached a dike at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston Fossil Plant about 40 miles west of Knoxville. The wave — roughly five times the volume of liquid spilled by the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico two years later — tore up railways, toppled power lines, knocked a home off its foundation and caked the Emory River in a thick, gray sludge.
The catastrophe awakened the public to a long-hidden danger: vast amounts of coal ash stored in disposal sites at power plants across the rest of the United States. Utilities produce over 100 million tons of coal ash annually, according to the EPA, making it the nation’s second-largest source of industrial waste after household garbage.
Coal ash is the fine residue left when coal is burned to produce power. The ash contains contaminants associated with long-term health risks, including damage to the kidney (from mercury), stomach (from boron) and nervous system (from arsenic). To dispose of it, utilities can either transport the waste to a landfill with a protective liner on the bottom or mix it with water in an ash pond without a layer underneath.
Until recently, the waste largely had been regulated by the states instead of the federal government, in part thanks to pressure from industry groups fighting stricter environmental protections. Some states, like Maryland, enacted tough standards to dispose of the waste. Georgia, however, did not follow suit, despite a growing body of science warning about the potential for unlined ponds full of contaminants to pollute aquifers that supply water to homes with drinking wells.
The Kingston spill broke a long-standing logjam in Washington. The Obama administration spent years holding hearings, studying the past research and reviewing new comments about potential coal ash regulations. On Dec. 19, 2014, EPA officials finalized the first-ever federal coal ash rule designed to reduce the risk of emergency failures, protect groundwater and outline best practices for closing ash ponds.
For decades, Georgia Power had dumped ash into ponds without a protective liner. Now, to comply with the new coal ash rule, the company would have to remove the water from its ponds. From there, it could either leave the ash in place with a cover on top, install a protective liner under the ash or remove the ash into a lined landfill.
Faced with billions of dollars in potential environmental compliance costs, the utility resorted to an old page from its corporate playbook. For much of the 20th century, Georgia Power had bought thousands of acres of land — seizing some properties through the use of eminent domain — to build new coal-fired plants. By the 1980s, the utility had expanded energy production capabilities beyond what Georgians actually needed. So it sold excess electricity outside the state, while disposing of the associated waste inside the state.
Georgia became a coal ash capital, home to over 90 million tons of waste in the communities where its plants stood.
“It’s Like a Death That You Can’t Get Over”
Power plants are notorious for driving down the value of nearby homes. But since the coal ash rule was finalized, GHN and ProPublica found that Georgia Power doubled the amount it had been previously paying to acquire land.
In the six years before Dec. 19, 2014, records show that Georgia Power purchased 12 properties for an average price of over $4,000 per acre. In the nearly six years since the coal ash rule was finalized, Georgia Power bought about 75 properties for an average price of $8,800 per acre — outpacing the growth of average real estate values in rural areas of the state. The company purchased a third of those properties for over $30,000 an acre — and a handful for over $100,000 an acre.
Ten days after the EPA finalized the coal ash rule, Georgia Power spent $1.3 million to acquire 141 acres of land near Plant Bowen in the northwest part of the state. A four-acre sinkhole there had opened at the plant’s coal ash pond years earlier, releasing over 2 million gallons of arsenic-laced ash and water into a tributary of the Etowah River. In the following years, the utility also purchased 32 acres near the Plant Arkwright site in Macon; 55 acres near Plant Wansley in west Georgia; and over 1,000 acres near Plant Scherer, the nation’s largest coal-fired plant, in central Georgia.
The EPA does not require utilities to disclose purchases of land near coal ash storage sites. But environmental experts say Georgia Power’s buying spree is larger than most previous residential land acquisitions by other utilities near their coal ash ponds in Florida, Indiana and North Carolina. Since December 2014, Georgia Power has acquired more land than the TVA did after its Kingston spill, according to property records. Unlike the TVA, Georgia Power has purchased land without the occurrence of a sudden catastrophe.
“It makes you wonder if they’re trying to buy you out to get you gone,” said Gloria Hammond, one of the last remaining property owners on Luther Smith Road, which runs along the northern edge of Plant Scherer.
Kraft, the Georgia Power spokesman, said the company “routinely purchases property around our generation plants.” He declined to answer questions regarding the increase in purchase prices near the company’s disposal sites since the coal ash rule was finalized.
At least one former neighbor of Georgia Power was required to sign a nondisparagement agreement. If the seller spoke negatively about the company — including any mention of prior concerns about groundwater contamination — the company could take that person to court.
After the sale, the seller, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, noticed Georgia Power post “no trespassing” signs outside the house. One of the company’s crews razed the person’s family home and sealed the drinking well on the property.
State law requires Georgia Power to seal unused drinking wells within three years to prevent accidents or illegal dumping. But environmentalists say the company should keep the wells open to monitor for potential contamination.
To this day, the seller worries about the long-term repercussions from living near the coal ash pond.
“It’s been a nightmare,” the seller said. “It’s like a death that you can’t get over.”
Coal Ash Contaminants Spark Statewide Concerns
On days that Holland, the alcohol sales supervisor, drove his two daughters to school, he passed by the front gates of Plant Mitchell, which had operated for decades less than a mile from his home. A tree buffer along Old Georgia Highway 3, however, obscured his view of the coal ash ponds on site.
Although Holland didn’t know it, some Georgia officials had long worried about the disposal of coal ash at Plant Mitchell. In the late 1980s, an investigator with the Georgia Environmental Protection Division, or EPD, visited coal plants across the state. At Plant Mitchell, the investigator documented evidence that “groundwater contamination is occurring via leachate from wastes generated on-site” and could impact nearly 2,000 people who “extensively” used drinking wells, according to records stored in state archives. Kevin Chambers, a spokesman for EPD, said current agency officials could not determine whether any efforts were made at the time to address those groundwater contamination concerns.
In 2015, Georgia Power shut down the power plant, which went online just after World War II. The utility left behind 2 million tons of coal ash waste stored on-site.
Around that time, Holland noticed “no trespassing” signs posted near a boat landing across the street from Plant Mitchell. A few years earlier, Holland and his father had been interested in buying a lot near the landing, which allowed access to the Flint River. He didn’t think the land was worth much because the property flooded during heavy storms. When the owner said he wanted at least $50,000, Holland didn’t even bother to make an offer. It was too much, he thought.
This past March, Holland clicked on a news article shared by one of his Facebook friends. As he scanned the article, he read about residents in Juliette, the small central Georgia town where Plant Scherer is located. They suspected the waste left behind from burning coal had contaminated local groundwater, which supplied water to their homes through wells. They’d seen friends grow sick and family members die at a young age.
Curious, he began researching property sales. When he looked up Georgia Power’s purchase of the property near the boat landing, he was floored to learn that it paid over $340,000 for the land. He also noticed that the power company had purchased nearby properties for a total of over $1.2 million, nearly four times the value appraised by the local tax assessor.
Worrisome thoughts soon raced through Holland’s head. He was never approached by Georgia Power about his property. So he called his neighbors who sold land to Georgia Power. Then, he called a law firm. None offered the answers he needed. He thought about all the times his wife and daughters had consumed the water. Was his family in danger? he wondered. He needed to know.
He was desperate for answers.
“I’m not stupid,” Holland told GHN and ProPublica. “If they’re doing that, there’s a reason for it.”
More Contamination Evidence Disclosed After Property Sales
In a public hearing last year, Georgia Power CEO Paul Bowers said the company’s focus “has always been on public health and safety, and ensuring we’re compliant with the EPA rules and Georgia state rules.” The company has mailed informational packets to residents near Plant Scherer, claiming that “no evidence” exists that the ash pond is responsible for groundwater contamination.
But environmental experts said data recently released by Georgia Power is cause for concern. It shows that monitoring wells at Plant Mitchell and several other plants have registered the presence of contaminants in groundwater often found in coal ash ponds. The wells lie between the ponds and land recently acquired by Georgia Power.
Groundwater testing at Plants Bowen and Arkwright have revealed levels of cobalt and molybdenum, toxins linked to higher risk of liver damage and other health ailments, that exceed state groundwater protection standards. Another Plant Arkwright site test found levels of lithium, a chemical that can lead to neurological damage if consumed in large enough amounts. The levels are high enough to have triggered extra monitoring and the development of cleanup plans required by coal ash regulations.
Experts who reviewed the data at the request of GHN and ProPublica said it does not offer a definitive link between contaminants found in coal ash ponds and those detected in either monitoring wells or nearby private drinking wells.
Environmental advocacy groups such as the Altamaha Riverkeeper are testing private drinking wells near coal ash ponds in an effort to establish a stronger link. Over the past two years, the group has tested about a hundred private drinking wells near Plant Scherer. Those wells contained mercury, boron, calcium, sulfate and barium — all of which are potential indicators of coal ash contaminants.
However, environmentalists noted, the swift sealing of drinking wells on the land purchased by Georgia Power will make it more difficult to establish such a link. The well closures may offer the utility protection from lawsuits by people claiming they have been sickened by contamination seeping from the coal ash ponds.
“This is a business decision,” said Jesse Demonbreun-Chapman, executive director of the Coosa River Basin Initiative, an environmental advocacy group whose purview includes the waters adjacent to Plant Bowen. “You’re cutting off liability for a waste stream they haven’t controlled.”
Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division is expected to make a final decision on how best to close the unlined ash ponds when it issues closure permits sometime next year.
Chuck Mueller, the agency’s land branch chief, said in a statement that any permit issued will require “a sufficient number” of monitoring wells to be installed so that coal ash contaminants “do not migrate beyond the permitted boundaries” of each plant site.
Unanswered Questions
This past summer, Holland couldn’t stop thinking about the nearby ash ponds. Working from home at his dining room table, he wondered why a constant parade of 18-wheel trucks passed by his house coming and going from Plant Mitchell site. He grew more curious about the monitoring wells near the coal ash ponds along the side of Old Georgia Highway 3.
The more articles Holland read, the more he jotted down notes on his trusted yellow legal pad. He recorded a grim roll of contaminants: Hexavalent chromium. Arsenic. Lead. Mercury. He wrote down the name of a Juliette resident who sold his property to Georgia Power. Describing what Georgia Power did after some sales he read about, he wrote: “HOUSE BOUGHT. POURED CONCRETE IN WELLS.” In July, 45 central Georgia residents sued the utility, alleging that Plant Scherer’s coal ash contaminants contributed to health problems such as cancer, cardiovascular disorder and thyroid damage.
One day in early October, Holland received a phone call from Gordon Rogers, executive director of Flint Riverkeeper. Holland shared his concerns that the company’s purchases may be hiding the true extent of contamination.
Rogers was reminded of similar conversations with other residents who lived near Plant Mitchell. Rogers hoped they’d find answers, starting with an upcoming well-testing campaign to determine the extent of groundwater contamination.
The prospect of future answers hasn’t quelled Holland’s present anxiety. Tests could help ease his worry. But only some. He still felt uneasy thinking of all the years his girls drank the water without worry.
“What if my daughters get sick 10 years from now?” he said with a sigh, sitting at his dining room table. “I’m scared of what can happen down the line.”
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