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n the days leading up to Donald Rumsfeld's death, the US targeted Iranian proxy fighters along the Iraq-Syria border with airstrikes in what the Pentagon said was a "defensive" response to drone attacks on American forces in the region.
The fighting between the US and Iran-backed militias is intrinsically tied to Rumsfeld's legacy. The 2003 US invasion of Iraq and removal of its dictator created a power vacuum that Iran took advantage of, using it as an opportunity to prop up Shiite Islamist militias and political parties that vie for power in Iraq and counter America's agenda and troops.
As former President George W. Bush's secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006, Rumsfeld was one of the main architects of the 2003 Iraq War and a proponent of the torture methods that damaged America's global standing. He played a central role in selling the false notion that Saddam Hussein was actively developing weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) that posed a direct threat to the US. Later, Rumsfeld referred to his baseless assertions about WMDs in Iraq as "misstatements."
In one of his most infamous statements about the war, Rumsfeld once dismissed looting that occurred shortly after the invasion by simply stating: "Stuff happens."
The war was a costly disaster for Rumsfeld's political career and in far more reverberating ways, with the conflict claiming many Iraqi and American lives while undermining US credibility worldwide.
The "global war on terror," which the Iraq invasion was fundamentally linked to and began while Rumsfeld was Pentagon chief, has also been an exorbitantly expensive debacle. It's claimed over 800,000 lives, displaced at least 37 million, and the US government places the price-tag around $6.4 trillion, according to the Brown University's Costs of War project, which estimated that as many as 308,000 people directly died as a result of the war's violence.
The 2003 Iraq invasion also helped catalyze the rise of the Islamic State or ISIS, a terrorist organization that has claimed responsibility for devastating attacks across the globe. ISIS was initially founded as "Al Qaeda in Iraq" in 2004. By 2014, ISIS declared a caliphate as it controlled a large swath of territory across Iraq and Syria. ISIS lost its territorial holdings and has seen top leaders killed, but is still viewed as a threat by the US and its Western allies.
"ISIS, al-Qa'ida, and Iran and its militant allies continue to plot terrorist attacks against US persons and interests, including to varying degrees in the United States. Despite leadership losses, terrorist groups have shown great resiliency and are taking advantage of ungoverned areas to rebuild," the US intelligence community said in its annual threat assessment released in April. The US maintains a presence of roughly 2,500 troops in Iraq as part of the international coalition continuing to fight the remnants of ISIS.
Rumsfeld in his 2011 memoir said he had no regrets about the 2003 Iraq War because it took out Saddam Hussein, which he said helped stabilized the Middle East. History tells a different story.
"While the road not traveled always looks smoother, the cold reality of a Hussein regime in Baghdad most likely would mean a Middle East far more perilous than it is today," Rumsfeld said. "Our failure to confront Iraq would have sent a message to other nations that neither America nor any other nation was willing to stand in the way of their support for terrorism and pursuit of weapons of mass destruction."
Years before the 2003 invasion, Rumsfeld served as the Reagan administration's special Middle East envoy. At the time, he met with Hussein and offered the Iraqi leader assistance - even though the US knew that Hussein was using chemical weapons against Iran amid a devastating conflict.
Rumsfeld was also a documented proponent of enhanced interrogation techniques - or torture.
In one memo that Rumsfeld signed as defense secretary approving the use of torture on detainees, he wrote a handwritten note asking why they would only be required to stand for four hours.
A December 2008 Senate report also concluded that Abu Ghraib torture scandal was a product of the interrogation techniques approved by Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials.
Human rights groups and civil liberties groups like the ACLU filed unsuccessful lawsuits against Rumsfeld over his involvement in America's use of torture. Such organizations pointed to this legacy as they reacted to the news of Rumsfeld's death.
"Rumsfeld may be dead, but other senior Bush administration officials are alive and well and available for criminal investigation into torture," Andrea Prasow, deputy Washington irector at Human Rights Watch, said in a tweet.
Jameel Jaffer, the executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, tweeted that the "top of every obituary" should state that he "gave the orders that resulted in the abuse and torture of hundreds of prisoners in US custody in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay."
Allen Weisselberg, long-serving CFO of Trump Organization, center, surrendered Thursday morning at the Lower Manhattan building that houses the criminal courts and the district attorney's office. (photo: Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times)
'In cases like Cosby's, a high-profile trial offers many women a moment of minor catharisis.' (photo: Mark Makela/Reuters)
Election officials have been targeted not just by extremists but by Republican lawmakers who seek to penalize them for failing to adhere to spurious protocols. (photo: Hannah Mckay/Reuters)
“To have someone say you deserve a knife to your throat, that you should be executed, that they are going to eff up your family, shakes you,” a former city clerk said.
or Tina Barton, the death threats began a few days after last November’s general election. At the time, Barton was in her eighth year as the clerk of Rochester Hills, a city of seventy-five thousand people in southeastern Michigan, where her many responsibilities included administering elections. On the evening of November 3rd, after the city’s election results were transmitted to a central tabulator, it looked like the absentee ballots for some precincts had not been included, so Barton and her crew resubmitted them. The next morning, when they realized that these ballots had, in fact, been transmitted the first time, the mistake was fixed. Barton assumed that was the end of it.
Within days, Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, held a press conference in nearby Bloomfield Hills. Although Barton was appointed by a nonpartisan city council, she is a Republican and considered McDaniel an ally. “I was never called by them to say, ‘Hey, Tina, what happened there?’ ” Barton said. “There was never, like, let’s check the facts.” Instead, at the press conference, McDaniel falsely claimed that two thousand votes for Trump had gone to Biden. “It was a complete mischaracterization,” Barton told me. “They needed language to support the agenda that they were pushing, and they used me, specifically, for the shock factor, because I was a Republican. I think they were trying to make the case that, if it could happen in Rochester Hills, it could happen anywhere.”
Barton posted an explanatory video on Twitter, which quickly amassed more than a million views. A torrent of death threats followed, left on her office voice mail and sent via Facebook Messenger. “To have someone say you deserve a knife to your throat, that you should be executed, that they are going to eff up your family, shakes you,” she said. “And I’m fortunate. My husband is a sheriff’s deputy. That added a layer of security a lot of election officials don’t have.” Barton is now a senior adviser to the U.S. Election Assistance Commission (E.A.C.), where she works with election administrators all over the country. “These are true public servants,” she said. “They are in it because they have a passion for democracy. And now they are asking themselves if they are willing to put themselves and their families at risk to do this job.”
A recent survey commissioned by the Brennan Center for Justice found that one in three election officials now feel unsafe doing their jobs, citing, among other things, threats to their lives. More than half said that misinformation circulating on social media made their job more dangerous. “The year 2020 provided Americans with an extraordinary civics lesson on the importance of election officials to our democracy,” the center noted in a subsequent report, “Election Officials Under Attack,” which was co-authored with the Bipartisan Policy Center. “It is no accident that in 2021, as American democracy finds itself under assault, these officials are a prime target.”
Last Friday, according to a memo from Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco, the Department of Justice launched a joint task force with the F.BI. to deal with threats to election workers. “We will promptly and vigorously prosecute offenders to protect the rights of American voters, to punish those who engage in this criminal behavior, and to send the unmistakable message that such conduct will not be tolerated.”
But officials like Barton have been targeted not just by QAnon conspiracists and Stop-the-Steal extremists. Republican state lawmakers across the country have been proposing and passing legislation to penalize election administrators and poll workers with sizable fines and criminal prosecution for failing to adhere to new, spurious protocols. An election supervisor in Florida who leaves a ballot drop box unattended, for whatever reason, can now be slapped with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar fine. Barton has been hearing from other election administrators who say that they are exhausted and traumatized. A number are in therapy. Some have had to put their children in therapy. “And now, with the legislation that’s coming forward in some states, attaching penalties that can be financial or jail time or whatever, it is going to cause a lot who haven’t already walked away, to stop and pause and reconsider,” Barton said.
The attrition has already begun. In California, for instance, fifteen per cent of election officials have left their jobs since last November. And, as the Brennan Center report points out, this may be the prelude to a “tsunami.” Nationally, nearly thirty-five per cent of election officials are eligible to retire by the 2024 election; a survey of more than eight hundred officials conducted by the Early Voting Information Center, at Reed College, found that potentially a quarter of them, in some of the country’s largest jurisdictions, are planning to do so. The worry is that, as election officials leave their jobs, not only will they take with them the institutional knowledge necessary to run free and fair elections but they will be replaced by ideologues who lack the commitment to one of the bedrock principles of American democracy—the apolitical administration of our elections. Matt Masterson, a former Republican E.A.C. commissioner, told me, “That creates an environment in which more threatening behavior is encouraged.”
Some states are hastening this transition, passing laws that effectively eliminate nonpartisan election authorities. In Georgia, the legislature removed the secretary of state as the head of the state elections board, deputized itself to name the chair, and empowered the board to take over “underperforming” local election systems, which is widely perceived to be a euphemism for poor communities of color that typically vote for Democrats. In Arizona, the G.O.P.-controlled legislature is aiming to strip the Democratic secretary of state of her authority to defend election lawsuits. And, in Kansas, the legislature has enacted a power grab from election officials. As the veteran election lawyers, Ben Ginsberg, a Republican, and Bob Bauer, a Democrat, recently wrote in the Times, “By subjecting them to invasive, politically motivated control by a state legislative majority, these provisions shift the last word in elections from the pros to the pols. This is a serious attack on the crucial norm that our elections should be run on a professional, nonpartisan basis—and it is deeply wrong.”
Since the election, Maribeth Witzel-Behl, who has served as the city clerk of Madison, Wisconsin, for fifteen years, has struggled with the decision of whether to stay in her job. “I’ve had to figure out if the stress of doing this work is worth trying to make voting accessible for all eligible voters in my community, or if I should be pursuing a career where I’m not receiving any death threats,” she told me. During a recount last fall, people looking for fraud noticed that all of the absentee ballots from Madison, as required by law, had been initialled by Witzel-Behl. One Web site, she said, hosted a discussion of the kinds of guns and ammunition they should use to kill her. Witzel-Behl said the police suggested that she get a home-security system, but, because that was not in her family’s budget, her husband used the money he’d been planning to spend on her Christmas present for a few security upgrades. “It nearly pushed me over the edge,” she said. “I kept going back and forth on a daily basis whether it would be better for my health and my family to move on.” In mid-June, after months of indecision, she agreed to sign on for another five years. “I finally decided that the value of trying to bring equity to the voting process was worth it,” she said.
Witzel-Behl and her staff are still fending off lawsuits related to the 2020 election. One conservative group challenged the grant money received by the city from a nonpartisan nonprofit organization, the Center for Tech and Civic Life (C.T.C.L.), claiming that it was a veiled attempt to benefit Democrats. (Witzel-Behl used the money to provide hazard pay to poll workers.) The funds came mainly from a three-hundred-and-fifty-million-dollar donation made to the organization by Facebook’s C.E.O., Mark Zuckerberg, and his wife, Priscilla Chan, to help with election administration during the pandemic, which sparked its own conspiracy theories. Although more than two hundred Wisconsin municipalities received grants, only five of them, including the state’s two biggest cities, Madison and Milwaukee, which are solidly Democratic, were targeted with litigation. (The suit failed in federal court.)
Republican legislators in Arizona and Arkansas have since made it illegal for any state or local election authority to accept outside funds. Yet, without the C.T.C.L. grants, which were distributed to twenty-five hundred election districts, many municipalities would not have been able to handle the deluge of absentee ballots, afford protective gear for election workers, buy drop boxes or, in many other ways, run an election during a national health crisis. The city of Philadelphia used its ten-million-dollar grant to purchase high-speed scanners, ballot extractors, and other equipment, and to increase the pay of Election Day workers. It, too, was sued. Its sole Republican election commissioner, Al Schmidt, received a barrage of threatening messages on his personal cell phone. His wife got an e-mail telling her, in all caps, “Albert Rino Schmidt will be fatally shot.” Two men were arrested with loaded semi-automatic weapons outside the convention center where ballots were being counted. After the election was called for Biden, Trump singled out Schmidt by name. His family had to move out of their home.
In recent weeks, much attention has been paid to measures being enacted at the state level to limit access to the ballot. Jurisdictions across the country are shortening polling hours, limiting early voting, and eliminating same-day voter registration. But undermining election administration—either by making it harder for officials to do their jobs or by removing them entirely—is new terrain for the Republican Party. Masterson, the former E.A.C. commissioner, told me, “As a Republican commissioner, it is incredibly disheartening to see a big chunk of the Party embrace a narrative of lies, and undermining of our democratic institutions because they can’t move on from a loss.” He went on, “It’s a grift. There are people out there who have identified the ability to both raise money and raise their profile pursuing these lies while offering assurances that they’re going to bring greater integrity to the system. In fact, what’s needed are laws that support and protect election officials and allow them to do their work in an environment that isn’t full of threats of violence and repercussions for doing their job.”
Nuclear-capable U.S. Air Force B-1B Lancer assigned to the 9th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron, deployed from Dyess Air Force Base, Texas. (photo: Airman 1st Class Jacob Skovo/U.S. Air Force)
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-Tom Engelhardt, TomDispatch
es, once upon a time I regularly absorbed science fiction and imagined futures of wonder, but mainly of horror. What else could you think, if you read H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds under the covers by flashlight while your parents thought you were asleep? Of course, that novel was a futuristic fantasy, involving as it did Martians arriving in London to take out humanity. Sixty-odd years after secretly reading that book and wondering about the future that would someday be mine, I’m living, it seems, in that very future, however Martian-less it might be. Still, just in case you hadn’t noticed, our present moment could easily be imagined as straight out of a science-fiction novel that, even at my age, I’d prefer not to read by flashlight in the dark of night.
I mean, I was barely one when Hiroshima was obliterated by a single atomic bomb. In the splintering of a moment and the mushroom cloud that followed, a genuinely apocalyptic power that had once rested only in the hands of the gods (and perhaps science-fiction authors) became an everyday part of our all-too-human world. From that day on, it was possible to imagine that we — not the Martians or the gods — could end it all. It became possible to imagine that we ourselves were the apocalypse. And give us credit. If we haven’t actually done so yet, neither have we done a bad job when it comes to preparing the way for just such a conclusion to human history.
Let’s put this in perspective. In the pandemic year 2020, 76 years after two American atomic bombs left the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in ashes, the world’s nuclear powers actually increased spending on nuclear weapons by $1.4 billion more than they had put out the previous year. And that increase was only a small percentage of the ongoing investment of those nine — yes, nine — countries in their growing nuclear arsenals. Worse yet, if you happen to be an American, more than half of the total 2020 “investment” in weaponry appropriate for world-ending scenarios, $37.4 billion to be exact, was plunked down by our own country. (A staggering $13.3 billion was given to weapons maker Northrop Grumman alone to begin the development of a new intercontinental ballistic missile, or ICBM, the one thing our thoroughly troubled world obviously needs.) In all, those nine nuclear powers spent an estimated $137,000 a minute in 2020 to “improve” their arsenals — the ones that, if ever used, could end history as we know it.
In the Dust of the History of Death
Imagine for a second if all that money had instead been devoted to creating and disseminating vaccines for most of the world’s population, which has yet to receive such shots and so be rescued from the ravages of Covid-19, itself a death-dealing, sci-fi-style nightmare of the first order. But how could I even think such a thing when, in the decades since this country dropped that first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, it’s learned its atomic lessons all too well? Otherwise, why would its leaders now be planning to devote at least $1.7 trillion over the next three decades to “modernizing” what’s already the most modern nuclear arsenal on the planet?
Let me just add that I visited Hiroshima once upon a time with a Japanese colleague who had been born on an island off the coast of atomically destroyed Nagasaki. In 1982, he took me to the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, which, despite exhibiting a carbonized child’s lunchbox and permanently imprinted human shadows, can obviously offer a visitor only a hint of what it was actually like to experience the end of the world, thanks to a single bomb. And yet I found the experience so deeply unsettling that, when I returned home to New York City, I could barely talk about it.
Admittedly, though nine countries now possess nuclear weapons, most of them significantly more powerful than the single bomb that turned Hiroshima into a landscape of rubble, not one has ever been used in war. And that should be considered a miracle on a planet where, when it comes to weapons and war, miracles of any sort tend to be few and far between. After all, it’s estimated that, in 2020, this country alone had more than 5,000 nuclear weapons, at least 1,300 of them deployed and ready to use — enough, that is, to destroy several worlds.
Consider it an irony of the first order, then, that U.S. leaders have spent years focused on trying to keep the Iranians from making a single nuclear weapon, but not for a day, not for an hour, not for a second on keeping this country from producing ever more of them and the delivery systems that would distribute them anywhere on this planet. In that light, just consider, for instance, that, in 2021, the U.S. is preparing to invest more than $100 billion in producing a totally new ICBM, whose total cost over its “lifespan” (though perhaps the correct word would be “deathspan”) is already projected at $264 billion — and that’s before the cost overruns even begin. All of this for a future that… well, your guess is as good as mine.
Or consider that, only recently, the American and Russian heads of state, the two countries with by far the biggest nuclear arsenals, met in Geneva, Switzerland, and talked for hours, especially about cyberwar, while spending little appreciable time considering how to rein in their most devastating weaponry and head the planet toward a denuclearized future.
And keep in mind that all of this is happening on a planet where it’s now commonplace scientific knowledge that even a nuclear war between two regional powers, India and Pakistan, could throw so many particulates into the atmosphere as to create a nuclear winter on this planet, one likely to starve to death billions of us. In other words, just one regional nuclear conflict could leave the chaos and horror of the Covid-19 pandemic in the unimpressive dust of the history of death.
A Slow-Motion Hiroshima?
And yet, here’s perhaps the strangest thing of all: we’re still convinced that, since the obliteration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, no matter how much world-ending weaponry has been stockpiled by China, France, India, Israel, North Korea, Pakistan, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, none has been used. Unfortunately, that should increasingly be seen as a Martian-less fantasy of the first order.
While it’s seldom thought of that way, climate change should really be reimagined as the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear holocaust. Hiroshima took place in literally seconds, a single blinding flash of heat. Global warming will prove to be a matter of years, decades, even centuries of heat.
That all-too-apocalyptic phenomenon was set off in the nineteenth century via the coal-burning that accompanied the industrial revolution, first in Great Britain and then elsewhere across the planet. It’s only continued over all these years thanks to the burning, above all, of fossil fuels — oil and natural gas — and the release of carbon (and methane) into the atmosphere. In the case of climate change, there are no ICBMs, no nuclear-missile-armed submarines, no nuclear bombers. Instead, there are oil and natural gas companies, whose CEOs, regularly abetted by governments, have proven all too ready to destroy this planet for record profits. They’ve been perfectly willing to burn fossil fuels in a criminal fashion until, quite literally, the end of time. Worse yet, they generally knew just what kind of harm they were causing long before most of the rest of us and, in response, actively supported climate denialism.
No, there was no mushroom cloud, but rather a “cloud” of greenhouse gases forming over endless years beyond human vision. Still, let’s face it, on this planet of ours, not in 2031 or 2051 or 2101 but right at this very moment, we’re beginning to experience the equivalent of a slow-motion nuclear war.
In a sense, we’re already living through a modern slo-mo version of Hiroshima, no matter where we are or where we’ve traveled. At this moment, with an increasingly fierce megadrought gripping the West and Southwest, the likes of which hasn’t been experienced in at least 1,200 years, among the top candidates for an American Hiroshima would be Phoenix (118 degrees), Las Vegas (114 degrees), the aptly named Death Valley (128 degrees), Palm Springs (123 degrees), and Salt Lake City (107), all record temperatures for this season. A recent report suggests that temperatures in famed Yellowstone National Park are now as high or higher than at any time in the past 20,000 years (and possibly in the last 800,000 years). And temperatures in Oregon and Washington are already soaring in record fashion with more to come, even as the fire season across the West arrives earlier and more fiercely each year. As I write this, for instance, California’s Big Sur region is ablaze in a striking fashion, among growing numbers of western fires. Under the circumstances, ironically enough, one of the only reasons some temperature records might not be set is that sun-blocking smoke from those fires might suppress the heat somewhat.
You should know that you’re on a different planet when even the most mainstream of news sources begins to put climate change in the lead in environmental pieces, as in this recent first sentence of a CNN report: “The incredible pictures of a depleted Lake Mead, on the Nevada-Arizona border, illustrate the effects of drought brought on by climate change.”
You could also imagine our modern Hiroshimas in the Florida Keys, where inexorably rising sea levels, due in part to the massive melting of ice in Greenland and Antarctica, are already threatening that especially low-lying part of that southern state. Or perhaps the Gulf Coast would qualify, since the heating waters of the Atlantic are now creating record tropical-storm and hurricane seasons that, like the heat and fires in the West, seem to arrive earlier each year. (One Florida city, Miami, is already contemplating building a massive seawall to protect itself against devastating future storm surges.)
In this desperately elongated version of nuclear war, everything being experienced in this country (and in a similar fashion around the world, from Australia’s brutally historic wildfires to a recent heat wave in the Persian Gulf, where temperatures topped 125 degrees) will only grow ever more extreme, even if, by some miracle, those nuclear weapons are kept under wraps. After all, according to a new NASA study, the planet has been trapping far more heat than imagined in this century so far. In addition, a recently revealed draft of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report suggests that our over-heating future will only grow worse in ways that hadn’t previously been imagined. Tipping points may be reached — from the melting of polar ice sheets and Arctic permafrost (releasing vast amounts of methane into the atmosphere) to the possible transformation of much of the Amazon rain forest into savannah — that could affect the lives of our children and grandchildren disastrously for decades to come. And that would be the case even if greenhouse-gas releases are brought under control relatively quickly.
Once upon a time, who could have imagined that humanity would inherit the kinds of apocalyptic powers previously left to the gods or that, when we finally noticed them, we would prove eerily unable to respond? Even if another nuclear weapon is never used, we stand capable, in slow-motion fashion, of making significant parts of our world uninhabitable — or, for that matter, if we were to act soon, keeping it at least reasonably habitable into the distant future.
Imagine, just as a modest start, a planet on which every dollar earmarked for nuclear weapons would be invested in a green set of solutions to a world growing by the year ever warmer, ever redder, ever less inhabitable.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Books, John Feffer’s new dystopian novel, Songlands (the final one in his Splinterlands series), Beverly Gologorsky’s novel Every Body Has a Story, and Tom Engelhardt’s A Nation Unmade by War, as well as Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power and John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II.
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the website TomDispatch.com. He is also a co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of a highly praised history of American triumphalism in the Cold War, The End of Victory Culture. A fellow of the Type Media Center, his sixth and latest book is A Nation Unmade by War.
Blinken said the administration expresses its 'enduring commitment to the LGBTQI+ community today and moving forward.' (photo: Alamy)
A beach in Italy strewn with microplastics, transported during a sea storm. (photo: Alfonso Di Vincenzo/Getty)
A proposal at the UN’s Stockholm convention could set a precedent for the regulation of chemicals in microplastics, but trade groups have opposed it
rade groups representing the world’s biggest oil and chemical companies – including BASF, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Ineos, BP and Shell – are opposing the global regulation of toxic and persistent chemicals in microplastics, according to documents obtained by Unearthed.
The industry argued that there is still insufficient evidence to justify the incorporation of the plastic additive UV-328 into the Stockholm Convention, the UN’s global treaty on persistent organic pollutants (POPs) – chemicals which, once released, do not easily break down in nature.
Its inclusion would lead to bans on its production and use – and could be a landmark for the regulation of chemicals that spread around the world via microplastics and plastic waste.
The Biden administration appears to be supporting the industry position on UV-328.
Microplastics now seem to be ubiquitous, with particles detected in food, water, air and animals, and even human stools. Much less is known about their impact and relatively little research has been done on UV-328, but scientists are concerned that it does not break down easily in the environment, accumulates in organisms and may cause harm to wildlife or human health.
It has also raised concerns among some Indigenous people in the Arctic because it is a major sink for plastic pollution and such communities are often more exposed to POPs through the traditional foods they eat.
Viola Waghiyi, who is a Native Village of Savoonga tribal citizen, part of a Yupik indigenous community on Sivuqaq in the Arctic, and recently appointed to Biden’s new White House environmental justice advisory council, criticised the US’ position.
“We’re concerned that this chemical has reached the Arctic and could be toxic, but this is not just about one chemical,” she told Unearthed. “Our community has already been so exposed to so many chemicals. The Stockholm Convention recognizes the special vulnerabilities of Arctic Indigenous Peoples, but the EPA is not looking out for the health and wellbeing of our people. The US produces so many toxic chemicals but it is not even a party to the convention.”
The US is able to participate and make interventions at the Convention as an observer, despite not being a party.
It’s not known if Indigenous communities have been exposed to UV-328, but it has been found in birds’ eggs and minks’ livers in the Arctic.
Very high concern
UV-328 is widely used in plastic products, rubber, paints, coatings and cosmetics to protect them from UV damage. The EU classifies it as a substance of very high concern (SVHC) on the basis that it persists in the environment, accumulates in organisms and has toxic properties.
It is one of numerous chemicals added in the plastic manufacturing process which some scientists are now concerned could spread far and wide via microplastics, posing potential risks to wildlife, human health or the environment.
A recent report by the International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) warns that regulators have “yet to grasp” the impact of chemical and plastic pollution on fish declines.
Dr. Omowunmi H. Fred-Ahmadu, an environmental chemist at Covenant University, Nigeria, and lead author of a paper from last year on microplastic chemicals, told Unearthed: “Plastics are a cocktail of all kinds of chemicals, such as UV-328, which are embedded to modify its structure and function. But they are not chemically bound to the plastic, so these chemicals are slowly released in the environment, or when they enter organisms, even if the plastic itself ends up being excreted. This is where most of the toxicity – the harm – comes from.
“The extent of the harm they cause to humans is still being investigated, but quite a number of toxic effects have been established in marine organisms, such as reproductive issues and the growth inhibition of organs,” she continued.
“Welcome to our future”
When a party puts forward a proposal to list a new chemical under the Stockholm convention, they must provide evidence that it meets five initial criteria that identifies the chemical and shows it is persistent, accumulates in organisms, has adverse effects – and that there is potential for it to travel around the world, far from its original source.
The proposal to list UV-328, put forward by the Swiss government last year, is the first one that makes a case that a chemical meets this final criteria, called “long-range transport”, in part on the basis that it travels via microplastics and plastic debris.
This is what appears to concern the European and American chemical trade groups, which expressed fears in the documents – obtained from the US Environmental Protection Agency using freedom of information rules – that the proposal could set a significant precedent.
It also seems of concern to the US environmental regulator. In April 2019 – during the Trump administration – the American Chemistry Council (ACC) forwarded an email to the EPA in which the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) raised concerns about the proposal. A senior EPA official wrote back to the ACC: “Wow – that’s quite a precedent. Holy moly.”
The ACC replied: “we’ve seen numerous presentations about getting microplastics into Stockholm and it looks like this is the first concrete proposal.”
The EPA official responded: “Welcome to our future.”
The same official, a senior policy advisor called Karissa Kovner, appears to still be leading the EPA’s work on the issue under the Biden administration, which is pushing back against the proposal.
The Stockholm Convention’s scientific committee agreed at a meeting in January that there is sufficient evidence to meet its initial criteria for listing the chemical as a Persistent Organic Pollutant, although the US, the ACC and CEFIC all argued against some of these criteria at the time. BASF, ExxonMobil, Dow Chemical, DuPont, Shell, BP are members of both groups, while Ineos is a member of CEFIC alone.
Speaking two months later at a conference organised by the ACC, Kovner explained that the US did not agree with three of the five criteria, including on long-range transport.
“Looking at the science [on long-range transport] we felt differently, quite frankly, than a number of our colleagues at the global level and scientists that are represented at the POPRC,” she said.
Given the issue divided parties at the meeting, it has formed a working group to consider it and draft new guidance – meaning a clear precedent has not yet been set.
The EPA told Unearthed that its views were based on a technical review by scientists.
“No ‘policy position’ was taken regarding the listing of UV-328 by the U.S. under the last Administration, and nor has there been one under this Administration,” a spokesperson said.
Democratic Congressman Alan Lowenthal, who re-introduced a key bill on plastic pollution to Congress in March, told Unearthed that he is concerned about the health impacts of many chemicals commonly used in plastics, such as per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) and phthalates. “We are no longer just poisoning the environment with our waste—we are poisoning ourselves. It is for these reasons Senator Merkley and I sought to ban the use of such chemicals in plastics in the Break Free from Plastic Pollution Act,” he said.
“The Biden Administration must seek to lead on this issue domestically and internationally to address the issue associated with the production, disposal, and waste of plastics. This is more than a solid waste or ocean pollution crisis. It is now an environmental justice, international human rights, climate, and public health issue.”
Not enough evidence
The process to decide if the chemical additive will be banned under the convention is still ongoing.
In September the proposal will go forward to the next stage of the process, where the convention’s committee will produce a risk profile to decide whether UV-328 poses enough risk to warrant global action. A later stage considers socio-economic concerns. The whole process which could lead to regulation will take at least another two years and is likely to be subject to significant further lobbying.
In a document regarding the Swiss proposal that CEFIC submitted to an expert group at the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) in April 2019, the trade group makes lengthy arguments criticising the science used in the proposal to support the idea that UV-328 is transported via microplastics, air, water or migratory species.
They cast doubt on the quality of the data available and contended that there is not enough to justify its regulation under the Stockholm Convention.
Scientists told Unearthed that there is relatively little data available on this chemical, but that they have concerns nonetheless.
Dr Zhanyun Wang, a senior scientist at public university ETH Zürich and an observer to the Stockholm convention’s scientific committee, told Unearthed: “We don’t have to stop everything [with regards to regulation] until we have very solid scientific evidence. I think we have to work with whatever data we have and move forward while generating data. There is concern about the continued releases and accumulation of this chemical in the environment and organisms, which could cause long-term, poorly mitigable, adverse effects on biodiversity, ecosystem services or human health.”
Although the available research suggests the short-term toxicity of UV-328 is minor, the ECHA concluded in 2014 that it meets its toxicity criteria, based on studies on rats, that found prolonged or repeated exposure could have impacts on the liver or kidneys. Other research suggests it could have effects on the endocrine system, which manages hormones in the body.
CEFIC argued that pollution could have come from a local source and that there has not been “sufficient rate of transfer to remote areas”.
As well as in the Arctic, UV-328 has been detected in plastic debris on Hawaii and in sewage in the Canary Islands. It has also been detected in human breast milk.
Polluted milk
Prof Laura Vandenberg of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and co-author of a recent report on endocrine disrupting chemicals in plastics told Unearthed: “The industry is basically saying that until they have polluted enough – until they have created a big enough problem – we can’t do anything about it.
“When it comes to proving the harm of this chemical, there isn’t a lot of evidence available yet, but the assumption is that if a chemical doesn’t degrade, we are altering our environment in a permanent way and we shouldn’t be doing that. When we start finding chemicals in human breast milk, it is not good. It means it is going into babies during vulnerable developmental periods. Most people would assume that breast milk would not be polluted, that it would be the best food you could give your babies.”
Scientists commented that some of CEFIC’s comments are valid and should be considered but “there is also untrue information in there,” according to Wang. “Other conclusions are taken out of context,” he said.
In pushing back against the evidence for regulating UV-328 CEFIC expanded their arguments to comment more broadly on the chemicals associated with plastics.
They argued that the Convention’s assessment should not focus on plastic because it is of “minimal importance in comparison to other routes of exposure”. They also argued that the impact of wildlife consuming microplastics on the accumulation of chemicals inside animals is “generally minor in nature”.
Prof Hideshige Takada, a microplastics expert at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology who presented his work on UV-328 at the Stockholm meeting, told Unearthed that CEFIC was wrong to argue this.
“Microplastics are a major source of the [chemical] additives” for marine organisms that ingest and retain them, he said.
Further research
Scientists agree on the need for urgent further research. Dr Zhe Lu, an ecotoxicologist at the University of Quebec at Rimouski and lead author of a study on UV stabilisers in the Arctic told Unearthed: “I believe there is both evidence that suggests that microplastics are a possible route for organisms to expose to some of these plastic-associated chemicals and evidence that suggests that they are not…In general with this chemical, my feeling is that we need to do more research.”
In a statement, CEFIC said they would support a ban if it did occur, but went on to criticise the scientific evidence used so far to consider such a decision suggesting it should wait until more studies have been conducted.
CEFIC told Unearthed: “If scientific evidence confirms that the substance UV-328 meets the criteria of a persistent organic pollutant set by this Convention, we fully support its ban for production and use globally.
“Cefic also agrees that the potential effect of intentionally added microplastics on the environment poses a legitimate concern. Their impact on water or soil needs to be carefully examined and then regulated.”
The body accepted it had questioned if the evidence was robust enough: “our technical experts raised some very specific scientific concerns with the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) about the quality of evidence linked to microplastics and plastic additives travelling through air or water over long distances.”
Jon Corley, a communications director for the American Chemistry Council told Unearthed: “The nomination of UV-328 as a [Persistent Organic Compound] [is] well-recognized as setting a potential precedent to expand the interpretation of the Stockholm Convention POPs criteria. It is important that any chemical management system uses a risk-based framework that combines hazard, exposure, and use information along with the best available science.
The EPA told Unearthed: “the U.S. found that the Convention’s requirements for bioaccumulation, long-range transport, and adverse effects had not been met. Therefore, the U.S. suggested that the proposal be put aside… The scientific analysis used to arrive at this conclusion was developed entirely by career scientists at EPA and concurred with through the typical interagency review process (which also included career officials at participating agencies).”
BP declined to comment but pointed out that they no longer produce any plastics, having sold their petrochemicals business to Ineos.
Shell also declined to comment but pointed Unearthed to their 2021 review of industry associations, which states they are aligned with the climate-related policy of both CEFIC and the ACC.
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