Pa. has its own ‘East Palestine.’ It’s not a train. | Will Bunch Newsletter

After weeks of encouraging bans and restrictions that literally emptied shelves in a few school libraries, Florida governor Ron DeSantis has decided to try something very different on the book front: He wrote one. And tempting though it might have been for this small man in search of a balcony (credit: Jimmy Breslin), DeSantis didn’t call it “My Struggle.” I thought about reviewing his tome but I’d much rather cancel it.

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It’s hard to believe, but Democrats and Republicans — even those on the far right like Fox News’ Tucker Carlson and new Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance — have finally found one thing they agree on. Massive corporations shouldn’t be dumping hazardous pollutants on “the forgotten Americans” of the Rust Belt.

And all it took was the slow-motion train wreck (literally, for once) of some of the most toxic chemicals known to humankind, more than 43,000 fish and other animals, and the unforgettable image of a black poisonous mushroom cloud over a middle-American Main Street that looked like it was painted by Norman Rockwell.

But what if I told you that just 20 miles southeast of East Palestine, Ohio — not far over the border into Pennsylvania, on the banks of the Ohio River — dangerous chemicals have also been released into the air, in a significant violation of environmental laws. But this isn’t a train, and the problem’s not rolling away any time soon. And neither Republicans or Democrats are saying “boo” about this one — not after a decade of throwing tax breaks at the owner, a corporation whose global parent made a record $40 billion profit in 2022.

This is the Shell Pennsylvania Petrochemicals Complex in Monaca, Pa., which cost $6 billion — the biggest monument to “Plastics!” since Dustin Hoffman went swimming in The Graduate — and won over politicians hypnotized to focus on its 600 blue-collar jobs and ignore the global warming risks from the kind of air pollution also linked to everything from asthma to cancer.

The plant officially started turning ethane, a byproduct of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania, into tiny polyethylene pellets that will make tons of plastic stuff like phone cases or small toys — whether you need them or not — just over three months ago. And already dangerous air pollution from the plant is way over the legal limits that environmentalists had, during the state permitting process, complained were far too lax.

Anti-pollution activists who opposed the Shell facility hate to say I told you so, but... “I try not to be jaded,” David Masur, executive director of the group PennEnvironment told me on Monday. “It’s sad but not shocking that they blew past the limits.”

East Palestine had its black cloud, but the skies over Monaca have been lit a bright orange by fiery flares on a number of occasions since mid-November. The principle behind the Shell flares is somewhat similar to the controlled burn that Norfolk Southern carried out after the Ohio train wreck: In the wake of a plant malfunction, hydrocarbons are burned off to prevent an explosion, but that means sending pollution particles skyward.

Remarkably, state officials cited the Shell plant for violating its annual limit for two especially worrisome pollutants — volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and nitrogen oxides, or NOx — in just two months. Experts say that sustained exposure to VOCs, such as benzene, can can cause breathing problems, nausea, and rashes, and more extreme exposure has been linked to cancer. While demanding that state regulators temporarily shut down the ethane cracker until the problems causing the flaring are solved, the Clean Air Council and the Environmental Integrity Project charged in a related lawsuit that NOx “contribute[s] to asthma attacks, lung disease, smog and acid rain.”

The early pollution crisis at the Ohio River plant some 25 miles northwest of Pittsburgh seems a grim confirmation of environmentalists’ worst fears for a fossil-fuel facility that many locals welcomed for the jobs (some 5,000 worked on its construction) and that both GOP state lawmakers and highly supportive Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf backed, including that $1.65 billion, 25-year tax break. Did I mention Shell’s $40 billion profit last year?

In a time of accelerating climate change, it was predicted that the Shell plant would be the equivalent of putting 424,000 gasoline-burning cars on the road each year. No wonder that an army of local citizens called Eyes on Shell has formed to continuously sample the river and air near this belching behemoth — similar facilities have polluted their environment with millions of tiny plastic particles called “nurdles.”

Here’s why it’s worth talking about the Shell ethane cracker in the political context of what happened up the road in East Palestine. For the first time since Ronald Reagan’s “Morning in America,” Republicans are noticing things like the corporate greed, the underwhelming regulation, and the overstressed workers that caused the train derailment. If they’re serious about this, they need to know that East Palestine was hardly a one-off.

Rust Belt states like Pennsylvania and Ohio are under constant assault from the toxic fallout of our addictions to fossil fuels and cheap plastics. Consider the massive 2019 blast that finally closed Philadelphia’s mid-19th century oil refinery. A Christmas Day 2022 explosion of a vapor cloud of natural gas at the Revolution Cryo plant in Washington County — owned by Energy Transfer, the firm also blamed for major incidents on the Revolution and Mariner East pipelines. The oil tanker train that derailed into a creek last year in Harmar Township, also on the Norfolk Southern line.

That’s just one state in an entire nation of East Palestines.

Yet until now, our society’s response to this assault on the lungs and the guts of the “forgotten Americans” of Harmar Township or South Philadelphia has just been to plow ahead with even more projects, like the proposed liquified natural gas terminal in Gibbstown, N.J., which would send explosive and highly flammable freight trains through the populated heart of Philadelphia (something that was banned until the pro-fossil-fuel Trump administration OK’ed it) or a series of so-called plastics “recycling” plants from Erie to Berks County that often just burn the material.

Both Masur and Matthew Mehalik of the Pittsburgh-based Breathe Project expressed hope that the new administration of Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro will step up environmental monitoring and regulation of problem sites like the Shell plant. Mehalik said the state Department of Environmental Protection’s “western Pennsylvania office needs more staff and it needs more expertise.” But even the best government regulation only postpones the real solution: We must transition into a society that learns to live without burning fossil fuels, or moving deadly chemicals through cities and towns, or manufacturing so much cheap plastic junk.

Mehalik said the new administration would be wise to move past better regulation of fracking to focus on making Pennsylvania a capital of alternative energy and fighting climate change, adding simply: “The world doesn’t need plastic.”

Question: Should Scott Adams be cancelled for his racism? I think pubs have the right not to run a racist but would like the [journalist point of view] — Via Steve Camm (@srcamm)

Answer: Steve, the decision by The Inquirer and scores of other news organizations this weekend to cancel the long-running comic strip Dilbert — after its creator Adams called Black people “a hate group” and urged white folks to stay away from them — was the textbook definition of a no-brainer. The First Amendment is incredibly important, but it essentially means the government can’t punish you for saying what you think (got that, Ron DeSantis?). It doesn’t mean that media organizations are required to hand a bullhorn to someone like Adams with abhorrent and unacceptable views. Honestly, in this fraught moment when democracy seems to be under attack in the United States and around the world, I’d like to see news organizations paying even more attention to the moral values of what we publish. Having a range of viewpoints is good, but defending core ideas like democracy and antiracism is more essential than ever.

The pictures coming out of Tel Aviv in recent weeks have been truly remarkable: as many as 160,000 liberal-minded Israelis packing the city streets in protests as far as the eye can see. The object of their ire? A new law that seriously weakens that nation’s independent judiciary while granting extraordinary new powers to its increasingly far-right, back-again prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and his legislative allies. The law — which allows the Israeli parliament to override judicial decisions and gives the government stronger controls over appointing jurists — is in line with global authoritarian movements from Hungary’s Viktor Orbán to Florida’s Ron DeSantis. The brain behind the move is a libertarian-minded think tank called the Kohelet Policy Forum. But the money behind it comes from right off Exit 339 of the Schuylkill Expressway.

The richest person in Pennsylvania, Jeffrey Yass — the Bala Cynwyd-based billionaire on a political odyssey from libertarian to a top funder of far-right candidates — strikes again. In funding pro-Israel causes, Yass has help from his business partner in the Susquehanna International Group and fellow Keystone State billionaire, Arthur Dantchik. Although the Kohelet group maintains a veil of secrecy over its finances, the Israeli-based newspaper Haaretz reported in March 2021 on a convoluted money trail that begins with non-profits based here in Pennsylvania that are tied to Yass, Dantchik, and their associates and ends up in Israel, as the main source of dollars for Kohelet and its causes. The report has sparked several protests outside Susquehanna’s suburban office. Wrote Debra Shushan, director of policy at the liberal U.S.-based Israel policy organization J Street: “A couple of conservative American billionaires are devoting bottomless resources to undermine democracy.”

The Intercept reports that Yass — whose political fingerprints are everywhere these days, including considerable donations to Pennsylvania races during the 2022 midterms, such as Philadelphia Democratic state Rep. Amen Brown, now running for mayor — is also aggressively funding the right-wing Israeli cause here in the United States. The Philly-area trader was identified last year as the sole, million-dollar donor to the Moderate PAC, which attempted to back centrist Democrats against some of the party’s left-wing candidates — like one who in spite of Yass’s effort was elected Pennsylvania’s first Black female congresswoman, Pittsburgh’s Rep. Summer Lee — seen as potentially hostile to the Netanyahu agenda. And now it seems like Yass’s evolution from libertarianism to authoritarianism is taking a new twist on the home front. The billionaire with the infinite bank account just gave $2.5 million to a Florida political committee supporting 2024 White House hopeful DeSantis. Stay tuned.