WASHINGTON (August 2, 2023) – The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced the availability of $115 million in grant funding for projects that cut harmful pollution from the nation’s existing fleet of older diesel engines. Under the Diesel Emissions Reduction Act (DERA) grant funding competition, EPA anticipates making 4-10 awards in each of EPA’s ten regions to eligible applicants.
EPA is soliciting applications nationwide for projects that significantly reduce diesel emissions and exposure, especially from fleets operating at goods movements facilities in areas designated as having poor air quality. Applicants may request funding to upgrade or replace older diesel-powered buses, trucks, marine engines, locomotives and nonroad equipment with newer, cleaner technologies. Priority for funding will also be given to projects that engage and benefit the health of local communities already overburdened by air pollution, protect grant funded investments from severe weather events caused by climate change, and applicants that demonstrate their ability to promote and continue efforts to reduce emissions after the project has ended.
EPA is seeking cost-effective diesel emission reduction projects that maximize health benefits, reduce diesel exposure for those facing poor air quality, and/or employ community-based inclusive and collaborative approaches to reduce harmful emissions. The DERA Program delivers on the Biden-Harris Administration’s Justice40 Initiative to ensure that at least 40% of the benefits of certain federal investments flow to disadvantaged communities, creating good-paying jobs and driving inclusive economic growth.
Background
Diesel-powered engines move most of the nation’s freight tonnage, and today nearly all highway freight trucks, locomotives, and commercial marine vessels are powered by diesel engines. Smog- and soot-forming diesel exhaust can impair air quality, threatening the health of people in nearby communities. Exposure to this pollution can lead to disruptive and costly asthma attacks, illnesses, lost days of school and work, and emergency room visits. These adverse health effects have been shown to disproportionately impact children, older adults, those with heart or lung conditions, and low-income and minority communities.
DERA enables EPA to offer funding to accelerate the upgrade and turnover of legacy diesel fleets. Funding opportunities for diesel reduction projects are provided through an annual appropriation by Congress to DERA. DERA prioritizes funding projects in areas facing the largest air quality issues. Many of these projects fund cleaner engines that operate in low socio-economic areas whose residents suffer from higher-than-average instances of asthma, heart, and lung diseases.
More than 73,700 engines, vehicles, or other pieces of equipment were replaced or retrofitted to run cleaner with DERA funds during fiscal years 2008 to 2018, according to the DERA 5th Report to Congress.
The grant funding opportunity is open until Friday, December 1, 2023. For any questions on the application, applicants should email written questions to: dera@epa.gov. For any technical issues with grants.gov, please contact grants.gov for assistance at 1-800-518-4726 or support@grants.gov. More information, including applicant eligibility and regional funding breakdowns, can be found at the DERA website.
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The Covanta plant in Newark has operated since 1990. They take in 2,800 tons of waste from 22 municipalities in Essex County as well as New York City. The garbage is burned and then converted into energy. The company says burning trash is a better alternative to dumping garbage in a landfill that produces methane. (Karen Yi | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)
Scattered across New Jersey, four looming incinerators spend day and night torching our trash.
The facilities receive tons of waste from homes and businesses each day, burn it all, then recycle the metal that’s left behind and sell the electricity generated in the process to power thousands of homes.
It’s a model that incinerator companies have held up as a cleaner alternative to simply dumping trash in methane-belching landfills. But many Garden State residents living in their shadow, often in places plagued by dirty air, have long seen incinerators as a threat to their health. Organizations advocating for these communities have for years railed against the incinerators and pushed for their closures.
Now, a newly-released catalog of pollution and violations associated with those incinerators, plus information about subsidies provided to the facilities, has opened a new chapter in the controversy.
A new report published Wednesday by a coalition of environmental groups details the scope of collective pollution from New Jersey’s four active incinerators, plus one that was retired less than two years ago.
The report also highlights millions of dollars worth of subsidies paid to the incinerators by electric customers, and questions whether such payment was legal.
The findings are presented by Earthjustice, the Vermont Law School Environmental Advocacy Clinic, the New Jersey Environmental Justice Alliance and the Newark-based Ironbound Community Corporation. The information matches much of what the groups sent in a letter to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection and the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities last April. That letter was first reported by Politico.
The two companies that operate New Jersey’s incinerators, Morristown-based Covanta and New Hampshire-based Wheelabrator Technologies, blasted the new report as anti-industry misinformation and defended their environmental records to NJ Advance Media.
Major sources of dirty air
The report focuses on four incinerators currently operating in the state — three facilities run by Covanta in Newark, Camden and Rahway, and another run by Wheelabrator in Gloucester County — plus the former Covanta facility in Warren County that closed in 2019.
Those five incinerators, according to the report, consistently ranked among the largest sources of air pollution in New Jersey between 2015 and 2018, when compared to all 215 facilities with major air permits in in the state — places like factories and power plants.
That pollution is compounded by the incinerators’ proximity to other major industrial facilities, leaving nearby communities to breathe air dirtied by the cumulative effects. The Newark incinerator, for example, is on the edge of the city’s Ironbound neighborhood and near to factories, tank farms, a natural gas power plant and a sewage treatment facility.
“They’re not standalone facilities that are in the middle of nowhere,” Ana Baptista, a Newark-native and professor at The New School who focuses on environmental justice, told NJ Advance Media.
“Even when they’re within their permit limits, they’re part of the problem,” she added.
The legacy of heavy pollution in these places has left residents, who are largely people of color, with higher rates of respiratory problems and at higher risk of COVID-19.
James Regan, a Covanta spokesman, said the locations of the company’s incinerators were chosen years before the company took them over.
“These facilities were sited by local governments for their use,” Regan said. “Covanta operates them as best we can with minimal environmental impact.”
Regan stressed that pollution from incinerators is dwarfed by tailpipe pollution from cars, trucks, buses and other transportation sources in the communities. The transportation sector is the state’s largest source of air pollution, according to the DEP.
But environmentalists argue it is misleading to compare a single source of pollution to the collective total of thousands of other smaller sources. They also point out that transportation pollution is predictable, and theoretically easier to address. Pollution from incinerators, however, can fluctuate based on the type of trash is being burned at a given time.
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Make no doubt about it, the COVID-19 pandemic has created plenty of knots for SEPTA to work through.
Behind closed doors, there’s chatter about mitigation strategies and vaccine distribution, talks with its unions about protecting workers and riders, and conversations with lawmakers on its dire financial challenges. As the sixth-largest transit agency in the country faces the future, another big question comes to mind:
What happens to a commuter rail network without any commuters?
With ridership down about 85% from pre-pandemic levels, SEPTA Regional Rail is essentially running empty trains, and it’s clear that many of its suburban riders won’t return to five-day-a-week schedules given the appeal of white-collar telework.
To sustain and grow Regional Rail ridership, transportation experts say, it should try to appeal to those it hasn’t in the past because of pricey fares and less frequent service. That was true before COVID-19 but may be more necessary now than ever, with the identity of Regional Rail turned on its head.
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The way forward is to blur the line between Regional Rail and SEPTA’s buses, trolleys, and subways, said Megan Smirti Ryerson, associate dean for research at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. The two groups may be managed by the same authority, but have been seen as separate for decades.
“Now is the time to prioritize the needs of people of color, essential workers, and particularly our communities that have been significantly, economically hurt by the pandemic,” Ryerson said. “Transit is an opportunity to lift people up, to give them access to opportunities that they didn’t have before.”
“There certainly has to be an evolution of Regional Rail and how we use it,” he said. “But again, I can’t stress enough how significant a capital investment that would be.”
But the recommendations aren’t that simple to adopt, said Scott Sauer, assistant general manager of operations.
The authority is losing about $1 million a day as riders avoid public transportation. In response to financial losses from COVID-19, SEPTA has temporarily closed 14 ticket offices across five Regional Rail Lines. Service on the Chestnut Hill West and Cynwyd Lines remain suspended from COVID-19 schedule changes in the spring.
A small group of animal welfare scientists is seeking answers to that question. Facing a growing anti-dairy movement, many farmers are altering their practices.
SCHODACK LANDING, N.Y. — The 1,500 Jersey cows that Nathan Chittenden and his family raise in upstate New York seem to lead carefree lives. They spend their days lolling around inside well-ventilated barns and eating their fill from troughs. Three times a day, they file into the milking parlor, where computer-calibrated vacuums drain several gallons of warm milk from their udders, a process that lasts about as long as a recitation of “The Farmer in the Dell.”
Mr. Chittenden, 42, a third-generation dairy farmer whose family bottle-feeds each newborn calf, expresses affection for his animals. It’s a sentiment they appeared to return one recent afternoon as pregnant cows poked their heads through the enclosure to lick his hand.
Mr. Chittenden with a new calf, one of the 1,500 Jersey cows on his farm.Credit…Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times
“I’m in charge of this entire life from cradle to grave, and it’s important for me to know this animal went through its life without suffering,” he said, stroking the head of one especially insistent cow. “I’m a bad person if I let it suffer.”
Animal rights activists have a markedly different take on farms like Mr. Chittenden’s that satiate the nation’s appetite for milk, cheese and yogurt. To them, dairy farmers are cogs in an inhumane industrial food production system that consigns these docile ruminants to a lifetime of misery. After years of successful campaigns that marshaled public opinion against other long-accepted farming practices, they have been taking sharp aim at the nation’s $620 billion dairy industry.
Some of their claims are beyond dispute: Dairy cows are repeatedly impregnated by artificial insemination and have their newborns taken away at birth. Female calves are confined to individual pens and have their horn buds destroyed when they are about eight weeks old. The males are not so lucky. Soon after birth, they are trucked off to veal farms or cattle ranches where they end up as hamburger meat.
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The typical dairy cow in the United States will spend its entire life inside a concrete-floored enclosure, and although they can live 20 years, most are sent to slaughter after four or five years when their milk production wanes.
“People have this image of Old MacDonald’s farm, with happy cows living on green pastures, but that’s just so far from reality,” said Erica Meier, the president of the activist organization Animal Outlook. “Some farms might be less cruel than others, but there is no such thing as cruelty-free milk.”
The effort to demonize dairy as fundamentally cruel has been fanned by undercover farm footage taken by groups like Animal Outlook that often are widely viewed on social media. In October, the organization released a short video filmed undercover on a small, family-owned farm in Southern California that revealed workers casually kicking and beating cows with metal rods, and a newborn male calf, its face covered with flies, left to die in the mud. One segment showed an earth-moving bucket hoisting an injured Holstein into the air by its hindquarters.
Stephen Larson, a lawyer for the Dick Van Dam Dairy, described the images as staged or are taken out of context. Earlier this month, a judge dismissed a lawsuit against the farm filed by another animal rights organization, saying it lacked standing. “The accusation that they mistreated their cows is something that cuts the Van Dam family very deeply, because the truth is that they have always, for generations, cared about and cared for all of their cows,” Mr. Larson said.
Dairy industry experts and farmers who have viewed the footage expressed revulsion and said the abuses depicted were not the norm. “These videos make every dairy farmer and veterinarian sick to their stomach because we know the vast majority of farmers would never do such things to their cows,” said Dr. Carie Telgen, president of the American Association of Bovine Practitioners.
The effort to turn Americans against dairy is gaining traction at a time when many of the nation’s farms are struggling to turn a profit. Milk consumption has dropped by 40 percent since 1975, a trend that is accelerating as more people embrace oat and almond milk. Over the past decade, 20,000 dairy farms have gone out of business, representing a 30 percent decline, according to the Department of Agriculture. And the coronavirus pandemic has forced some producers to dump unsold milk down the drain as demand from school lunch programs and restaurants dried up.
During his Academy Awards speech last February for best actor, Joaquin Phoenix drew rousing applause when he urged viewers to reject dairy products.
“We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow and when she gives birth we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable,” he said, his voice cracking with emotion. “And then we take her milk that’s intended for the calf and we put it in our coffee and cereal.”
The National Milk Producers Federation, which represents most of the country’s dairy 35,000 dairy farmers, has been trying to head off the souring public sentiment by promoting better animal welfare among its members. That means encouraging more frequent veterinarian farm visits, requiring low-wage workers to undergo regular training on humane cow handling, and the phasing out of tail docking — the once-ubiquitous practice of removing a cow’s tail.
“I don’t think you’ll find farmers out there who are not trying their best to enhance the care and welfare of their animals,” said Emily Yeiser Stepp, who runs the federation’s 12-year-old animal care initiative. “That said, we can’t be tone-deaf to consumers’ values. We have to do better, and give them a reason to stay in the dairy aisle.”
What scientists see
Among those caught in the battle to win the hearts and minds of dairy consumers is a small group of animal welfare scientists quietly working to answer knotty questions: Are cows that spend their entire lives confined indoors unhappy? Does the separation of a newborn calf from its mother result in quantifiable anguish? And are there ways to improve the life of a dairy cow that are both scientifically sound and economically viable?
Marina von Keyserlingk, a researcher at the University of British Columbia in Canada and a widely recognized pioneer in the field of animal welfare, has made some headway in trying to understand whether certain aspects of modern dairy farming lead to avoidable suffering.
A young heifer peeked out of a pen at Dutch Hollow Farm.Credit…Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times
Raised on a cattle ranch, Professor von Keyserlingk says she can empathize with farmers who resent being lectured by urbanites disconnected from animal husbandry. Still, part of her job is helping persuade dubious farmers to accept improvements in animal welfare backed by science.
“As a little girl, I castrated thousands of calves without pain-relieving drugs and never thought to tell my dad, ‘This isn’t OK,’” she said. “But would I castrate a calf now without pain mitigation? Absolutely not.”
Divining the inner life of animals is notoriously elusive, but scientists like Professor von Keyserlingk have created experiments that seek to quantify bovine desires and ascertain whether some farming practices lead to poorer health and subpar milk production.
The studies she and other scientists have designed include installing weighted swinging gates inside barns to gauge whether pregnant cows might prefer to remain in their climate-controlled enclosures and munch on their favorite food or push through the gate to reach pasture. They found that cows’ desire to go outside depends on the weather (they avoid rain and snow) and the time of day (they prefer the outdoors at night).
One experiment sought to determine whether housing two calves together, as opposed to keeping them isolated in pens, could improve their learning abilities. (They found it did, and that paired housing also made them less fearful and easier to manage.)
The dairy at Hawthorne Valley Farm in Ghent. Credit…Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times
Another study highlighted the value of mechanical scratching brushes to a cow’s well-being. Using the same weighted gate setup, it found that cows were as interested in rubbing up against the spinning bristles as they were in gaining access to fresh feed. Although the brushes are not cheap, the findings have convinced a growing number of farmers that they are worth the expense.
“It’s really important that we don’t just anthropomorphize cows based on our human experience, but we do know that they can experience negative emotions like pain and fear that we want to minimize,” said Jennifer Van Os, an animal welfare scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “On the flip side, they can have positive experiences like pleasure, reward and contentment that we want to try to promote.”
Research by animal welfare scientists has led to a number of changes in the industry. Many large dairy farms have begun housing multiple cows together, abandoning the age-old tradition of keeping solitary cows tied up inside barn stalls, and a number of studies over the past two decades found there was no hygienic benefit to removing a cow’s tail, which they use to swat away flies.
(Until recently it was widely believed a swishing tail spread feces and bacteria, but farmers mostly found the tails to be annoying.)
Other changes promoted by scientists have led to the widespread adoption of pain-relief medication during dehorning, a process that has long angered animal rights activists but one that veterinarians say is necessary to protect both livestock workers and cows from being gored.
On the farm
Jersey cows on Mr. Chittenden’s farm.Credit…Lauren Lancaster for The New York Times
Mr. Chittenden’s farm is entirely populated by Jerseys, a smallish, tawny breed made incarnate by Elsie the Cow, the daisy-garlanded Borden Dairy mascot who provided generations of Americans with quaint notions of the happy, lovable milk cow. Jerseys are known for their gentle disposition, and for producing milk with a high butterfat content.
A loquacious man whose weather-beaten hands reflect a lifetime of toil, Mr. Chittenden said low prices, increasingly stringent environmental rules and heightened attention from animal rights groups had made the past five years especially stressful. He and other farmers say the allegations of widespread abuse from animal rights activists are exaggerated, contending that unhappy cows are poor milk producers.
Be careful what you wish for. Conservationists have been so successful in the campaign since the early 1990s to stop logging in the West that today many logging companies are collapsing and selling their land to (gasp) developers. In the New York Times, Kirk Johnson reports: “Many environmentalists say they have come to realize that cutting down trees, if done responsibly, is not the worst thing that can happen to a forest, when the alternative is selling the land to people who want to build houses.”
Whitman stumping for nuclear power The former New Jersey governor and EPA Administrator now runs a lobbying/consulting firm and serves as co-chairwoman of the nuclear-industry-funded Clean and Safe Energy Coalition. In a speech at a climate-change conference in New Hampshire last week, she said that, in order to meet a projected 40 percent energy-demand growth, the nation will need 35 to 40 new nuclear plants. In an interview with the Concord Monitor, she noted that renewable sources like wind and solar currently produce 2.5 percent of America’s energy. “So if you double or triple that, which is really putting a strain on that industry, you’re still not going to get to the 40 percent,” she said.
Pennsylvania investing $10M in biofuel production and use Governor Ed Rendell today announced the award of $10 million in grants through the Alternative Fuels Incentive Grant program for 24 projects designed to support research into new potential fuel sources–primarily biofuels. He said the grants will leverage another $108 million in private investment to expand the production and use of homegrown biofuels. The largest grant recipient is All American Plazas Inc. which will receive a $1.9 million “production incentive” for 37.5 million gallons of biodiesel. All American Plazas proposes to build three, 44-million-gallon biodiesel production facilities at three truck stops in Pennsylvania. All American Plazas anticipates production of more than 20 million gallons per year at each plant over two years. Other recipients include, Rohm and Haas Company, Sunoco, the Biotechnology Foundation Inc. at Thomas Jefferson University, Green Renewable Energy, Ethanol & Nutrition Holding LLC and numerous school districts and county governments for the incremental cost of purchasing biofuels for their buses and other vehicles. A full list is available here.
New York exploring woody biomass as an alternative energy source The state’s Department of Environmental Conservation is using a federal grant to explore the feasibility of converting leftover wood from logging operations on private lands into a fuel source. The $64,000 award will fund a one-year project to evaluate whether there would be enough potential users in and around the Adirondack Park to make woody biomass a go. The Association of Fish and Wildlife Agencies newsletter, Conservation News reports that “currently, about two million tons of wood chips harvested from private Adirondack lands go into the low-grade wood market, as pulp or biofuel. Some of that goes to two cogeneration facilities in the North Country. DEC estimates at least another one million tons gets left behind.” Potential customers would be community colleges, prisons, other state facilities with the capacity to store the wood chips and heating and cooling systems capable of incorporating appropriate emissions controls to protect air quality.
Making the case for coal “State law currently requires 18 percent of the state’s power be provided from renewable resources by 2021. That process already has begun, with an increased amount of renewable power phased in each year. However, let’s not forget the critical role coal plays.” So writes Morgan K. O’Brien, president and chief executive officer of Duquesne Light Co, in an op-ed piece in today’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Give us your comments after reading the entire piece here.
