Commerce City Pollution: A Friday Night Massacre in Colorado

By Phil Doe in Counterpunch, April 5, 2021 A Friday Night Massacre in Colorado Last Friday night I listened to the state of Colorado and the Suncor Corporation vote as one against independent monitoring and public health analysis of the Suncor refinery’s massive air pollution. The Suncor refinery’s nay vote was cast by its public relations flak, Brandy Radey. It was …

Phil Doe: A better Suncor plan: continuous real-time pollution reporting

March 2021 A Denver Post editorial recently congratulated the Suncor corporation for planning to introduce air +6 monitoring equipment into the communities surrounding the refinery it has owned for 19 years. Cultivando, a community- based nonprofit organization dedicated to helping the Latino community develop a stronger sense of civic importance and cohesiveness, has a better proposal. It was developed over …

WV Can’t Wait! Also, viral video – Mountain State person forcibly removed for calling attention to oil-and-gas donations to lawmakers’ campaigns

By Avi Selk Feb. 12, 2018 – Also see WV Can’t Wait https://wvcantwait.com/ Video of a little-known candidate for a statehouse seat in West Virginia went viral over the weekend after she was forcibly removed from a hearing for reciting a list of oil-and-gas donations to lawmakers’ campaigns. Here is her story. You don’t run for the statehouse in rural West Virginia because you’re in it for the fame. Lissa Lucas hadn’t raised much …

How Neighborhood Infrastructure Affects Wellbeing – GESC neighborhoods in Denver

Globeville, Elyria, Swansea, and Cole residents live in the most polluted zip code in the country, according to a recent national environmental risk index. How Neighborhood Infrastructure Affects Wellbeing https://news.ucdenver.edu/on-the-street-where-you-live/ There is a reason Denver’s I-70 expansion and National Western Complex redevelopment projects cut right through the Globeville, Elyria Swansea, and Cole (GESC) neighborhoods. These communities have historically had low socio-economic …

Race is the factor that bears the strongest relationship to slow and ineffective enforcement of the federal drinking water law in US

A landmark 2007 study by academic Dr. Robert Bullard, the “father of environmental justice,” found “race to be more important than socioeconomic status in predicting the location of the nation’s commercial hazardous waste facilities.” Bullard helped elevate the issue in the United States as an important target for advocacy. The current Black Lives Matter movement, while largely focused on ending police brutality, …

Colorado Commissioners reject cap and trade to meet statutory GHG reductions

Before voting to reject the idea, the AQCC commissioners questioned whether they had the authority to create such a complex and potentially costly program from scratch, without new laws and accompanying funding passed by the state legislature. there is not the time or the staff or the money to try it while facing two years of extensive rulemaking for other …

Denver area refinery chronically violating clean air laws, threatening people, communities, and justice: Suit filed to ensure action on Suncor oil refinery air pollution permits

Suncor’s refinery is a massive source of toxic air pollution and harmful greenhouse gases located in Commerce City in Adams County. It also disproportionately impacts low income households and Latino communities primarily in the 80216 zip code, which is frequently reported as the most polluted zip code in the United States. By law, the Air Pollution Control Division must deny air permits …

People of Colorado v. the State

The state relies on the Suncor polluters to tell it what’s happening. In so doing, it holds fast to the neoliberal playbook of putting corporate interests and profits before people’s health and wellbeing. Suncor has a state permit to emit 800,000 tons of pollutants a year. That is equivalent to the annual CO2 emissions from 174,000 cars on the streets …