Apparently unconcerned that Illinois is one of the top 10 states for industrial air and water pollution in the country, Governor Rauner’s administration is failing to police and penalize industrial polluters. Put more bluntly, Rauner and his EPA are giving polluters a pass. The Illinois EPA, unlike the US EPA,…
Just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, the latest in a parade of dreadful environmental nominees is back. In December, the Senate sent the nomination of Kathleen-Hartnett White–for Chair of the Council on Environmental Quality–back to the White House for reconsideration, believing that Trump would submit someone else. Instead,…
The world is heading for a potential climate catastrophe and a recently released report has unmasked the biggest corporations responsible. The report entitled “Carbon Majors: Accounting for Carbon and Methane Emissions 1854-2010”, by researcher Richard Heede, “offers the most complete picture to date of which institutions extracted the fossil fuels…
There are many potential reasons why you might want to contact your state’s most important environmental and health agencies. Usually it is because you are concerned about an environmental issue in your area. Here are 10 questions you may want answered: (1) Is there an environmental investigation being conducted in…
Michigan’s Attorney General has criminally charged more than 50 people over the deplorable government behavior that stripped the families of Flint of their clean water from Lake Huron, and substituted dangerous, lead-contaminated water from the Flint River. And now the Attorney General has just filed the most significant charges of…
Government Often Keeps Us in the Dark Is your government protecting you? If your air or water is contaminated, and your government knows it, it’ll tell you, right? Sadly, the answer to these questions is often, “no”. I’ve represented thousands of families over the last 18 years who have…
I want to take a moment to recognize McHenry County, IL, and its Public Health Administrator, Michael Hill, for disclosing on the County’s website what it calls “Groundwater Contamination Incidents”. http://ow.ly/Gb7v30cyNOF McHenry, while a fast-developing county, is not far removed from its roots as essentially a rural community, where most…
How long after the discovery of chemical contamination in groundwater should the government be checking to see if those chemicals have turned into a gas (“vapor”), and migrated upward to intrude into the breathing space of homes? They shouldn’t wait a quarter of a century, that’s for sure. News just…
One of the surest topics on which to get agreement is that we should punish the filing of “frivolous” lawsuits. There are legitimate debates to be had over the definition of “frivolous”, who decides what is “frivolous”, and what the punishment (usually called a “sanction”) should be. For years, and…
It’s such a compelling story: A 10-years-in-the-making plan to pour $1 billion into the redevelopment of Jordan Downs, a once-dangerous, crime-ridden public housing project in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, that had been the stage for nationally-televised riots in the 1960s. The idea is to convert what had been…