The Plastic Train Wreck Should Be a Wake-Up Call

BY AMY WESTERVELT – 17 FEB 2023

Source: The Plastic Train Wreck Should Be a Wake-Up Call

…On February 3, just before 9pm at night, a Norfolk Southern train derailed near the small Ohio town of East Palestine, which sits on the border of Ohio and Pennsylvania. According to the EPA’s train manifest, of its 150 cars, 34 were carrying toxic chemicals or oil. The owners of those cars include Occidental Chemicals (the chemical division of Occidental Petroleum), Exxon Chemical America (the chemical arm of ExxonMobil), and a company called ShinTech, the American subidiary of Japan’s largest chemical manufacturer, which claims to be the world’s largest producer of polyvinyl-chloride, or PVC plastic.

So why am I delving into this in a climate newsletter? For a start, I don’t know if you could tell from some of the names listed above, but a whole lot of oil companies are also in the chemicals business. As I and others have reported on extensively over the years, petrochemicals are the fossil fuel industry’s great hope as the world transitions away from using their product for transportation and electricity. They are driving a global plastic boom, whether people want it or not, and then using that boom to justify more oil and gas development. That push is turning the Ohio-Pennsylvania corridor this train was running along into yet another Cancer Alley, with a petrochemical buildout rivaling Louisiana’s, and residents left with inexplicable illnesses and homes worth nothing….

But the East Palestine derailment is also illustrative of a broader trend in the U.S. toward de-regulation. There’s a powerful minority of people in this country who have been working for the past two decades to roll back the clock to the days of the Industrial Revolution, when men were men, fewer people had rights (or a vote), and business was entirely unregulated. Leaders of this movement, like Leonard Leo, the former head of the Federalist Society who moved on to another shadowy group (CRC Advisors) once the public started to figure out what the Federalist Society was up to (placing anti-regulatory, but socially conservative justices in positions of power around the country), are not shy or secretive about this goal.

“Leo described it in his speech to the Council on National Policy in 2019: he said America stands at the precipice of the revival of what he described as the ‘structural constitution,'” says Lisa Graves, a former Senate investigator who went on to run the Center for Media and Democracy and now her own research firm, True North. Graves has been following Leo’s work and dark money in politics in general for more than 20 years. “And he told the audience that no one alive in that room had seen the type of legal revolution that America was about to see based on the appointments to the Supreme Court and other courts to revive this so-called structural constitution to the law as it existed pre-New Deal.”

It was train derailments that first prompted the U.S. government to pass its very first regulations on industry. And the passage of those regulations—in combination with the growing power of the labor movement and increased scrutiny from journalists—spawned the creation of the disinformation industry as part of corporate America’s strategy to retain power and minimize the existence and the impact of regulation. So when I see women’s rights being sent back five decades, states considering allowing child labor again, voting rights being stripped from citizens (particularly non-white citizens), the federal government telling rail workers to suck it up and work with no time off, the increased criminalization of protest, and now not just the East Palestine derailment but similar accidents every three days according to the EPA, I think…holy shit they’ve done it. We are hurtling back to those pre-New Deal days with a dizzying swiftness.