Last spring, the Trump administration announced an extraordinary way for companies to get around new clean-air rules: Simply email the Environmental Protection Agency and ask for an exemption.
The E.P.A. created a special inbox for requests for waivers. Companies flooded the agency with submissions.
Many of their wishes were granted. In total, President Trump handed out waivers to 202 industrial facilities across the country, including chemical manufacturers, copper smelters and coal-burning power plants that were among the worst polluters in the United States.
Over the past six months, I teamed up with my colleague Eric Lipton to report on how these decisions were made and how they affected people. We each brought our own expertise and interests to bear on the story. (Read and comment on our article here.)
As an environmental reporter, I focused on the health risks for people who live near the facilities that got a permission slip to pollute. I traveled to a community just outside Richmond, Va., where residents said they were angry about the waiver for a facility that uses a cancer-causing gas to sterilize medical devices like pacemakers. I heard similar concerns in Clairton, Pa., where a steel-making plant spews another carcinogen into the air.
As an investigative reporter, Eric focused on the behind-the-scenes lobbying of the chemical industry and the remarkable sway it held over its regulators. He pored through thousands of pages of government documents that he obtained via Freedom of Information Act requests. He also traveled to Port Neches, Texas, home to a chemical plant with a history of releasing toxic pollution near a middle school.
I hope you’ll spend some time this weekend reading the full story and sharing your thoughts in the comments section. But if you’re short on time, you can read the key takeaways here.
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