Hat trick! The Supreme Court has rejected three separate attempts by the fossil fuel industry and its allies to block federal rules to rein in the industry’s dangerous air pollution. NRDC intervened in each of the lawsuits. The rules aim to cut leaks of the climate super-pollutant methane from the oil and gas sector, reduce carbon pollution from power plants, and curb the toxic air pollution from coal-fired power plants linked to asthma, heart attacks, and other serious health harms.
Victory
COURT TO L.A. PORT: GREEN UP!
A state superior court has ruled that the lease between the Port of Los Angeles and its largest shipping customer, China Shipping, must include enforceable measures to protect air quality and communities nearby. Residents of the communities, partnering with NRDC, have been fighting for more than two decades to force the port to clean up its act. Commonsense safeguards to cut the port’s reliance on heavily polluting diesel fuel stand to go a long way toward addressing the single largest source of air pollution in the Los Angeles area.
Victory
MAINE RIVER CLEANUP BEGINS
The restoration of the Penobscot River in Maine is underway, following the approval of 13 beneficial environmental projects by the court-appointed trustee overseeing remediation efforts. The projects range from improved fish passage to better recreational opportunities, and include funding for the Penobscot Nation to help protect its members from mercury and other toxics in fish and wild foods. The work begins to fulfill a landmark settlement won by NRDC and Maine People’s Alliance in 2022 of at least $187 million to clean up industrial mercury contamination in the river.
COURT BATTLES RAGE OVER PEBBLE MINE
Alaska Native groups and their allies, including NRDC, are fighting on multiple legal fronts to defend hard-won federal protections that would prevent a gargantuan open-pit copper and gold mine from destroying Bristol Bay and its flourishing runs of wild salmon. The sole remaining corporate backer of the mine, Canadian mining company Northern Dynasty Minerals, and the state of Alaska, at the direction of pro-mining governor Mike Dunleavy, have each filed suit in federal court, with another suit filed by the libertarian Pacific Legal Foundation. All three suits aim to overturn the Environmental Protection Agency’s veto of the Pebble Mine project in 2023 as well as the denial of a federal permit for the project by the Army Corps of Engineers. For more than 20 years, Bristol Bay’s Indigenous communities have been fighting to stop the mine. Their cause has drawn legions of supporters,
including hundreds of thousands of NRDC Members and online activists who have helped to drive away four major multinational mining companies from the project. At stake are the world’s most productive runs of wild salmon, which support a $2.2 billion sustainable fishery and 15,000 jobs. They also nourish a thriving wild ecosystem and a stunning array of wildlife. Yet the threat of the Pebble Mine and its 10 b illion tons of toxic mining waste has hung like the sword of Damocles over Bristol Bay and its Native communities for a generation. An overwhelming majority of residents—more than 80 percent—have consistently opposed the mine.
“For the people of Bristol Bay who have battled the Pebble Mine for most of their lives, there is no choice but to continue to fight—to protect their families, their salmon and salmon-based culture, their livelihood, and their ways of life,” says NRDC Senior Attorney Joel Reynolds. “This fight pits an essentially eternal supply of food against an essentially eternal supply of poison, at the heart of
the greatest wild salmon fishery on earth. The people who live there will never give up, and neither will we.”
The environmental campaigns and victories featured in Nature’s Voice are all made possible through your generous support. You can help NRDC defend the environment by making a special contribution: NRDC.ORG/GIVE
Siding with NRDC and our allies, a federal court has suspended a recent oil and gas lease in Alaska’s Cook Inlet. The court ruled that the Interior Department failed to fully consider the potential harm to wildlife and other environmental risks when it greenlighted the sale, sending the agency back to the drawing board and suspending activity in the lease area until the agency’s review is complete. The court win marks a major victory for critically endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales, whose population has plummeted in the last 30 years from 1,300 to around 300. The industrialization of
Cook Inlet threatens not only the local population of belugas highlighted as one of the species most at risk of extinction by NOAA Fisheries but other vulnerable wildlife such as brown bears, sea otters, and migrating seabirds.
“Oil and gas development in Cook Inlet will also add fuel to the climate crisis, and remember, Alaska is warming two to three times faster than the global average,” says NRDC Senior Attorney Irene Gutierrez.
“We’ll continue to watchdog the Interior Department to make sure it fully complies with the court order.”
The fight to save Alaska’s Bristol Bay from a colossal mega-mine has lasted more than 20 years.
WHAT’S IN YOUR WALLET? THE POWER TO DRIVE SUSTAINABLE ACTION
If you’re going to spend a good portion of your career campaigning to rid the world of forest-destroying toilet paper, you better know how to take a joke, or at least appreciate a good pun. “‘Square off,’ ‘wipe right,’ ‘bottoms up,’ heard ’em all—used a lot of them in our campaign material, too,” laughs Shelley Vinyard, NRDC corporate campaign director for global northern forests. So you might say that Vinyard and her team are—ahem—on something of a roll.
S ix years ago, when NRDC forest advocates released their first Issue with Tissue report, complete with a consumer-friendly scorecard ranking the sustainability of popular brands of toilet paper and other throwaway tissue products, the results were dismal: Fewer than a dozen “A”rated toilet paper brands and a whole lot of “F”s. Today? The most recent scorecard ranks nearly 30 TP brands “B” or higher, and features a remarkable makeover story: Georgia-Pacific, one of the country’s Big Three tissue makers, relaunched its previously “F”-rated ARIA brand as one made from 100-percent recycled content, not only earning an “A+” rating but catapulting to the head of the class. In a press release, the company acknowledged that the original ARIA, which relied almost exclusively on forest fiber, failed to meet consumers’ “desired level o f eco-friendliness.”
T hat admission is telling, says Vinyard. “As consumers become increasingly aware of the devastating impact of single-use tissue products— especially on what is the largest remaining intact forest on the planet—they’re demanding change. NRDC’s work getting the word out and raising consumer awareness has been critical to that.”
I ndeed, the Issue with Tissue scorecard has received widespread media coverage, from The Washington Post to TikTok, and in the process has prompted countless consumers to reconsider not only their choice of toilet paper but facial tissue and paper towels as well. That’s because
these supremely disposable items all too often come at tremendous cost to the boreal forest in Canada, where industrial logging operations clearcut approximately a million acres of intact forest every year. When the towering stands of old-growth spruce and fir trees are leveled, so too is the home for scores of wildlife as well as vital nesting habitat for billions of migratory birds. No less important is the boreal’s outsize role in fighting climate change. Its trees, soils, and lush peatlands store twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves, and nearly twice as much per acre as tropical forests. Canada has long maintained its logging industry is carbon neutral, but in fact the industry accounted for more
than 90 megatonnes of climate-warming emissions on average each year between 2005 and 2021, ranking it as the country’s third-highest-emitting sector, behind only oil and gas production and transportation. A significant amount of what’s logged is turned into wood pulp, much of which is then gobbled up by the big tissue makers, fueling what’s come to be known as the “tree-to-toilet” pipeline.
“When folks realize that we are—almost literally flushing hundred-year-old trees down the toilet, they want choices, they want alternatives,” says Vinyard. “One consumer sending that message may not get heard. But when half a million, a million consumers start making noise, companies
“For the first time, we are seeing big tissue makers take steps to end the tree-to-toilet pipeline. That’s consumer power in action.”
start to pay attention. And that’s one of the ways NRDC plays a vital role, not only in exposing the high environmental cost of a roll of Charmin but in marshalling consumer demand for change.” N ot only does it seem as if Georgia-Pacific is starting to get the message, so too is rival KimberlyClark, which recently committed to go beyond its biggest competitors in what could signal a seismic industry shift. The family-care giant behind such brands as Kleenex, Cottonelle, and Scott issued a new policy that aims to reduce forest degradation in its supply chain. Furthermore, the company has set an industry-leading ambition to cut its use of natural forest fiber by half by the end of the decade, and ultimately to go “100% Natural Forest Free” across its entire product line. Such announcements often garner a lot of publicity. Vinyard and her team are quick to applaud Kimbery-Clark while also acknowledging that part of their job is to hold companies accountable for their commitments long after the headlines have become yesterday’s news. “In these kinds of campaigns, you have to be in it for the long haul,” says Vinyard.
Perhaps nothing epitomizes that quite like the case of Procter & Gamble, maker of Charmin, Puffs, and Bounty. For the sixth year in a row, the company
[ Continued on next page. ]
Clockwise from top left: Buying forest-friendlier toilet paper and other tissue products can help save climate-critical boreal forest in Canada; Activists call out Procter & Gamble at an NRDC-organized protest outside one of the company’s shareholder meetings; Elk are among the wildlife that depend on a healthy intact boreal forest.
garnered nothing but failing grades on NRDC’s Issue with Tissue scorecard, making it the last of the Big Three tissue makers to earn “F”s for all its tissue brands. This despite the fact that, four years ago, P&G faced a historic “investor rebellion,” when two-thirds of the company’s shareholders voted in favor of a resolution demanding the company report on how it could eliminate deforestation and forest degradation from its supply chain. By 2022, P&G was crowing that it was prohibiting forest degradation in its supply chain, only to quietly drop that claim the following year—a fact that Vinyard and her team swiftly called the company out on. NRDC also filed a complaint against P&G with the Securities and Exchange Commission for the way these claims may have misled the company’s shareholders.
“Is it frustrating? Yes,” says Vinyard. “P&G could have been a leader, and instead falls back on greenwashing. But now for the first time, we are seeing other big tissue makers take steps to end the tree-to-toilet pipeline. And that’s consumer power i n action.”
C heck out NRDC’s latest Issue with Tissue scorecard: nrdc.org/tissue. And tell Procter & Gamble to stop flushing our forests!
nrdc.org/pg
WIND WIN FOR WHALES
Your Membership Support of NRDC Made a World of Difference in 2024
Thanks to your generous donations, here are some of the
BIG POWER-PLANT CLEANUP
New federal rules for existing coal-fired power plants and new gas-fired ones will cut a billion-and-a-half tons of climate-warming carbon emissions each year.
NEW PUBLIC LANDS RULE RULES
The Bureau of Land Management’s new rule means the agency won’t prioritize oil and gas drilling and other extractive uses on public land over conservation.
ARCTIC WILDLANDS PROTECTED
The
BELL TOLLS FOR LEAD PIPES
The EPA finalized a crucial rule to require the removal of virtually every lead water pipe in the United States, with most replaced within the next decade.
CLEAN CARS GO ZOOM-ZOOM
New EPA standards are set to turbocharge the transition to clean vehicles and will slash both carbon pollution and deadly particulate matter from cars and trucks.
EPA CRACKS DOWN ON PFAS
For the first time ever, the EPA has restricted toxic PFAS chemicals in drinking water, targeting six of the ubiquitous “forever chemicals.”
STATES STAND UP FOR BEES
New York became the first state in the country to clamp down on the most widespread uses of bee-killing neonic pesticides, and Vermont quickly followed suit.
DAM-FREE FUTURE FOR SNAKE
A groundbreaking agreement promises to pave the way for the removal of hydropower dams on the Snake River and to restore native salmon populations.
DIRTY LNG EXPORTS PAUSED
The Biden administration halted the approval of permits for new
NRDC Helps Rally Tidal Wave of Support for Old-Growth Protections
Will our country’s old-growth forests get the protection they so richly deserve? Forest advocates were heartened in April 2022 when President Biden issued an executive order aimed at strengthening the nation’s forests, which directed federal agencies to compile the first-ever inventory of old-growth and mature forests on public lands and to come up with a plan to protect them. Yet the proposal put forth by the Forest Service last June fell far short of that goal, allowing the agency near-full discretion to log old-growth trees and forests in the name of what it euphemistically calls “proactive stewardship.” In response, more than 295,000 forest champions, including thousands of NRDC Members and online activists, have called on the Forest Service to adopt meaningful protections that would, among other things, end the cutting and commercial exchange of old-growth trees across all national forests. To date, the agency has received more than a million public comments in favor of strong forest protections.
“For more than a century, the Forest Service has tended to look at our biggest, oldest trees as a commodity or revenue stream,”
says NRDC Forest Advocate Gabrielle Habeeb. “This is a chance to change the status quo and to protect these trees for what they are: the load-bearing pillars of forest stability needed for healthy ecosystem function and climate-change mitigation.”
Indeed, old-growth trees absorb and store enormous amounts of carbon far more than younger forests or the saplings planted to “replace” clearcut forests. Not only that, as Habeeb points out, old-growth forests help purify our air and water,
house innumerable wildlife species, and provide cool, shady refuge in a rapidly warming climate. Yet the recent national census found that old-growth forests make up just about 17 percent of the forests managed by the Forest Service, and only about half of those are in areas currently protected from logging.
“There is simply no ecological or scientific justification for sending our few remaining old-growth trees to the mill,” Habeeb says. The Forest Service is expected to release its final plan early in 2025.
We’re Living in a PostChevron World Now
By Manish Bapna, NRDC President
The past year saw the Supreme Court’s ultra-conservative majority once again overturn decades of settled law, this time the important legal doctrine known as “Chevron deference.” The long-standing principle arose from a 1984 Supreme Court ruling in Chevron v. NRDC. We actually lost that case, but the court got the principle right, holding that when a law can be read more than one way, a federal court should defer to a federal agency’s reasonable interpretation of the law.
In the new decision, called Loper Bright, the court has invited unaccountable lower court judges to substitute their personal policy preferences more often for the expert decisions of federal agencies. Judges are now freer to effectively rewrite our laws and block the protections they’re supposed to provide. Federal agencies like the EPA and Interior Department are staffed by professionals with extensive technical,
legal, and scientific expertise in their fields. That expertise is essential to carry out laws that Congress passed to protect our air, water, public health, and natural resources.
When Congress passed the Clean Air Act in 1970, for example, lawmakers didn’t pretend to grasp every detail, answer every question, or anticipate every new threat. It’s been the job of the EPA to write the specific rules needed to protect public health and the environment from air pollution. Likewise, when Congress passed the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, or any of our other bedrock environmental laws, it did so with the knowledge that experts would craft the detailed, technical rules to keep pace with unforeseen, evolving risks.
To be sure, Loper Bright emphasizes that when Congress delegates discretion to federal agencies, the lower courts’ role is to define the “outer boundaries” of what Congress allowed and to be deferential to agencies’ choices within those bounds. Just as NRDC has been at the forefront for more than 50 years building legal precedent to defend our environment and public health, our work turns now to the imperative task of doing the same in a post-Chevron era.
Make a bequest to NRDC and defend our environment for generations to come. Learn more at NRDC.ORG/FUTURE
