Last night, hundreds of residents of East Palestine, Ohio, gathered to demand answers from local, state, and US federal officials about the disastrous train derailment and subsequent burning of toxic chemicals earlier this month.
Given the threats to human health and the environment, they deserve clear and honest answers.
But the rest of us need to be asking questions now, too.
A number of hazardous chemicals were involved in the fiery derailment, and the response by authorities included the controlled release and burn of at least one particularly worrying one: vinyl chloride.
Vinyl chloride is a colorless and highly flammable industrial chemical used to make plastic products, and it’s been linked to various types of cancer.
With their controlled burn, authorities said they wanted to avoid unpredictable explosions. Still, even with the evacuation of the area – which the governor of Ohio called “a matter of life and death” – residents exposed to smoke and fumes will naturally have health concerns in the weeks and years ahead.
But this is not just a local problem that impacts a few thousand people in a small community in Ohio. Nor is it only a “wake-up call” to the dangers of train derailments for those residing near rail lines that transport toxic chemicals – like the estimated 25 million Americans who live in an “oil train blast zone.”
This is actually part of a much wider problem – the big problem that affects all eight billion of us.
That’s because vinyl chloride is produced exclusively from fossil fuels, the burning of which, as we’ve explained in detail in this newsletter before, is causing climate change and all its deadly human-rights-related impacts. And, as we’ve also discussed here, plastics themselves are a human rights issue.
We’re all connected to East Palestine, Ohio. The disaster there is a warning to everyone everywhere: our governments have a human rights obligation to rapidly phase out fossil fuels and reduce production and consumption of plastics.
We have to get off this toxic train.