Senate Champion For Environment, Chemical Safety Dies

Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-N.J.), who since the 1980s championed federal legislation aimed at ensuring the safety of chemicals and the chemical industry, died on June 3. He was 89 and the oldest person serving in the Senate.

Hailing from a state with a robust chemical industry, Lautenberg advocated for preventing and preparing for chemical accidents.

In the wake of the disastrous 1986 leak of methyl isocyante from a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that killed thousands of people, he coauthored the Emergency Planning & Community Right-to-Know Act.

“One goal is to develop a national emergency planning infrastructure for chemical accidents, designed to plan for and prevent chemical emergencies,” Lautenberg said about the law in 1988. “The second objective is to give citizens the right to know what chemicals are being stored in and emitted into their communities.” That second part is the annual Toxics Release Inventory, which industry reports to EPA.

The New Jersey senator also wrote and pushed hard for passage of provisions in the Clean Air Act of 1990 to protect communities from chemical accidents and to discover the cause of these incidents. The air act included risk management plan provisions requiring companies to prepare and publish worst case accident scenarios for their plants with the twin goals of encouraging companies to use safer, less-reactive chemicals and allowing emergency responders and community members to know the dangers associated with nearby chemical plants. Another provision in the air act marshaled by Lautenberg created the Chemical Safety & Hazard Investigation Board to search for the root cause of chemical accidents.

Lautenberg also wrote a law to abate the risks from cancer-causing asbestos in schools.

A strong supporter of the environment, Lautenberg earned a lifetime score of 96% on the nonpartisan League of Conservation Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard.

In recent years, Lautenberg pushed for reform of the law that governs the manufacture of commercial chemicals, the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA). In 2005, he introduced legislation to modernize TSCA. Last year, his bill garnered committee approval but died before reaching the Senate floor.

Less than two weeks before his death, Lautenberg joined forces with Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), the ranking minority member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, to introduce legislation (S. 1009) to modernize TSCA. Industry and some environmental and health advocates hailed the bipartisan bill as a political breakthrough.

Lautenberg also introduced a number of bills that the chemical industry opposed. One involved the security of facilities that make or store chemicals. Lautenberg sponsored legislation to require some 4,600 chemical facilities classified by the Department of Homeland Security as high-risk to assess the feasibility of adopting so-called inherently safer technology—a switch to safer chemicals or processes.

In addition, he introduced bills to restore the Superfund tax, which expired in 1995. This three-part levy on chemicals, crude oil, and a corporate income has paid for environmental cleanups at sites where few, if any, parties shoulder financial responsibility for remediating pollution. The chemical industry is adamantly against the tax.

Lautenberg was first elected to the Senate in 1982. He retired after three terms in 2000. But after a finance scandal rocked the re-election campaign of then-Sen. Robert G. Torcelli (D-N.J.) in 2002, Lautenberg ran again and won. He was reelected in 2008. He served six years as chairman of the Senate Environment & Public Works Subcommittee on Superfund, Toxics & Environmental Health.