Beyond Oil: Corporate Influence and Regulation
Authors:
Steve Cohen
Editor’s note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a “teachable moment” on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation’s leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. Here, the executive director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute argues for increased oversight of both the drilling industry and its influence in Washington .
The modern economy is hooked on petroleum, and we are a bunch of addicts increasingly desperate for our next fix. When we drill for oil a mile deep in the Gulf of Mexico, we are like junkies in a dangerous alley, willing to go anywhere to score. The latest result of our addiction was arguably the worst environmental catastrophe in American history. One would have to go back to the Dust Bowl of the early 1930s to find human-induced environmental destruction of a similar scale and impact.
The primary cause of this disaster in my view was that advances in resource extraction technology outpaced effective government regulation of resource extraction industries. The notion of government as the enemy and the modern glorification of the private sector, both of which have their origins in the Reagan Administration, were the root causes of both our recent environmental and financial disasters.
The Department of the Interior has an inherent conflict of interest because it both generates revenues and wealth by leasing government lands and waters for mining and drilling and regulates those activities on government property. It’s like the city’s chief food inspector owning a part interest in the town’s biggest restaurant. The Obama administration’s organizational response to the disaster was to direct Interior Secretary Ken Salazar to split up these two functions. He was tasked with dividing the infamous Minerals Management Service into two parts: one to lease resources and the other to regulate the extraction practices of the firms holding the leases.
In practice, however, this simply moves the conflict of interest up one level of hierarchy, into the secretary’s own office. The Department of the Interior, like the Department of Commerce and the Department of Agriculture, is an old-line federal agency that is essentially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the American business community. I am not complaining about this in principle. Economic power tends to be aligned with political power in most nations, and I would prefer to have it out in the relative open in a cabinet-level agency. However, as the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, the Food and Drug Administration, and other regulatory agencies has demonstrated, it is possible to set up reasonably effective agencies to police corporate behavior. Regulatory responsibility has to be removed from these old-line cabinet dinosaurs. The EPA and FDA are far from perfect and they are certainly influenced by corporate interests, but they still manage to work reasonably well.
The influence of business in public policy is not limited to food and fuel but extends to finance as well. The “Great Recession” that began in 2008 was also caused by inadequate regulation, and the financial reforms enacted in the summer of 2010 were a direct response to that failure. Now we need a similar reform of mining and drilling regulation.
One lesson learned from the BP disaster is that the inspection, regulation, and enforcement of offshore drilling must be given to the EPA or a new regulatory agency. A second lesson is the need to pay more attention to the role of money and corporate influence in public policy. The Supreme Court has decided that political donations are a form of free speech that cannot be regulated. It is legal for corporations to spend lavishly to subtly steer the media and the political process to define issues in ways that match corporate interests. The fact that confidence in the technology of deep-sea oil drilling was unchallenged until the BP disaster exemplifies how pervasive this corporate influence has become.
The third lesson we have learned relates to the control of this complex technology. The views of experts may have been influenced by the resources and clout deployed by the energy industry, but the President trusted these experts. Our decision makers need to develop a healthy skepticism of the views of experts. They need to engage panels of competing experts to debate these issues and then subject their analyses to external peer review.
We live in a world dominated by technology, and we are all addicted to the convenience and comforts that technology generates. While we could all use a little treatment to reduce our need for a fossil-fuel fix, it’s a little ridiculous to pretend that we can free ourselves completely of our dependency on the natural resources we rip out of this fragile planet. But if we are to manage these resources for the use of our children, we need to be more careful in the way we extract and use them. Companies that refuse to be careful should be treated like reckless drivers running red lights. They should ticketed, penalized, and if necessary, lose their licenses.Tell your senators not to abandon climate legislation
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Disaster in the Gulf
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Beyond Oil: Corporate Influence and Regulation
Beyond Oil: The Oil Industry and Partisanship
Authors:
Chris Mooney
Editor’s note: Any hope that the Deepwater Horizon would mark a turning point in the fight for a climate bill quickly evaporated. But the spill still offers us a “teachable moment” on many critical issues. In a series of essays in our magazine and online, some of the nation’s leading environmental writers and thinkers reflect on our two national disaster areas: the one in the Gulf and the other in Congress. Here, the author of The Republican War on Science argues against the blame game and for continued investment aimed at combating the oil industry.
It was just one more note in a familiar tune. In March Greenpeace revealed that the Kansas-based oil and chemical conglomerate Koch Industries had pumped nearly $50 million into global warming denial groups and think tanks. Koch is a loyal Republican ally, having also donated 86 percent of its political contributions in the current campaign cycle to GOP candidates. Their donations amounted to well over half a million dollars.
Republicans, oil, climate change inaction: Whether you’re talking about conservative think tanks, lobbyists, politicians, or political action (527) groups, the correlation between funding source and position is impossible to mistake. GOP candidates have received almost three times as much money in oil industry campaign donations as Democrats from the 1990 election cycle to the present — nearly $108 million versus $39 million. In turn, many of the candidates and think tanks supported by Big Oil gladly regurgitate an anti-regulatory and fossilized fuel ideology — including opposition to strong action on climate change.
But if the GOP-oil relationship is well known and predictable, staring too closely at it can also blind us. It can make us overlook Democratic complicity, the increasing diversity of industrial interests, and most of all, the need for new grassroots ways of shaking up our political system.
What of that $39 million given to Democrats by oil and gas companies? Mary Landrieu (D-LA), for instance, has received over $750,000 of it. In turn, she has opposed fuel economy improvements and helped to frustrate strong climate action (she was, for instance, one of four Democrats who joined Republicans in thwarting the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act in 2008). Her example suggests the real issue with our politics is not finding one party in bed with one industry, but rather political parochialism — catering to interests in one’s backyard to ensure reelection. The problem is the system.
And if the politicians who support entrenched interests are diverse, so too are corporate views on the environment. Many companies, like General Electric, have gone increasingly green, and the new generation of tech billionaires, like Bill Gates and Larry Page, are as appalled by our retrograde energy system as anyone. But though the entrepreneurs are salivating over it, there’s not yet any Google or Microsoft-sized titan of the green energy industry. The market capitalization of industry leader First Solar is about $11 billion, compared with ExxonMobil’s $297 billion. If and when there’s a truly powerful green energy company, its influence would tip the political scales away from the negative influence of fossil fuel interests.
Finally, if we’ve got a broken system we should go back to the basics, thinking as a game theoretician would and focusing on punishment and reward. There are abundant carrots to entice politicians to support wealthy polluting companies, and there are few sticks to punish them for it. “Right now, if you vote against climate or clean energy, there’s no penalty,” says the prolific climate blogger Joe Romm . “You’re not going to lose votes, not going to lose money.”
In the sticks department there have been some intriguing efforts lately, like Bill McKibben’s 350.org movement to energize the grassroots. But as with the green energy industry, such efforts haven’t yet attained the scale necessary to outweigh the industrial behemoths of the past. We don’t just need innovations in clean energy, we need continuing innovations in activism — using all the tech tools available to network citizens into the information channels that will help them better appreciate why climate change threatens everything , and why we need dramatic and immediate change.
The core problem is, and always has been, that oil and gas interests have greater resources and a greater investment in having things go their way. But the clean energy transition will create its own momentum as we continue to urge it forward. Green companies will change the energy system, and their influence will feed back into politics; even as activists will change our politics, in turn advancing the clean energy transition. It’s a positive feedback loop, or it could be. Let’s kick-start it .Tell your senators not to abandon climate legislation
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Disaster in the Gulf
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Beyond Oil: The Oil Industry and Partisanship
Rough Burial: Cleaning Up Katrina’s Toxic Mess
Authors:
Elizabeth Royte
This Sunday will mark the five-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina’s landfall on the Gulf Coast. With the region now facing a new and challenging cleanup following the BP blowout, we look back at author Elizabeth Royte’s 2006 journey into the trash and debris created by the last disaster — a toxic mess strewn across 90,000 square miles of land.
Winter days in the French Quarter still commence with the hosing of the previous night’s excesses from the sidewalks, but the district’s few lunchtime patrons are dressed for drudgery, not revels. New Orleans remains a somber place. During daylight hours, this is a city unerringly and unceasingly focused on recovery. A jungle camo T-shirt popular among visiting emergency workers reads “Baghdad on the Bayou.”
Beyond the central business district, National Guard troops prowl the city in brown and green jeeps. The Army Corps of Engineers has awarded three $500 million contracts for debris removal, and platoons of subcontractors roll through New Orleans’s low-lying districts, directing thousands of foot soldiers in orange vests, hard hats, and work boots. Entire neighborhoods appear deserted; the only obstacles to parking are the ever-accumulating mounds of household chattel — the contents of a city turned inside out.
Louisiana’s Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) estimates that Katrina created 22 million tons of debris in the southeastern part of the state. The wreckage of the World Trade Center, by comparison, was 1.5 million tons, and it lay mostly within a few city blocks. Katrina’s is strewn across 90,000 square miles. By early December, when I visited the city, only 26 percent of the residential and public debris in Orleans Parish had been removed; a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) spokeswoman expected the cleanup to continue at least through this summer. Since tens of thousands of residents still hadn’t mucked out their homes, and city officials had already tagged more than 2,500 unsound structures for demolition, new massifs of waste will materialize on curbs for some time.
But where will everything go? And what will become of the hazardous material that’s inevitably mixed in with the benign?
In an ordinary trash-producing year, New Orleans generates about 350,000 tons of waste, 6 percent to 9 percent of which gets recycled. Now, everything flows in a continuous torrent that debris managers struggle to comb into five roaring streams: woody debris; construction and demolition debris; “white goods,” such as refrigerators, air conditioners, water heaters, and trash compactors; household hazardous waste; and electronic waste. The process borders on chaos. Half a dozen government agencies have jurisdiction over different types of waste, the rules change as one crosses parish lines, and information is typically offered with a sense of contingency. “We can burn the mulch,” for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that mulch is being burned.
The mulch comes from nearly 12 million cubic yards of oaks, magnolias, and other vegetation strewn about by hurricanes Katrina and Rita. The state has authorized burning to reduce this volume, and also that of some non-recyclable household debris. Erik Olson, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who recently visited New Orleans, worries that some wood used in construction and furniture has been treated with preservatives that can release toxins, like chromium and dioxin, upon combustion. “We’ve heard from citizens that there is burning, but the Environmental Protection Agency [EPA] refuses to give us detailed information on how they’re handling debris,” he says. And then there’s an entomological caveat: As many as 80 percent of the city’s trees are infested with Formosan termites. The state Department of Agriculture, which keeps termite maps, decreed that mulch originating in termite zones can be spread only where these insects already occur. Most of the city’s chipped wood is being trucked directly to landfills, where it’s used to cover the trash and assist in erosion control.
But as organic materials — like wood and brush — biodegrade in the anaerobic confines of a landfill, they give off methane, a potent greenhouse gas. While 21 states ban yard waste from landfills — both to preserve space and to decrease the generation of methane and leachate — Louisiana’s landfills, post-Katrina, are moving in the opposite direction. Moreover, when methane and carbon dioxide (from decomposing wood) rise from landfills, they set off a chemical reaction that strips from the other waste such toxic organic compounds as benzene and toluene, which are then transported to the surface. Polyvinyl chloride occurs in roofing and insulation materials, vinyl siding, and window frames — all ubiquitous in the thousands of truckloads of debris dumped daily at six area landfills.
Construction and demolition (C&D) debris is the most heterogeneous of Katrina’s waste streams, containing both the slimed and moldy contents of houses and the houses themselves. Some household materials, meanwhile, are excluded from this rough burial, whether because of their intrinsic worth or their intrinsic toxicity. White goods are coveted for their scrap value. In a staging area set aside for this material at the Old Gentilly landfill, which sits in a cypress swamp east of the city on a road fringed with illegal dump sites, a team of workers drains the appliances’ refrigerants for reuse. Another team, known as the food guys, dumps the putrefying contents of the refrigerators and wraps them, burrito-style, in sheets of plastic. The air here is eye-wateringly bad. Gulls kettle over the decomposed food; workers wear moon suits and respirators. The reeking burritos won’t be buried at Old Gentilly, which is unlined. Instead they’re bound for River Birch, a lined landfill that already entombs 36 million pounds of spoiled meat and seafood collected from processing and export facilities in the port. As for the white goods themselves, by late December more than 230,000 appliances, squashed into six-foot-long rectangles, had been hauled to a scrap yard and sold.
Three thousand trucks enter Old Gentilly each day; a spotter in a two-story tower peers down into each load and orders the removal of any hazardous materials he or she can make out. But the trucks come fast and thick, their contents are jumbled, and spotters aren’t paid to poke through the mess. Moreover, the drivers are paid by the cubic yard, so they have no incentive to separate.
But plenty of household hazardous waste is teased out. Residents or their proxies haul it from ruined houses and set it in discrete piles on the curb: small collections of paint cans, pesticides, and solvents, the kind of stuff relegated to high shelves in garages. Household electronics too are set apart: TV and computer monitors contain between four and eight pounds of lead. Cell phones, handheld video games — anything with a circuit board — often contain chromium, cadmium, mercury, beryllium, nickel, zinc, and copper, all of which can potentially leach from landfills.
EPA crews troll the city for electronic waste, which they transfer to a Georgia-based company that removes batteries, cathode-ray tubes, mercury bulbs, leaded glass, and toner cartridges for recycling. What remains is sorted into metals and plastic, then shredded and sold to commodities processors. By late December, a unified command composed of the EPA, the Coast Guard, and the Louisiana DEQ had collected about 90,000 hurricane-damaged televisions, computers, stereos, and other electronic equipment in seven parishes. There’s plenty more to come.
East of the city, in a weedy lot shadowed by an abandoned incinerator, a different phalanx of EPA workers sorts through more than 12,000 pieces of household hazardous waste each day. Flammables and solvents go to a power plant hungry for their Btu value; pesticides and poisons end up at an incinerator licensed to burn hazardous waste; propane is recovered from tanks and canisters which are then either crushed and scrapped or painted for reuse. Lead from car and boat batteries is recovered for processors; bleach is poured into barrels, chemically neutralized, and discharged (under a federal permit) into waterways. Hunched over a small table, a field chemist runs tests on mystery compounds. “We’ve processed more than a million pounds of household hazardous waste,” says James Augustyn, a site coordinator. Asked whether the folks mucking out houses are segregating all the hazardous stuff, he answers with an air of resignation. “They’re supposed to, but it’s impossible to get every single piece.”
And that is the bottom line. No one is going to root out a mercury-containing thermostat from a 20-foot mound of rubbish. Not every car (Katrina left 360,000 storm-ruined vehicles on the streets) will be drained of its toxic fluids and scrapped for reuse. Not every desktop monitor will be transformed into something shiny and new.
If Katrina’s cleanup seems to be proceeding slowly (and it is, especially for exiled residents eager to come home), officials blame the unprecedented scale of the operation and the complexity of the waste stream. “We want to reuse and recycle as much as we can,” says John Rogers, a DEQ staff scientist. “We’re diverting as much as we can from the landfill because we don’t want to create problems down the line.” Rogers is alluding to the cleanup after 1965’s Hurricane Betsy, when debris was dumped indiscriminately into the Agriculture Street landfill, in the Lower Ninth Ward, and then covered with less than two feet of soil. In time, lead, arsenic, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons — in all, some 50 carcinogenic compounds — leached out, and the EPA in 1994 conferred Superfund status on the site (though not before houses, a community center, and a school were constructed atop it).
Everything has to go somewhere, the laws of nature state. Sluice the brown sediment, laced with oil and heavy metals, from your siding and the contaminated water drains into Lake Pontchartrain. Bury PVC pipes in a landfill and vinyl chlorides rise with the methane. We know, after decades of failing to manage Superfund sites, that poisons shunted elsewhere have a way of working their way back again, into the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat.
As winter turns to spring, it’s impossible to say whether anyone is doing a good, or even an adequate, job of handling Katrina’s fallout. The hurricane’s toxic legacy has already been written, but it may be decades until we’re able to comprehend it.
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Overview of NRDC's health work after Katrina
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Rough Burial: Cleaning Up Katrina’s Toxic Mess