Enemies of the Environment
Pollution is the irresponsible disposal of waste. Doing business, producing goods, and simply living produce wastes. Eliminating waste from our society is impossible. But eliminating pollution is simply a matter of owning up to the waste we generate.

Companies, farmers, municipalities and industries act responsibly when they reduce or eliminate pollution. When they don’t, they force the rest of us to carry their load – a load that is a drain on the economy and a danger to our health and communities. The Enemies of the Environment highlighted in this section are some of the most irresponsible companies, public officials, scientists and lobbyists who are leading an unprecedented attack on the American people.

America’s WORST CORPORATE POLLUTERS
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that illegal dumping of toxic waste is a major problem. Few disagree that midnight dumping – backing a truck up to the water’s edge and emptying its vile contents – is a crime. But toxic chemicals also take a second, equally insidious path into our waterways.

Under the Clean Water Act, state and federal agencies can grant a company or municipality permission to discharge their pollution – including sewage, heavy metals, cancer-causing chemicals – into public waterbodies. Congress included this permitting system in the Clean Water Act to control pollution while polluters figured out how to meet the larger national goal of “zero discharge” into our nation’s waterways. But granting companies permission to pollute has resulted in the de facto legalization of this pollution – while midnight dumping is illegal, daylight discharging with a permit is not.

Companies should pay all the cost of bringing their goods to market. Keeping waste out of the environment is simply the cost of doing business. But these companies are using our natural rivers, streams, lakes and coastal waters as dumping grounds for industrial wastes:

AK Steel Corp. (NYSE: AKS), led by James L. Wainscott, has the distinct (dis-)honor of being the single largest reported discharger of toxics to water nationwide. Their Rockport, Indiana operation discharged an astonishing 29,680,083 pounds of toxins to the Ohio River. Though named one of America’s Most Admired Companies by Fortune Magazine, how truly admirable can a company be when they are poisoning our water?

BASF Corp. (NYSE: BASF) is directed by U.S. CEO Klaus Peter Löbbe. Their Freeport, Texas, chemical plant is the second largest single reported discharger of toxins to surface water in the U.S., releasing 15,945,553 pounds of toxins into the Clute Lake Jackson Drainage Channel and the Brazos River. The German-based chemical company reported discharging toxins to 11 different waterbodies in eight states. Maybe BASF should change their tagline to “We don’t make a lot of the products you buy, but we do make a lot of the water you drink polluted.”

Cargill, Inc. (privately held), headed by Warren R. Staley, and their subsidiaries are a triple threat – high number (11) of facilities discharging toxins, high number (10) of waterbodies polluted, and total pounds (almost 12 million) of toxins discharged. Cargill is a multibillion-dollar industrial agriculture corporation, which translates to big yields and big money for them, but big pollution for all of us.

Dow Chemical Co. (NYSE: DOW), and their subsidiaries under the guidance of Andrew N. Liveris, discharge a whopping 97 different toxins to 16 different U.S. waterbodies, including a total of 606 pounds of the incredibly dangerous dioxin. There is no known safe exposure limit to dioxin and it bioaccumulates, working its way up the food chain and passing from mother to child in the womb and through breast milk. So much for “Living. Improved daily.”

E.I. Du Pont De Nemours & Co., Inc. (NYSE: DD), with Charles O. Holliday, Jr. at the helm, continues to discharge PCBs to the Delaware River, even though this highly toxic substance is banned. In addition, Du Pont, in conjunction with the U.S. Army, is planning to discharge VXH, a form of caustic nerve gas, into the Delaware River. It will take one of Du Pont’s “miracles of science” to undo the damage that it has done to American waterways.

ExxonMobil Corp. (NYSE: XOM) is the company that brought us the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. Under the direction of CEO Lee R. Raymond this dinosaur continues to poison our waterbodies with mercury, a neurotoxin, and MTBE, a potential human carcinogen. This petroleum powerhouse weighs in with 25 facilities releasing 47 different kinds of toxins into 25 different U.S. waterbodies.

General Electric Co. (NYSE: GE), controlled by CEO Jeffrey R. Immelt, is notorious for their legacy of PCB contamination of the upper Hudson River. They’ve spent millions on a campaign to avoid cleaning up this mess. They lead the pack with the largest number of facilities discharging toxins to surface water. Despite being named one of Working Mother’s “Best Companies to Work For,” we think most working parents wouldn’t want their kids playing in GE’s toxic playground.

Monsanto Co. (NYSE: MON) and CEO Hugh Grant continue their horrifying tradition as the manufacturer of Agent Orange and now banned PCBs, producing herbicides and pesticides that contaminate water all over the U.S. and the world. Not only are their products dangerous, they take top dishonors for discharging the largest variety of toxins (97) to our waterways. While Monsanto has undergone considerable corporate restructuring, they haven’t stopped “imAgining” new ways to poison our water and our communities.

Tyson Foods, Inc. (NYSE: TSN), led by CEO John Tyson, is an industrial agriculture giant. Tyson’s 23 facilities discharge toxins to 24 different waterbodies. The largest chicken producer and beef supplier in the U.S. likes to keep it big – including the 18,424,001 pounds of toxins they discharged to U.S. waters in 2002. Even though Tyson thinks it’s “what your family deserves,” we actually think your family deserves better.

U.S. Steel Corp. (NYSE: X), directed by John P. Surma, Jr., dischages more than 20 heavy metals and other toxins to nine waterbodies in Alabama, California, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Their Gary, Indiana, steel works alone pumps out 2,970,499 pounds of arsenic, chromium, cyanide, lead, mercury and 18 other toxins into Lake Michigan and three other surrounding waterbodies. Their long history as the largest steel producer in the United States would be more impressive if they weren’t among the largest toxic dischargers as well.

Why these companies? We identified these Worst Corporate Polluters using the pollution numbers they recorded and reported to U.S. EPA for the most current (2002) Toxic Release Inventory. We used Environmental Defense’s Scorecard tool (www.scorecard.org) to screen the data for the top toxic dischargers to water. We also considered companies’ environmental record. The CEOs listed are current as of May 1, 2005.

Public Officials Endangering the Public Trust
In the 6th century the Roman Empire codified the rights of citizens to shared resources including air, flowing water and wildlife. These “public trust” rights descended to the people of the United States following the American Revolution. Throughout history, however, tyrants have broken the public trust to deliver these commons to private hands. The extent of this tyranny in 2005 is, perhaps, at an all time high:

President George W. Bush
Worst environmental president in U.S. History
The centerpiece of the President’s administration is the reversal of more than 30 years of progress restoring America’s environment. Bush has filled the ranks of his administration with corporate cronies who are clear cutting environmental and public health protections wherever they interfere with the wishes of America’s biggest polluters. Many of these rollbacks are hidden in the minutia of bureaucratic changes, leaving a facade for the press and public. But the results are real. More than 400 individual rollbacks damage your family’s health, our natural areas and our economy. In 2005 alone Bush has:
• Released a new mercury non-control rule,
• Weakened federal cancer safeguards,
• Opened protected areas to development,
• Removed protection for endangered species, and
• Proposed an exemption for oil and gas companies from cleaning up their polluted stormwater runoff.

Gail A. Norton
Standard-bearer for gutting the Endangered Species Act
As Secretary of the Department of Interior, Gail Norton is supposed to play the role of the primary enforcer of the Endangered Species Act (ESA). However, like many other bad actors in the Bush administration, she won’t be winning any awards for her lackluster performance. As Colorado Attorney General, Norton argued to the United States Supreme Court that the ESA was unconstitutional. Her disdain for the ESA has continued as Secretary. In her first two years at Interior, Norton only added species to the Endangered Species list AFTER a lawsuit ordered her to do so. Despite the fact that the ESA directs Interior to protect critical habitat, Secretary Norton has suspended any further critical habitat designation because, she says, it provides “little additional protection to species.”

Dale N. Bosworth
Breaking The Law
In 2001, Dale Bosworth became Chief of the U.S. Forest Service. Under his leadership, in 2003 and 2004, courts ruled that the U.S. Forest Service violated environmental laws 44 times. These violations included eliminating protections for endangered species, preventing Environment Impact reviews, and ignoring laws that protect historic sites. Bosworth’s agenda of “streamlining” agency procedure rarely seems to jive with public interest or the law.

William Gerry Myers, III
Scales of Injustice
William Gerry Myers is President Bush’s nominee for Ninth Circuit Judge, despite having never served as a judge. He began his career as a lobbyist for the mining and cattle industry, once comparing environmental regulations to the tyranny of King George III over the American Colonies. As the Department of Interior’s Chief Attorney from 2000 to 2003, Myers approved regulations that one federal judge described as “prioritiz[ing] the interests of miners…over the interests of persons…[who] seek to conserve and protect the public lands.”

Jeffrey Holmstead
Inside Lobbyist
Prior to becoming Assistant Administrator for Air and Radiation at the Environmental Protection Agency, Jeffrey Holmstead worked for the law firm Latham & Watkins where he represented the interests of the power industry. Now at EPA, Holmstead is responsible for establishing mercury limits for power plants. Holmstead is taking every step to remove limits on mercury emissions from power plants operated by his former clients. As the chief architect of the administration’s 2005 mercury rule, he inserted language verbatim from memos prepared by his former colleagues at Latham & Watkins.

John D. Graham
Public Safety a Nuisance
John Graham, Administrator of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget, once stated “environmental regulation should be depicted as an incredible intervention in the operation of society.” Graham has made a career out of spinning anti-regulatory rhetoric, junk science and phony economics to serve polluters. In April, Graham testified at a House hearing supporting the elimination of 76 regulations, including laws that require the disclosure of information concerning the release of toxins and safety requirements for disposal of PCBs.

Dr. Nils J. Diaz
Keeping the Nuclear Industry’s Dirty Secrets
As Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Dr. Diaz classified formerly public data on the safety of reactors and spent fuel pools. A scientist at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) reported that they have “never encountered such hurdles” releasing crucial information on the safety of the U.S. civilian nuclear industry. Chairman Diaz recently traveled to China to promote the sale of a nuclear reactor that had not yet passed a safety review by his own agency here at home.

U.S. Senator James Inhofe (Oklahoma)
Wielding the Power of the Senate for Polluters
As the Chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Inhofe is strategically placed to grant favors to his corporate friends who gave him almost half a million dollars in 2002. And he hands out those favors with fervor. Inhofe denies global warming as a “hoax” and opposes any attempt to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. His environmental voting record, compiled by the League of Conservation Voters, is a perfect zero. Inhofe was the chief sponsor of President Bush’s “Clear Skies” bill. And, to secure his place as the public’s worst enemy in the Senate, Inhofe infamously compared the Environmental Protection Agency to the Gestapo.

U.S. Representative Richard Pombo (California)
Putting the Environment on the Endangered Species List
Rep. Pombo, Chair of the House Resources Committee, was elected to represent his rural California district with significant help from agribusiness, oil and gas, and construction industries. To the delight of property rights groups, he has set his sights on gutting the Endangered Species Act and likes to mislead the public by claiming that the law has “a zero percent rate of success.” Pombo also wants to take away the public’s access to the courts to enforce environmental laws. Targeting the so-called “abuse” of citizen suits, Pombo held hearings last year to undermine the rights of citizens to protect their communities from environmental harm.

U.S. Representative John Duncan (Tennessee)
Environment Be Dammed
Duncan, Chair of House Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment, is the leading shill for the transportation industry – he received more contributions from transportation PACs than from any other sector. In 2001, he blamed the high gasoline prices on the “rich, yuppie environmentalists [who] are slowly but surely shutting this country down economically.” In 2005, Duncan fought off attempts to reign in the excesses of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and instead pushed through a pork-loaded multibillion-dollar bill to fund dam construction and river dredging.

America’s MADDEST SCIENTISTS
In his infamous 2003 memo on how to blunt the environmental movement, pollster Frank Luntz instructed polluters and their allies on how to suppress and marginalize science and scientists when their results don’t jive with industry’s goals. These mad scientists are on the frontline of this campaign against the public interest. Each has made a highly lucrative career out of corrupting scientific method and attacking their colleagues to bamboozle the public and the press:

Elizabeth Whelan
Ardent defender of the most toxic substances know to mankind
Whelan is the author of Panic in the Pantry and Toxic Terror. In Panic, Whelan rejects back-to-nature “mania” like organic lifestyles and pesticide-free eating as a “hoax.” Whelan is President and founder of the American Council on Science and Health, a group that asserts “there is no scientific evidence that DDT harms the environment” and that dioxin, one of the most toxic substances in existence, “was not such a bad actor.” Whelan has suggested, contrary to a considerable body of research, “that there is no credible evidence that PCB exposure in the general environment, in fish, or even at very high levels in the workplace, has ever led to an increase in cancer risk.”

Dennis Paustenbach
Keeping the world safe for chromium polluters
Paustenbach is the president and founder of ChemRisk, a consulting firm that helps companies, “confront public health, occupational health, and environmental challenges.” Paustenbach served as an expert witness for Pacific Gas and Electric when the utility was sued for allowing the poisonous heavy metal chromium to leach into groundwater – a case made famous in the movie Erin Brockovich. In the 1990s, Honeywell, PPG Industries Inc. and Maxus Energy Corp. were faced with spending nearly a billion dollars to clean up New Jersey communities they had contaminated with chromium. Instead, they hired Paustenbach to mount a successful campaign to force the state to raise the allowable limit of chromium in soils. Paustenbach has taken his pro-toxic chemical stance nationwide with his recent Bush administration appointment to the advisory committee for the Center for Disease Control’s National Center for Environmental Health.

John P. Giesy
Ensuring that good science doesn’t stand in the way of America’s
#1 pesticide
Giesy is a leading apologist for atrazine, the most common pesticide used in the United States, and an endocrine disruptor so dangerous that it has been banned in Europe. When University of California toxicologist Tyrone Hayes linked tiny amounts of atrazine to deformities and infertility in frogs, Sygenta, atrazine’s manufacturer, hired Giesy to dispute Hayes’ research. Despite running faulty studies and misinterpreting the results, Giesy’s research was widely used by Sygenta and other pro-industry lobbyists to force EPA to back away from plans to tighten regulations on atrazine.

S. Fred Singer
Spreading a gospel of mis-truth about global warming
Singer is President of the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), a non-profit policy research group that denies global warming. SEPP is directly funded by ExxonMobil, according to the company’s own disclosures. In 2001, Singer denied ever receiving oil industry funding. During the past two decades Singer has become one of the most prominent “experts” refuting the existence of global warming and the impact of human activities on climate change. In 1996, he wrote a declaration arguing that there was no scientific consensus on global warming and therefore no grounds for measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Singer claimed the declaration was co-signed by “more than 100 European and American climate scientists” when most of the signers were not climate experts, and many were not scientists. But Singer made it clear that he is not necessarily ready to give up on global warming. In testimony to Congress he stated “a warmer climate would be generally beneficial for agriculture and other human activities.”

Dennis Avery
Guarding factory food from “dangers” of the organic food movement
This self-styled “leading critic of organic produce” is a self-righteous attack dog who serves the interests of the corporate agriculture companies who pay the bills at his “think tank,” the Hudson Institute. “Organic foods,” Avery claims, “have clearly become the deadliest food choice.” He gained notoriety by insisting that people who eat organic food are eight times more likely to suffer E. coli food poisoning – a figure he claimed to draw from research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control. But CDC has never conducted such research. Avery frequently repeats his mantra that there is no hard scientific evidence that pesticides harm humans, flatly ignoring decades of scientific analysis. Avery’s “research” has been paid for by Monsanto, DuPont, Dow-Elanco, Sandoz, Ciba-Geigy, ConAgra, Cargill, and Procter & Gamble.

America’s LEADING POLLUTION LOBBYISTS
The power of persuasion in Washington D.C. is not distributed equally. Citizens have a fundamental democratic right to petition public officials. But all too often, their voices are drowned out by slick high-paid corporate representatives who plague the backrooms and shadowy hallways of Congress and the White House. This list includes the most dangerous pro-pollution lobbyists in America:

National Association of Manufacturers
Pushing an anti-environmental litmus test for judges
The National Association of Manufacturers is one of the “Gang of Six” trade associations with close ties to President Bush. It is waging a multi-million dollar campaign to secure the appointment of federal judges who will be antagonistic to the public’s interest in environmental and health related cases. This unparalleled assault on the independence of the judiciary reflects the blurring of the line between corporate and government interests under the Bush Administration. NAM’s position on the environment could not be made any clearer than the 100% approval rating that it gave to Senator James Inhofe, the most anti-environment member of the Senate.

American Petroleum Institute (API)
Helping children understand why we shouldn’t sacrifice oil for
the environment
API promotes deregulation of environmental standards for the oil industry. API claims that environmental safeguards cost billions, but provide no benefits. It argues that environmental protection policies are based upon faulty science and scare tactics by the environmental community. In its most cynical move, API took its propaganda into America’s schools. API and the publishing house Scholastic developed the “Powering Your World” website providing 6th-8th grade science curriculum to teachers that indoctrinates children with their pro-oil, pro-plastic agenda. The website fails to mention the environmental and health problems associated with oil spills, air emissions or plastic toxicity. API has also funded a major study that discounted human-induced climate change and teamed up with Project Learning Tree (an industry propaganda effort masquerading as an educational resource) to develop a teaching curriculum that minimizes the threat of global warming.

Lundquist, Nethercutt and Griles
A Troika of Environmental Terror
This new lobbying firm brings together the axis of anti-environmental evil. Andrew Lundquist headed Vice President Cheney’s secretive energy task force that promoted an oil and coal-first approach to U.S. energy policy. George Nethercutt is a former U.S. Representative who supported drilling in ANWR and stood firm against implementing provisions of the Kyoto climate change accord. He once waited around the Capitol until midnight to sneak an anti-environmental rider into a bill. The rider had earlier been tossed out by a sizable margin. The most venal addition to this trio is former Deputy Secretary of the Environment J. Steven Griles. Prior to joining Interior in 2000, Griles was a lobbyist for the National Mining Association and Shell Oil. During his tenure Griles stayed cozy with his former clients, using his position to undermine the authority of the very agency he ran and continuing to receive $284,000 each year he served as a “public servant” from his former fossil fuel lobby firm.

National Mining Association
Moving more mountains than God
Working in concert with the Bush Administration the National Mining Association, and its well-funded members forced through a change in federal law to allow “mountain top removal” coal mining. This practice, approved by agencies filled with industry cronies, allows coal companies to reach underground coal seams by using explosives to tear off the top of mountains, and burying adjacent stream valleys under millions of tons of rubble and waste. More broadly, NMA has successfully opposed other environmental and safety regulations of mines, particularly in poor areas of Appalachia. Under the guise of sound science, former National Mining Association lobbyist Steven Griles corrupted environmental impact studies on the effects of mountain top removal, ordering agency scientists to ignore evidence of harm to ecosystems and endangered species.

National Association of Home Builders
Tearing down tress and putting up parking lots
The National Association of Home Builders is a rabid opponent of laws and regulations that protect wetlands from destruction, that require treatment of polluted stormwater from construction sites, and that protect endangered species and their habitats. They use lawsuits to rollback the reach of the Clean Water Act so small streams and wetlands can be bulldozed with impunity. Home Builders fights vigorously to undermine the government’s ability to protect communities, public health, and the environment. They want to exempt developers from taking responsibility for the costs of development. They work to shackle the public’s ability to protect itself and its natural resources from wanton development and degradation.