What Is the Keystone XL Pipeline — and Why Is It So Controversial?

by Lois Beckett
ProPublica, Oct. 14, 2011

By the end of this year, the State Department will decide whether to give a Canadian company permission to construct a 1,700-mile, $7 billion pipeline that would transport crude oil from Canada to refineries in Texas.

The project has sparked major environmental concerns, particularly in Nebraska, where the pipeline would pass over an aquifer that provides drinking water and irrigation to much of the Midwest. It has also drawn scrutiny because of the company's political connections and conflicts of interest. A key lobbyist for TransCanada, which would build the pipeline, also worked for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on her presidential campaign. And the company that conducted the project's environmental impact report had financial ties to TransCanada.

The debate over the pipeline is both complicated and fierce, and it crosses party lines, with much sparring over the potential environmental and economic impacts of the project. More than 1,000 arrests were made during protests of the pipeline last summer in Washington, D.C.

Here's our breakdown of the controversy, including the benefits and risks of the project, and the concerns about the State Department's role.

Potential benefits — energy security and jobs for Americans — and how they're disputed

Proponents of the project point to two main benefits for Americans. First, it would improve America's energy security, because it would bring in more oil from friendly Canada and reduce our dependence on volatile countries in South America and the Middle East. Secondly, the pipeline would create well-paying construction jobs and provide a broader economic boost to the American economy. Labor unions have supported the project.

TransCanada estimates that the project would directly create 20,000 construction and manufacturing jobs for Americans. A study paid for by TransCanada also estimated the economic impact over the life of the pipeline at about $20 billion in total spending.

But a report by Cornell University's Global Labor Institute questioned those numbers, noting that the project would "create no more than 2,500-4,650 temporary direct construction jobs for two years, according to TransCanada's own data supplied to the State Department."

Critics of the project have also questioned whether the pipeline's oil, once processed in American refineries on the Gulf Coast, would actually be sold to Americans rather than being exported for sale elsewhere. As a New York Times editorial opposing the pipeline noted, five of the six companies that have already contracted for much of the pipeline's oil are foreign companies — and the sixth focuses on exporting oil.

The Washington Post, which editorialized in favor of the pipeline, said this should not be a major objection. "The bottom line remains: The more American refineries source their low-grade crude via pipeline from Canada and not from tankers out of the Middle East or Venezuela, the better, even if not every refined barrel stays in the country," the Post editorial stated.

Cozy relationships with the State Department — and a compromised environmental report

Because the project crosses the U.S. border, it requires a permit from the State Department. As part of that process, the State Department did an environmental impact report. The study concluded that, if operated correctly, the pipeline would have "limited adverse environmental impacts." But a New York Times investigation found that the company that the government hired to conduct the study had significant financial ties to TransCanada — and that this conflict of interest "flouted the intent of a federal law" requiring federal agencies to select contractors that have no potential interest in the outcome of the project being evaluated. (Update: The Los Angeles Times first reported the financial connection between TransCanada and Cardno Entrix, which helped conduct the environmental studies, this July.)

Environmental groups have also scrutinized the relationship between State Department officials and TransCanada's representative in Washington. Paul Elliott, who worked on Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign, was actively lobbying the State Department and Congress about the project for a year and a half before he officially registered as a lobbyist, according to State Department email messages made public by the environmental group Friends of the Earth. Elliott did not comment on the emails, but a TransCanada spokesperson said he was simply doing his job as a lobbyist.

The emails showed a friendly relationship between Elliott and his State Department contact, who wrote "Go Paul!" when Elliott secured the support of a key congressman for the Keystone project.

The State Department has said that it will consider the merits of the pipeline proposal impartially.

As the news organization Mother Jones pointed out, the emails also revealed "an apparent understanding between the State Department and TransCanada that the company would later seek to raise the pressure used to pump oil through the pipeline — even though the company said publicly it would do the opposite."

TransCanada had originally sought permission to use a higher-than-usual pressure in its pipeline but publicly backed away from the request in response to the concerns of citizens and politicians that higher pressure might increase the risk of leaks and environmental damage.

A WikiLeaks cable also revealed that a different U.S. diplomat had given PR tips to Canadian officials about the project. As the Los Angeles Times noted, the diplomat "had instructed them in improving 'oil sands messaging,' including 'increasing visibility and accessibility of more positive news stories.'"

Concerns about water contamination across the Great Plains

The proposed route of the pipeline passes over the Sandhills wetland of Nebraska — and over the most important aquifer in the nation, the Ogallala Aquifer, which provides drinking water and irrigation to a large swathe of Midwestern states.

This has prompted opposition from Nebraska politicians. The state's Republican governor wrote a letter to President Obama asking him not to approve the project, and state legislators are considering legislation limiting where the pipeline can be located.

"Clearly, the contamination of groundwater is the top concern," State Sen. Mike Flood told reporters.

Opposition to the pipeline is so broad in Nebraska that a TransCanada-sponsored video that was perceived as supporting the pipeline was booed at a University of Nebraska football game, which resulted in the Cornhuskers athletic department ending a TransCanada sponsorship deal.

But at least one scientist with significant experience with the Ogallala Aquifer said fears about contamination from the pipeline are overblown.

James Goeke, a hydrogeologist and professor emeritus at the University of Nebraska, wrote on The New York Times' website that the geography of the aquifer — there'd be clay between the pipeline and the water, and much of the aquifer is uphill from the pipeline's proposed location — means that a leak in the pipeline "would pose a minimal risk to the aquifer as a whole." He suggested the government "require TransCanada to post a bond for any cleanup in the event of a spill," and noted that in particularly vulnerable areas, TransCanada has promised to encase the pipeline in cement.

Leaks and spills

The Keystone XL pipeline would carry a diluted form of tar sands, a type of natural petroleum deposit. Environmentalists argue that the tar sands, or "dilbit," mixture that the pipeline would transport is more corrosive than typical crude oil, and thus might cause more leaks in the pipeline.

These fears were heightened by an oil spill in Michigan that leaked roughly 800,000 gallons of tar sands into Michigan's Kalamazoo River in July 2010. The spill came within 80 miles of Lake Michigan, and a year later, the Environmental Protection Agency has ordered Enbridge, the energy company responsible for the spill, to conduct further cleanup, citing pockets of submerged oil covering about 200 acres of the river's path.

The Christian Science Monitor has a good, brief summary of spills on TransCanada's existing U.S. pipeline, and notes that according to the State Department estimate, "the maximum the Keystone XL could potentially spill would be 2.8 million gallons along an area of 1.7 miles."

Concerns about eminent domain

Some property owners whose land the pipeline would cross have spoken out against the company's approach, particularly the fact that a Canadian company is able to use eminent domain to acquire the use of private land.

The issue has struck a nerve across the political spectrum and has helped bring together Tea Party and environmental activists in Texas to oppose the project.

TransCanada says it is compensating landowners fairly, and notes that, "Our permit does allow us to use eminent domain to acquire an easement and provide compensation for the landowner. Keystone XL always prefers to avoid the use of eminent domain, and if we cannot reach an agreement, then we turn to the independent processes/hearings that are established in Texas and other U.S. states."

Broader environmental concerns

Environmentalists also object not just to the pipeline itself but to the start-to-finish process of refining tar sands, which has a heavy impact on the environment, including global warming. As a Stanford University professor wrote on The New York Times' website:

Available evidence suggests that oil sands, on a "well-to-wheels" basis, have 15 to 20 percent higher greenhouse emissions than conventional oil. This is because of increased energy demand during extraction and the use of high-carbon fuels like petroleum coke. Also, water pollution concerns plague mining-based projects that produce large volumes of tailings (a contaminated, watery waste product).

Critics of the project argue that approving Keystone XL could have a "chilling effect" on efforts to create green jobs, and that it would demonstrate that the U.S. is not serious about its climate change leadership — and that Canada is not serious about trying to reach its Kyoto targets.

But as many have noted, denying approval to Keystone XL wouldn't stop tar sands production. As the Heritage Foundation's David Kreutzer argued: "Block the XL pipeline if you think the environment will be better served by shipping Canadian oil an extra 6,000 miles across the Pacific in oil-consuming super tankers and then refining it in less-regulated Chinese refineries."

Debt Political Theater Diverts Attention While Americans' Wealth Is Stolen

Friday, July 15, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
by Dennis Kucinich

The rancorous debate over the debt belies a fundamental truth of our economy -- that it is run for the few at the expense of the many, that our entire government has been turned into a machine which takes the wealth of a mass of Americans and accelerates it into the hands of the few. Let me give you some examples.

Take war. War takes the money from the American people and puts it into the hands of arms manufacturers, war profiteers, and private armies. The war in Iraq, based on lies: $3 trillion will be the cost of that war. The war in Afghanistan; based on a misreading of history; half a trillion dollars in expenses already. The war against Libya will be $1 billion by September.


Fifty percent of our discretionary spending goes for the Pentagon. A massive transfer of wealth into the hands of a few while the American people lack sufficient jobs, health care, housing, retirement security.

Our energy policies take the wealth from the American people and put it into the hands of the oil companies. We could be looking at $150 a barrel for oil in the near future.

Our environmental policy takes the wealth of the people -- clean air, clean water -- and puts it in the hands of the polluters. It's a transfer of wealth, not only from the present but from future generations as our environment is ruined.

Insurance companies, what do they do? They take the wealth from the American people in terms of what they charge people for health insurance and they put it into the hands of the few.

We have to realize what this country's economy has become. Our monetary policy, through the Federal Reserve Act of 1913, privatized the money supply, gathers the wealth, puts it in the hands of the few while the Federal Reserve can create money out of nothing, give it to banks to park at the Fed while our small businesses are starving for capital.

Mark my words -- Wall Street cashes in whether we have a default or not. And the same type of thinking that created billions in bailouts for Wall Street and more than $1 trillion in giveaways by the Federal Reserve today leaves 26 million Americans either underemployed or unemployed. And nine out of ten Americans over the age of 65 are facing cuts in their Social Security in order to pay for a debt which grew from tax cuts for the rich and for endless wars.

There is a massive transfer of wealth from the American people to the hands of a few and it's going on right now as America's eyes are misdirected to the political theater of these histrionic debt negotiations, threats to shut down the government, and willingness to make the most Americans pay dearly for debts they did not create.

These are symptoms of a government which has lost its way, and they are a challenge to the legitimacy of the two-party system.

What are You Going to Do About the Empire?

So You Say You Aren't a Secessionist
By THOMAS NAYLOR

Then what are you going to do about the Empire? More specifically, how will you deal with the following:

Governance

• The complete loss of moral authority of a government owned, operated, and controlled by Wall Street, Corporate America, and the Israeli Lobby.
  
• An empire which is economically, militarily, politically, morally, socially, and environmentally unsustainable because it is too big.
  
• A nation governed by a single political party disguised as a two-party system.
  
• Congressional gridlock – an ungovernable nation which is, therefore, unfixable.
  
• The fantasy of campaign finance reform as a panacea for solving most of our problems.
  
• A populace which still believes that only the U.S. government can solve all of our problems all of the time, failing to realize that the U.S. government is the problem.
  

Foreign Policy

• A foreign policy based on full spectrum dominance, imperial overstretch, might makes right, and the proposition, just be like us.
  
• The disproportionately large influence which the Israeli Lobby has on American foreign policy.
  
• Our inflammatory policy towards Iran.
  
• Our lack of commitment to an Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
  
• The support we provide to dictators and authoritarian leaders in the Middle East, North Africa, and the rest of the world.
  
• The Cuban embargo.
  
• Our predisposition towards the use of the military option in resolving international conflicts.
  

Military Might

• The never ending, highly racist war on terror (Islam).
  
• Our immoral, illegal, undeclared wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Palestine (via Israel), and Yemen.
  
• The 1.6 million American troops stationed at over 1,000 military bases in 153 countries.
  
• The 80,000 American troops stationed in Europe, the 36,000 in Japan, and the 30,000 in Korea.
  
• NATO, the 27-nation Cold War relic which has lost its way.
  
• Ronald Reagan’s fantasy of a strategic missile defense system.
  
• The American led proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.
  
• The unconditional military support provided to the right-wing Likud government of Israel.
  
• America‘s unchallenged position as the world’s leading arms merchant.
  
• American pilotless drone aircraft spreading death and destruction worldwide.
  
• The outrageously expensive F-35 fighter jets which cost $115 million a pop.
  
• The trillion-dollar plus military and national security budget.
  

Civil Liberties

• The Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and the proposed Detainee Security Act.
  
• The highly intrusive, money-guzzling Department of Homeland Security.
  
• Prisoner abuse and torture.
  
• The rendition of terrorist suspects.
  
• White House ordered assassinations.
  
• The Guantanamo prison.
  
• Citizen surveillance and the suppression of civil liberties.
  

The Economy

• A moribund housing market.
  
• An inability to create enough real jobs to compensate for those exported to China, India, and elsewhere over the past two decades.
  
• Stagnant real incomes for all but the super-rich.
  
• An ever widening income gap between the rich and the poor.
  
• Increases in the number of people who find themselves to be among the poor, homeless, or uninsured (no health insurance).
  
• A multi-trillion dollar national debt.
  
• Increased dependence on China, Japan, and other foreign countries to finance our national debt.
  
• A government which prints money as though it were going out of style.
  
• Uncertainty about the future value of the U.S. dollar and the rate of inflation.
  
• An unreliable system of public and private retirement pension systems.
  
• Uncertainty over the sustainability of Social Security and Medicare.
  
• A financial regulatory system which favors Wall Street mega-banks at the expense of ordinary citizens.
  
• An organized labor movement which has been rendered impotent by two decades of hostile, anti-labor employers such as Wal-Mart.
  
• An economy driven by our intense psychological need to fill our spiritual and emotional vacuum with more and more stuff and the illusion that the accumulation of wealth and material possessions can provide meaning to life. Whoever dies with the most toys, wins the game.
  
• Wal-Mart with its seductive low prices and the promotion of the idea that what life is all about is unrestrained personal consumption.
  

Social Services

• A health care system driven by fear of death on the demand side and greed on the supply side which is spiraling out of control.
  
• Over two million people in prison.
  
• An international war on drugs that is a complete failure.
  
• A federal education program committed to a one-size-fits-all corporate model of education.
  
• A social welfare net that is woefully inadequate.
  
• Patronizing, racist programs of support for Native Americans, Native Hawaiians, Eskimos, and Inuits.
  

Energy and Environment

• Unabated dependence on imported foreign oil and its inherent price fluctuations.
  
• Under investment in alternative energy sources by government and private industry alike.
  
• A failure to confront the problem of climate change.
  

Infrastructure

• Widespread aging infrastructure including highways, bridges, tunnels, airports, dams, levees, and public water systems.
  
• Obsolete air traffic control system.
  
• Grossly inadequate railroad passenger train system.
  

Summary

A government that is too big, too centralized, too powerful, too undemocratic, too intrusive, too materialistic, too environmentally destructive, too racist, too violent, too militaristic, and too unresponsive to the needs of individual citizens and small communities.

Another Crisis Over, Thanks to the Government

By Anthony Gregory on Sep 20, 2010
It’s all over the news. “The recession is over.” The mainstream economists say so. This was the longest recession since World War II, I heard on the news (say, I thought the economy was just dandy throughout that war—oh, never mind).

The end of this terrible recession into which the free market plunged us is all thanks to the federal government, of course. In particular, we owe the Obama administration our gratitude for its stimulus program. But we should also tip our hats—hats we can presumably now afford to buy— toward the Bush administration for its TARP bailouts, without which the banking system would have completely collapsed, credit would have dried up and we would have all starved to death.

This is another wonderful crisis brought to an end by government. All within about a month of the end of the Iraq war! That, too, was a crisis, incalculably costly in American blood and treasure. The Iraqis, too, were suffering, or so we heard some time several years ago. But thank goodness that horror is now over. Sure, there are still U.S. soldiers there, shooting, killing and dying—but this does not mean the war is not over, just as the high unemployment figures and inconsistent private investment do not mean that our economic troubles are somehow still persisting.

Speaking of which, the economy sure has been perfected by government’s responses to all the various crises, hasn’t it? Not just currently, but going back many years. In 1913, Congress passed the Federal Reserve Act, which not only allowed for the financing of the Great War that succeeded in securing democracy throughout the world and precluding any wars from ever again being necessary, but also ensured that our monetary system has been completely solid ever since—no banking panics, no trouble keeping the U.S. dollar strong and stable. Well, there was the Great Depression, but FDR sure acted quickly to make sure we’d never have another big boom and bust. The sharp increase in regulation, federal spending, taxes, stimulus and government control over money in the 1930s sure put an end to any economic problems. The early 1970s might have looked bad, but that was just an illusion, as Nixon fixed that for good by closing the gold window and giving us price controls. The dotcom recession? Bush remedied that once and for all with an engineered housing bubble that was egged on by the most respected of America’s Keynesian economists. All that government intervention from 1913 and the New Deal through the 1970s and onward sure kept the economy from ever falling off the tracks again. And yet, when it did fall off the tracks again in 2007 and 2008—when it was called the greatest financial collapse, at least since 1929—government sure came to the rescue, fixing the disaster caused by the free market, for we all know that the century worth of cascading interventions into the financial markets, the real estate industry, money, banking and the overall economy, could not possibly have had anything to do with this last recession; only the remaining sphere of American economic freedom could be the culprit.

Speaking of the economy, remember how America used to have a crisis with poverty? Lyndon Johnson sure put an end to that. I don’t actually know if the war on poverty ever ended as decisively as the Iraq war has—probably sometime in the 1990s, with welfare reform. Now the government doesn’t need to wage war on poverty any more. It has won. Poverty is vanquished from America.

Although, in the 1980s and 1990s, there sure was a homelessness crisis. It was all over the news. It must have been a very big deal. But no more. The war on homelessness stopped that, thank goodness. Now even left-liberals don’t ever talk about any sort of homelessness problem, so there must not be one.

Speaking of domestic crusades from the last couple generations, remember when our public schools were failing? Thank goodness for the ramping up of public school spending in the last 40 years. Where would we be without it? If not for the war on illiteracy, Carter’s Department of Education, Bush’s No Child Left Behind and the rest of the government’s constant intervention into educational life, we’d probably have such an illiterate, uneducated populace that we’d elect to the presidency men who brag that they don’t read newspapers, or come close to electing Vice Presidents who can’t name two important Supreme Court decisions.

And to think that all this progress has happened alongside the many other problems the government has solved. Back in the 1960s, Americans used to do illegal drugs. Thanks to Nixon, Reagan and all the presidents since, practically no one does illegal drugs, the war on drugs is over, according to the current administration, our streets are safe and we didn’t have to sacrifice any precious liberties to get here. Meanwhile, Americans consume only the safest of pharmaceuticals, and everything that is effective comes quickly to market. We can also be certain, thanks to agricultural subsidies, that healthy food is easily accessible and unhealthy food is more expensive. If the market handled farming completely, you’d probably be able to get a box of corn-syrup-drenched snack cakes for less than a bag of carrots. And if you did overeat and needed medical attention, health care would be massively expensive. Thank goodness for more than fifty years of increasing federal involvement in health care. But it’s too bad that this federal involvement did not prevent the unregulated free market from causing a health care crisis that Obama had to repair with his gigantic health care plan. We can take solace, at least, that the health care crisis is finally over.

The environment is also totally clean, thanks to the Environmental Protection Agency, which ensures that there will never be, say, a huge oil leak off the Gulf Coast that lasts for a couple of months before being plugged. And as for oil, it sure is affordable, thanks to the numerous price regulations and America’s active energy policy, which the last eight presidents have assured us would stabilize prices and produce “energy independence” within a few years. And we need plenty of oil in this country to power our wonderful automobiles, which are built by the kind of companies that are the fulcrum of the American economy, a fulcrum we can thank Uncle Sam for propping up. Now that we know the auto industry is secure, we can drive those American cars with pride on our wonderful government roads—roads you know are safe, with practically no deaths on them. Could you imagine private industry handling the roads? Not only would they be congested and littered with potholes, we’d have thousands of deaths per year, probably more than ten times as many as died on 9/11.

Which brings us to terrorism, the great crisis of the last decade. Solved, thanks to government. Indeed, the “war on terrorism,” just like the “war in Iraq” and the “war on drugs,” has been officially over for a more than a year. Another great government success, and at minimal cost, too.

Americans used to think that government itself could be a serious problem, as it was prone to corruption. Another crisis solved. Thanks to our trustworthy Congress passing campaign finance laws, we know that Congress will never be corrupted.

Some might say this post is sardonic—even cynical. Can we afford to be sarcastic in the current climate? We can afford practically anything, I say, thanks to the end of the recession—another total victory for the government. And we all know that, thanks to our four-trillion dollar central government in DC, our military-industrial complex, our millions of pages of federal edicts, our millions of federal employees, our national police forces unbound by traditional legal constraints, our thousands of regulators, our dozens of welfare programs, our public school system, our government infrastructure, our Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, our numerous international quasi-governmental organizations from the WTO to the UN, not to mention the massive state and local bureaucracies that most Americans are blessed to live under—we know that thanks to all this government, we will never see another crisis comparable to this ghastly recession. And if we do, we can always blame it on the free market and the lack of government involvement.

Gas Is Really Costing Us About $15 a Gallon

Calculating the true cost of living in a country built on oil.
By Mark Engler, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on August 13, 2010

This might be an opportune time to make a disclosure: I am a BP shareholder. Admittedly, I’ve never attended the company’s annual meeting, and if I did, I would have very little weight to throw around.

I own two shares of BP stock. I received my stake in the company as a Christmas gift in 1989, when I was 14 years old. The previous June, I had taken a "summer enrichment" course in the Des Moines public schools, designed as an introduction to the world of business. The teacher gave each of us in the class a modest hypothetical budget to invest in the stock market.

Earnest young capitalists, we made our picks and then followed the quotes in the morning paper. I invested heavily in Amoco and finished the summer feeling that my portfolio had done quite well. As a result, my younger brother decided that I should receive a real piece of the enterprise that was once John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil. He conspired with my mom to get me an Amoco share for the holidays.

I’ve watched the oil industry as an interested party ever since. In 1998, my Amoco stock split, turning my one share into two. Then, a few months later, the company was acquired by BP. This "oil mega-merger," as the BBC called it, gave me a stake in yet another energy titan. It also allowed the combined corporation to shed 6,000 jobs, prompting its new chief executive, Sir John Browne of BP, to confidently assure the press that "he hoped the merger will increase pre-tax profits of the two partners by 'at least' two billion dollars by the end of 2000."

The merger proved profitable indeed. Over time, the price of my stock nearly doubled. I received dividends every three months, usually of around 60 cents per share. And by the mid-2000s, BP was making some $20 billion per year in profits. The numbers looked good.

Of course, these are not the only numbers to consider. In fact, in the wake of BP's disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, they don’t seem like the right numbers at all. It’s time for a different accounting: What has that catastrophic spill cost our society? What price do we pay for our dependence on oil? How do we measure these things?

Costs of Business

When I first began receiving Amoco’s annual reports, they featured photos that celebrated robust industrial capabilities, like multicolored sunsets behind fields of horsehead oil pumps in Texas. These days, there's still some of that, but the reports tend to have more shots of solar panels, white windmills, and smiling school children (our future). Someone looking at the annual review the company sent me in 2001, for instance, might have been fooled by the photos of lush, palm-heavy landscapes in Indonesia, California, and Trinidad into thinking that it was a mailing from Conservation International.

Such changes in public relations were born of tragedy. Back in 1989, not three months before my summer business class, the Exxon Valdez collided with the Bligh reef in Alaska's Prince William Sound, breaching its hull. Even according to conservative estimates, it spilled more than 10 million gallons of oil and contaminated more than 1,200 miles of ecologically sensitive coastline. For years afterwards, we saw Exxon deal with the fallout of the catastrophe.

However many thousands of boats and booms the company deployed, it only managed to recover about 8% of the oil released. The rest evaporated, coated beaches, or sank to the bottom of the sea. The Exxon Valdez Oil Spill Trustee Council estimates that 250,000 seabirds, 2,800 sea otters, 300 harbor seals, 250 bald eagles, up to 22 killer whales, and billions of salmon and herring eggs were killed by the spill. Two decades later, some 16,000 gallons of leftover oil still poison wildlife in the Prince William Sound.

The cost to the planet was steep. The cost to Exxon could have been severe as well. While the company claims that it spent $2.1 billion on its clean-up efforts, it might have had to pay many times that in fines and lawsuit settlements. The government initially threatened $5 billion in criminal penalties, and in 1994 a federal jury ordered the company to pay $5.2 billion in punitive damages to Alaskans who had filed a class-action lawsuit. For a time, things at Exxon looked grim.

Although these were the worries of a rival corporation, Amoco investors did get a taste of what Exxon was experiencing. In 1990, after a dozen years of litigation, a federal judge in Chicago ordered my company to pay $132 million in damages to the French government and other parties. They had all been harmed 12 years earlier when the Amoco Cadiz ran aground off the coast of Brittany, releasing 68 million gallons of oil. At the time, it was the largest tanker spill ever. It killed millions of sea urchins and mollusks, thousands of tons of oysters, and almost 20,000 birds.

In terms of the overall business, however, the judgment was only a blip on Amoco's radar screen. In the end, Exxon never made any $10 billion payout for its disaster either. The first Bush administration allowed the company to plead guilty to a small number of charges and settled for penalties and fines of around $1 billion. The judge who ultimately approved the settlement had earlier worried that the amount was too low: "I'm afraid these fines send the wrong message," he said, "and suggest that spills are a cost of business that can be absorbed."

It was a prescient concern, especially given the resolution of the class-action suit. In that arena, Exxon's lawyers proved patient and skilled. They held up the case in court for years until, in 2008, nearly two decades after the spill, the Supreme Court ruled that damages paid by the company would be limited to an exceptionally absorbable $507.5 million.

Emerging Unscathed

In the months during which the well under BP's Deepwater Horizon freely spewed crude into the Gulf of Mexico, it released 4.9 million barrels of oil, or 205.8 million gallons, according to a government panel tasked with measuring the spill. Depending on what estimates you use for the earlier disaster, this amounts to roughly 20 times as much oil as the Exxon Valdez released. In negotiations with the Obama administration, BP agreed to put $20 billion into a fund for cleanup. It has also indicated that it will pay "all legitimate claims" related to the disaster.

Despite such vows, how much of the final cost BP will actually end up paying is unclear. Spill-related damages and lost economic activity could amount to tens of billions of dollars more than what BP is currently setting aside. An Oxford Economics study predicts that costs to the tourism industry alone could exceed $22 billion. Damage to the natural environment, much of it potentially unseen, is almost impossible to quantify.

In the case of the Valdez spill, according to the Associated Press, "the state priced each seagull at $167, eagles at $22,000, harbor seals at $700, and killer whales at $300,000." Such an effort could be replicated for the Gulf. Yet a price tag of $167 per seagull seems tragically inadequate as a means of accounting for a destroyed population of birds, and it doesn’t begin to account for species that may seem less significant to us, but could be crucial to the ecosystem.

Now-deposed BP executive Tony Hayward repeatedly vowed to Gulf residents that the company would "make this right." Likewise, in 1989, after the Valdez ran aground, Don Cornett, Exxon's top official in Alaska, told locals dependent on the ruined fishing industry, "We will do whatever it takes to keep you whole. We do business straight." Of course, that was before Exxon went on to pursue years of dogged litigation to limit its liability.

Once the public furor dies down, as already seems to be happening, BP will have financial incentive to do the same. Though the price of my stock took a hit, plummeting from around $60 per share in early April -- before anyone had heard of the Deepwater Horizon -- to a low of $27 per share in late June, it has already rallied to above $40 as of this writing. Some analysts are betting that BP, like Exxon, will contain the cost of its spill, and then continue about its business in much the same manner it did before. As analyst Antonia Juhasz argues with regard to the Valdez disaster, "Exxon emerged virtually unscathed from the incident and is, today, the most profitable corporation the world has ever known."

What We Do Not Pay at the Pump

Aspects of this situation are reminiscent of the aftermath of another recent “spill.” They recall the way in which bailout banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase relied on billions of dollars in public funding to stay afloat after causing a global economic near-collapse, then turned around the next year to report massive profits and once again award exorbitant bonuses to their well-heeled employees. In each case, there is something deeply unsatisfying about how the market handles the destructive behavior of powerful economic actors.

It is not a new idea to suggest that the true costs inherent in many economic pursuits have been unfairly socialized. Nor does this notion apply only in moments of crisis. Economists give the name "externalities" to costs associated with a business that are not reflected on the balance sheet of that enterprise or in the prices of its products, but rather are borne by society at large. For example, if a factory can dump its waste in a local river and is never fined, it has successfully externalized the cost of waste disposal, which the public pays for in the form of polluted water and its consequences.

Oil has many externalities, and the BP disaster has been only the most recent trigger -- "the reminder we didn't need," as Carter Dougherty at BNet put it -- for refreshed awareness that the gas we buy is far more expensive to our country than what any of us pay at the pump.

In August 1987, the New York Times published an editorial with the bold title, "The Real Cost of Gas: $5 a Gallon." Given that, at the time, you could commonly fill up for 99 cents per gallon, and that even the energy crises of the 1970s did not push gas prices above $1.50 per gallon, $5-a-gallon gas was pretty much unimaginable. Yet the Times editorial stated that, "in light of the administration's willingness to risk lives and dollars in the defense of oil from the Persian Gulf… the real cost of oil should include the cost of the military forces protecting supplies." It argued for an energy policy that accounted for Pentagon expenditures.

Two Gulf wars later, an array of reports from both liberal and conservative sources suggest that $5 per gallon is anything but an outlandish estimate for the true cost of gas. It could, in fact, be far too low.

Taking military spending into account would only be a start toward reckoning with what we really pay for oil. But since the military takes up a massive part of our national budget, it would be a good start.

Anita Dancs, an economist with the Center for Popular Economics, notes that "energy security, according to national security documents, is a vital national interest and has been incorporated into military objectives and strategies for more than half a century." After breaking down the overall military budget and evaluating specific missions, she concludes that "we will pay $90 billion this year to secure oil. If spending on the Iraq War is included, the total rises to $166 billion." That would already add 56 cents to every gallon of gas we buy.

The late Milton Copulos was a veteran of the Heritage Foundation, an advisor to both President Ronald Reagan’s White House and the CIA, as well as the head of the right-wing National Defense Council Foundation. He was particularly concerned with dependence on foreign oil, and he highlighted how oil imports were both an economic boon to unsavory governments abroad and a missed opportunity for domestic investment. In 2006, Copulos argued that, if you add to oil-related defense spending such factors as the economic impact of periodic oil supply disruptions and the opportunity costs of money spent on oil imports that might have been used elsewhere in the economy, the "hidden" costs of the U.S. dependence on petroleum would total up to $825 billion per year.

"To put the figure in further perspective," he wrote, "it is equivalent to adding $8.35 to the price of a gallon of gasoline refined from Persian Gulf oil." At today's rates, that would hike the price at the pump to approximately $11 per gallon, or more than $250 to fill the tank of a typical SUV.

Gushing Subsidies

Military spending is just one type of public subsidy that benefits the oil industry and keeps the price at gas stations artificially low. When I made my adolescent wager on Amoco, I was not aware that the company also profited from massive tax breaks and other non-military forms of support. Yet these go a long way toward making the enterprise a safe bet for investors. Copulos factored some of them into his $11 per gallon calculation; others would drive the price still higher.

In early July, The New York Times reported: "With federal officials now considering a new tax on petroleum production to pay for [the BP oil spill] cleanup, the industry is fighting the measure… But an examination of the American tax code indicates that oil production is among the most heavily subsidized businesses, with tax breaks available at virtually every stage of the exploration and extraction process." Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) added, “The flow of revenues to oil companies is like the gusher at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico: heavy and constant. There is no reason for these corporations to shortchange the American taxpayer.”

The Times story notes that BP was, for instance, able to write off 70% of what it was paying in rent for the Deepwater Horizon rig that caught fire, "a deduction of more than $225,000 a day since the lease began." Amazingly, BP is also claiming a $9.9 billion tax credit for its response to its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Not only does our government allow energy companies to avoid taxes in myriad ways, the variety of public supports for the oil industry outside the tax code are almost too numerous to list. A 1995 report by the Union of Concerned Scientists mentioned several, including these: the government invests in substantial energy research that directly benefits the oil industry; it spends millions to maintain a Strategic Petroleum Reserve, designed to help stabilize the oil supply; and it maintains a massive highway system that facilitates gas-intensive auto travel, only part of which is paid for by taxes on motorists.

Then, of course, there is the environmental price we pay, most notably in the form of global warming. As Ezra Klein wrote recently in Newsweek, some experts argue that carbon emissions from cars could be offset at the cost of about 65 cents per gallon (money that would presumably be invested in activities like reforestation). Others believe the cost would be much steeper -- perhaps steep enough to turn oil industry profits into losses.

Andrew Simms of the British New Economics Foundation calculated that, if you were to combine BP's exploration, extraction, and production activities with those involved in the sale of its products, you would end up with 1,458 million tons of CO2-equivalent entering the atmosphere per year. Pricing the cost of carbon emissions at $35 per ton, he puts the bill for climate-change damages at $51 billion. Since BP reported a mere $19 billion in profits in 2006, the year Simms was reviewing, he argues that it would have been "$31 billion in the red," or effectively bankrupt, if it had to cover the climate-change bill.

There's more, too. Consider that car exhaust and oil industry pollution mean an increase in smog and asthma, burdening our health-care system. Then count in the damage caused by massive oil spills we seldom hear about in places like Nigeria, Ecuador, or China, as well as the economic cost of traffic congestion and excess auto accidents made possible by subsidized car travel (costs which the willfully contrarian Freakonomics blog contends may be even more expensive than global warming). The final tally is staggering. High-end estimates of the true costs of the gas we use come to over $15 per gallon. Taxpayers subsidize significant parts of this sum without even knowing it.

That Which Makes Life Worthwhile

To the extent that energy corporations are made to spend more to do business in the future -- forced, for example, to pay for mandatory safety measures, pricier insurance policies, or taxes from which they were previously exempt -- some of the costs of oil could be "internalized." If enough costs were accounted for, some companies, no longer confident that their efforts would be profitable, might begin to reconsider exploiting harder-to-extract reserves of fossil fuels. A recent article in the British Guardian offered this scenario: "If the billions of dollars of annual subsidies and the many tax breaks the industry gets were withdrawn, and the cost of protecting oil companies in developing countries were added, then most of the world's oil would almost certainly be left in the ground."

Unfortunately, this is surely an overstatement. If the exploits of oil companies were made more costly, these companies would simply raise their prices and pass along the costs to consumers. And we would pay them because we are unwilling to give up the speed and convenience of driving, or the luxury of airline travel. We would pay them because we are unwilling to reduce our consumption of foods shipped to our grocery stores from far away, or diminish our energy consumption in many other ways. We would pay them in order to maintain at least a facsimile of our previous lives.

Or would we?

While it is too much to say that "most of the world's oil" would be abandoned, some might be. In 2008, when gas prices soared above $4 per gallon, Americans did behave differently. As the New York Times reported, we drove 10 billion fewer miles per month than the year before; surprising numbers of SUV owners traded in their vehicles for smaller, more efficient cars; and daily oil consumption was lowered by 900,000 barrels. Investors began to reconsider how "realistic" the costs of developing alternative energies might be and to fund them more seriously. In other words, Americans responded to the market.

This was a hopeful sign. At the same time, reacting to the market's cues will not be enough to sort out our relationship to oil and the oil business. We must also reckon with the market's limits. Appreciating the full magnitude of the Deepwater Horizon crisis requires us to recognize that the market is inherently unable to account for many of the things we hold most precious. Robert F. Kennedy pointed to this problem in one of his most powerful speeches, explaining that the gross national product measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile."

Some things cannot be -- or should not be -- left to business spreadsheets. Calculating the cost of a destroyed ecosystem in the Gulf of Mexico or along the coast of Alaska means putting a price tag on things that are not meant to be priced. If you accept that a harbor seal's life is indeed worth $700, and a killer whale's $300,000, pretty soon you must accept that your own life has a price tag on it as well.

Yet taking the limits of economic calculus seriously has implications. It means that we cannot trust the market to solve its own problems -- to self-regulate and self-correct. It means that we need democratic action to place controls on corporate behavior. It means that some things must be considered not merely expensive but sacred, and defended against forces blind to their true value.

Those who believe that the price of my BP stock will recover in the next year might be wrong. Even if the stock bottoms out, however, that won’t restore a shattered Gulf, nor will it change a system that prizes easy consumption and deferred responsibility. We can only correct for the catastrophe oil has wrought by living according to a different measure.

Merchants of Doubt

July 8, 2010 by Brian Angliss

What do the following things all have in common: tobacco safety and the dangers of secondhand smoke, the Strategic Defense Initiative, acid rain, the ozone hole, global warming, and the recent attacks on Rachel Carson (author of Silent Spring)? According to the new book by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, Merchants of Doubt, they were all manipulated by a very small group of once well respected scientists whose radical free-market and anti-communist ideologies corrupted them to the point of attacking scientists, scientific organizations, and ultimately the process of science itself.

Merchants of Doubt focuses on seven different areas that are presented roughly how they’ve occurred chronologically, starting with the safety of tobacco in the 1950s, proceeding through nuclear war and the misguided defense of SDI, the opposition to regulation of both acid rain and CFCs, and finishing up with the recent attacks on global warming and attempts at historical revisionism with respect to Rachel Carson and the regulation of DDT. But through all of these areas, the main cast of characters barely changes, the methods used to attack scientific conclusions remain remarkably consistent, and the goals of the attacks become clearer and clearer.

We learn reading Merchants of Doubt that Fredrick Seitz, Robert Jastrow, William Nierenberg, and S. Fred Singer were the main instigators of attacks on science in service of their ideology. Several were involved with the development of the atomic bomb and all were cold warriors who equated environmentalism with communism and/or socialism. All four men believed the teachings of Milton Friedman, who taught that capitalism equals freedom, and so to rein in capitalism to stop a market failure (which is what most environmental problems are) meant to put limits on freedom. And because these men couldn’t stomach the possibility that their ideology was wrong, they sought to corrupt the public sphere and science itself to protect their ideology.

One way that Oreskes and Conway found the scientists had done this was by attacking numerical models. The early computer models that supported the hypothesis that the dinosaurs were killed by an asteroid impact were also used to estimate how the global climate might react to other major effects, such as the eruption of a supervolcano, global warming, and nuclear winter. Nierenberg and Singer didn’t like the results of the nuclear winter models because the model results ran contrary to the “USSR is a major threat, SDI must happen” narrative that the two men had created. The problem was that the models showed that even a small nuclear exchange would throw the entire globe into climatic upheaval, and the supporters of SDI didn’t like this. So a cousin of Fredrick Seitz attacked the models – in 1986. Attacks on climate modeling have grown as the models have radically improved and as the models’ projections have been observed.

Another tactic described in Merchants of Doubt was attacking the science was by manipulating the media. The Fairness Doctrine was used by Seitz and the tobacco industry to force reporters and editors to give equal time to the tobacco industry when countering scientific claims about the dangers of smoking and later secondhand smoke. A greater problem with the media, however, was that Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer could attack the science they didn’t like in the mainstream media without reprisal. Scientists who tried to demand corrections were ignored by the media and forced to publish their corrections in the scientific press instead of the mainstream media. Merchants of Doubt describes repeated incidents with respect to the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, which published erroneous columns, heavily edited or simply refused to publish correction letters, and rebutted expert scientists with industry spokespeople. PR firms even went so far as to provide stories for publication in Scientific American that were linked and referenced in media reports and full page advertisements as if they’d been peer reviewed. Singer himself finally got to the point where he would repeatedly make false claims about the science even in the face of rebuttals that proved him wrong – he simply continued on as if the rebuttal had never occurred.

Merchants of Doubt also describes how Seitz et al misrepresented scientific uncertainty to their advantage over the course of the last 60 years. The scientists did this in a number of ways, starting by equating two different types of uncertainty – uncertainty with respect to causes vs. uncertainty with respect to effects. Acid rain experts knew what caused acid rain with great certainty, but the effects of acid rain on lakes, forests, and ecosystem health were unknown, so Nierenberg and Singer said that the uncertainty in the effects justified more research on the causes of acid rain. Singer and Seitz misused uncertainty to attack the EPA and the data linking secondhand smoke to lung cancer by claiming that medical researchers couldn’t know all the risk factors and so couldn’t conclude that there actually was an increased risk for lung cancer caused by secondhand smoke. This flew in the face of decades of statistical experiment design and ignored the fact that the link had been detected on three continents in multiple ethic groups and across all economic levels. Oreskes and Conway found these two methods have been and are being used in combination to oppose taking action on global warming.

Oreskes and Conway point out that economics has been used to counter science since at least the Reagan Administration. For example, panels that were formed to address only the accuracy of the science were saddled with economic analyses that had not been asked for and that valued ecosystem services at $0 in their cost/benefit comparisons. Another example is that the analysis that estimated economic damage due to acid rain used a very high discount rate to devalue future damages in favor of present-day profits. This economic tactic has since been used to devalue the economic effects of global warming on future generations by economists like William Nordhaus and Bjorn Lomborg [Correction: Lomborg is not himself an economist, but he makes economic arguments that rely on a high discount rate]. And the authors point out how every environmental problem is evidence of the failure of free market fundamentalism: “If you believed in capitalism, you had to attack science, because science had revealed the hazards that capitalism had brought in its wake.”

There are a few other points that were clear from reading Merchants of Doubt. First, Reagan’s presidency was where much of this really took off. The Reagan White House was hostile to acid rain regulations and didn’t like the unanimous scientific assessment of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), and so the White House created an acid rain panel specifically created to undermine the NAS. The panel was chaired by Nierenberg and had Singer as a direct White House appointment. Reagan wanted the MX missile and the SDI, so the Reagan White House ignored the intelligence community and formed an outside group to provide the anti-”Commie” justifications for the creation of the MX and SDI. That panel was also headed by Nierenberg.

Second, attacks on the science serve as indirect defenses of Milton Friedman’s free market fundamentalism, but the defense is ironic for several reasons. One irony is that free markets rely on accurate information to function properly, and yet the people involved in attacking science have done their best to make information as inaccurate as possible. A second irony is that the free market fundamentalists used Orwellian tactics to fight against those perceived as being “watermelons” – green on the outside, red on the inside – and yet Orwell had ascribed those tactics to the USSR. A final irony is that, in their fight to stall environmental regulations as long as possible, Seitz et al are responsible for making environmental issues so serious that draconian anti-free market measures may be the only way to solve them. As a result, it’s entirely possible that the free market ideas espoused by Seitz et al may not survive their own machinations to save them.

Finally, while the only one of the four scientists still alive today is Singer, the web of libertarian organizations that pushed the anti-science messages of Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer is alive and well. Organizations such as the American Enterprise Institute, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Heartland Institute, the Reason Foundation, the CATO Institute, the Marshall Institute, and many other smaller and less well funded organizations continue to use the tactics pioneered by Seitz et al against environmentalism in particular and science in general, all in support of an economic system that is clearly collapsing.

Merchants of Doubt was researched over years spent reading hundreds of thousands of page, and there are about 1100 references (an average of 138 for every chapter and the conclusion), so no mere summary or review could hope to do more than scratch the surface of the information contained in this book. Because the book points out the factual failings of Chicago-school economic theory, it will be dismissed by supporters of free market fundamentalism as an attack on their ideology. But the facts and references contained within
Merchants of Doubt are so compelling that it cannot be dismissed with a mere “talk to the hand.” The facts cannot be denied any longer – no free markets can address clearly market failures like acid rain and global warming, and ignoring reality only works for so long before reality finally does something that simply cannot be ignored.

Seitz and the others claimed that the world had time to address all these things, but time is running out to address global warming without major social and economic upheaval. But there is a little hope to be had in Merchants of Doubt. While addressing tobacco took about 50 years, it took only about 30 years to address secondhand smoke. The MX missile and SDI were ultimately shut down, even though the government wasted billions on each program. Acid rain is being addressed, albeit slowly and inefficiently with a cap-and-trade system. And the attacks on Rachel Carson’s DDT legacy don’t appear to be taking hold in the wider public mind.

If you start with the Jasons in 1977, we’re 33 years into the global warming battle. If you start with James Hansen’s testimony before the House of Representatives in 1988, we’re only 22 years in. That we’ve come so far already means we may actually be learning how to counter the anti-science arguments created by Seitz, Jastrow, Nierenberg, and Singer.

Weighing Safety of Weed Killer in Drinking Water, EPA Relies Heavily on Industry-Backed Studies

Agency Says Company's Evidence 'Scientifically More Robust' than Independent Research
by Danielle Ivory, Huffington Post Investigative Fund

Thursday, July 8, 2010 

Companies with a financial interest in a weed-killer sometimes found in drinking water paid for thousands of studies federal regulators are using to assess the herbicide’s health risks, records of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency show. Many of these industry-funded studies, which largely support atrazine’s safety, have never been published or subjected to an independent scientific peer review.

Meanwhile, some independent studies documenting potentially harmful effects on animals and humans are not included in the body of research the EPA deems relevant to its safety review, the Huffington Post Investigative Fund has found. These studies include many that have been published in respected scientific journals.

Even so, the EPA says that it would be “very difficult for someone to put a thumb on the scale” to slant the outcome.

Atrazine is one of the most widely used herbicides in the U.S. An estimated 76 million pounds of the chemical are sprayed on corn and other fields in the U.S. each year, sometimes ending up in rivers, streams, and drinking water supplies. It has been the focus of intense scientific debate over its potential to cause cancer, birth defects, and hormonal and reproductive problems. As the Huffington Post Investigative Fund reported in a series of articles last fall, the EPA failed to warn the public that the weed-killer had been found at levels above federal safety limits in drinking water in at least four states. Some water utilities are suing Syngenta to have it pay their costs of filtering the chemical.

Now the EPA is re-evaluating the health risks of atrazine, which was banned in the European Union in 2004 due to a lack of evidence to support its safe use. That ban includes Switzerland, where atrazine’s manufacturer, Syngenta, is headquartered. The EPA expects to announce results of its re-examination of the herbicide in September 2010. It could take action ranging from restrictions on its use on crops to an outright ban. Or it could permit continued use without additional restrictions.

The company, one of the world’s largest agribusinesses, says the chemical has been used safely for decades and restrictions could prove devastating to farmers who are heavily dependent on the inexpensive herbicide. Atrazine poses “no harm” to the general population or to drinking water supplies, said company spokesman Steven Goldsmith.

EPA records obtained by The Huffington Post Investigative Fund show that at least half of the 6,611 studies the agency is reviewing to help make its decision were conducted by scientists and organizations with a financial stake in atrazine, including Syngenta or its affiliated companies and research contractors.

More than 80 percent of studies on which the EPA are relying have never been published. This means that they have not undergone rigorous “peer review” by independent scientists, a customary method to ensure studies are credible and scientifically sound before they can be published in major journals.

At the same time several prominent studies by independent academic scientists in well-respected scientific journals – showing negative reproductive effects of atrazine in animals and humans – are absent from the EPA’s list.

That finding may raise concerns about how the agency is doing its work. Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees environmental regulators, told the Investigative Fund, “it’s critically important that EPA use all of the information at its disposal.”

Agency scientists may review studies not on the list, but EPA senior policy analyst William Jordan said that the 6,611 studies are those considered “relevant to the assessment of atrazine.”

‘Not Just Atrazine’

EPA spokeswoman Betsaida Alcantara said the list was not exhaustive and that some studies may not be on the list because they were not given an eight-digit “master record identification number,” which the agency uses to keep track of studies. There is “no uniform practice” for assigning numbers to studies submitted by people other than those working for herbicide, fungicide or pesticide manufacturers, she added.

EPA officials said that with a limited budget the agency must rely heavily on research sponsored by parties with a stake in the outcome. The agency’s “test guidelines” governing how experiments are conducted – the types and number of lab animals to be used, for instance. These provide sufficient safeguards against skewed results, officials said.

“Companies have a very strong incentive to follow the guidelines,” said EPA senior analyst Jordan. “We hope and think that we have written the guidelines with enough detail that it would be very difficult for someone to put a thumb on the scale, as it were, to slant the outcome, [or] to make something look safer than it is.”

Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist specializing in health issues at the Natural Resources Defense Council, argues that relying on a company to test the safety of its own product – an “inherent conflict” of interest – is part of a larger pattern at the EPA. “It’s not just happening with atrazine,” she said.

Hundreds of herbicides, pesticides, and other chemicals are regulated by the EPA, whose decisions can have significant implications for public health and on the abilities of an array of multinational companies to earn billions of dollars in the U.S.

By law, industry influence often is built into the regulatory process of the federal government. At the Food and Drug Administration, for instance, clinical trials conducted by pharmaceutical companies are used to determine whether pills and devices work and are safe. Makers of pesticides, herbicides, and fungicides also must pay for studies on their products. If they meet agency rules for conducting the testing, the EPA must accept them.

The ‘Funding Effect’

But is industry-funded research always reliable? A pair of scientists funded by the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the EPA scrutinized a Syngenta-funded Canadian study – one that is not on the EPA’s list. The scientists said they found numerous inaccuracies and misleading statements.

The scientists who questioned the study, University of South Florida biologists Jason Rohr and Krista McCoy, published their critique in the March 2010 issue of the journal Conservation Letters. In all, they tallied what they said were 122 inaccurate and 22 misleading statements, of which 96.5 percent appeared to support atrazine’s safety. The widely cited study focused on the herbicide’s effects on fish and other aquatic creatures.

Rohr and McCoy also asserted that the Canadian study, which was done in 2008, misrepresented more than 50 other studies. For example, it incorrectly suggested that only one scientist had demonstrated the chemical’s gender-altering effects on frogs. In fact, several other scientists demonstrated such effects.

The study dismissed one of Rohr’s papers as invalid, noting wrongly that the researcher had filtered atrazine out of a water tank while trying to assess the chemical’s effect on the aquatic organisms in the tank.

The Canadian study also misrepresented results, figures, and conclusions of other studies, according to the University of South Florida biologists.

Rohr, who served on an EPA advisory panel examining atrazine last year, told the Investigative Fund that he felt compelled “to set the record straight given the potential policy and environmental implications of these misconceptions and inaccuracies.”

The author of the Canadian study, University of Guelph (Ontario) biologist Keith Solomon, declined to respond to questions from the Investigative Fund about his financial ties to Syngenta, the company’s influence, or the inaccuracies and mischaracterizations the South Florida biologists said they had uncovered. Solomon noted that other scientists had come to similar conclusions, and that governments in the U.S. and Australia had not found any significant risk to creatures living in water.

While the critiqued study is not on the EPA’s list, several other studies by Solomon are.

Wendy Wagner, an expert in environmental policy at the University of Texas law school, said that the criticism of the Canadian study demonstrates a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “the funding effect.”

“It is next to impossible to squeeze all of the discretion out of a researcher, and when he has a strong incentive to find a particular result, the result can be unreliable and badly biased research,” said Wagner, an authority on the influence of politics and special interests on science. “There is compelling evidence that bias still pervades sponsored pesticide research – research that presumably is done in accord with EPA’s guidelines.”

Meanwhile, some independently-funded academic research published in major scientific journals is missing from the list of papers the EPA is using to make its decisions on atrazine. Absent are studies published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Environmental Health Perspectives, and Nature. Many works by independent academic scientists such as Tyrone Hayes and Rohr – who have demonstrated a range of potential reproductive and hormonal effects of the chemical – are not on the list.

Some peer-reviewed studies from prestigious journals fail to meet the agency’s standards, said EPA analyst Jordan, citing as an example work by scientists such as Hayes, who recently found that low doses of atrazine could turn male frogs into female frogs.

Jordan explained that the agency couldn’t rely on Hayes’ and the other scientists’ research in part because the government lacked protocols for testing chemicals on frogs. So the EPA developed those guidelines and asked Syngenta to study the issue. The company’s researchers reported that they were unable to replicate Hayes’ findings. Jordan said the Syngenta study “superceded” Hayes’ and the other scientists’ studies. The EPA, on its Website, currently states that atrazine causes no such adverse effects on frogs and that “no additional testing is warranted” to address the issue.

Environmental groups have in the past criticized the EPA for allowing chemical companies to wield disproportionate influence over regulatory decisions. While evaluating the safety of atrazine in 2003, the EPA allowed representatives from Syngenta to participate in closed-door negotiations with the agency, according to documents obtained by the NRDC in 2004.

Missing Evidence

Dale Kemery, an EPA spokesman, defended the practice of omitting some studies. The agency’s safety “review may not include every study that has been conducted, since some may not meet the standards that are appropriate for a regulatory setting or they may not be on target for the issues to be assessed.”

The EPA considers industry-sponsored studies “scientifically more robust than are the studies generated by people in academia,” said Jordan, the agency's senior policy analyst. “That’s generally because companies spend more money on their studies and can attend to details that are potentially important that people in academia just can’t afford to do.”

Jordan added that agency oversight of the thousands of unpublished studies on the list is just as rigorous as a peer-review by scientists prior to publication in a scientific journal. “I know that people might not agree with this proposition, but I believe that the scientists at EPA constitute a peer-review,” he said. “Our scientists go over the studies with a fine tooth comb.”

EPA officials said they were not able to provide a list of all omitted research.

A spokeswoman for CropLife America, the Washington D.C.-based trade association that represents pesticide and herbicide manufacturers, said EPA oversight is thorough, regardless of whether studies have appeared in peer-reviewed journals.

“Whether or not they have been published, the studies submitted to EPA for registration support of pesticide products are subject to scientific review by EPA scientists that is equally, if not more, rigorous and demanding than the pre-publication peer review conducted by any scientific journal,” said spokeswoman Mary Emma Young.

Some people are skeptical about the rigor of the EPA’s scrutiny. “What worries me,” said the University of Texas’ Wagner, “is the possibility that there isn’t time or energy within EPA to give a lot of oversight to this unpublished, industry-funded research, especially when the number of unpublished studies for a chemical like atrazine are in the thousands.”

A former EPA official, epidemiologist Lynn Goldman, said it is normal and necessary for the agency to accept unpublished and industry-funded studies, most of which would not be interesting enough to publish in scientific journals.

“This is the way that the system was built by Congress. It could be changed but the EPA does not have the authority to turn the system upside down,” said Goldman, a former assistant administrator for toxic substances during the Clinton administration.

The existence of a list of relevant research for EPA review has played a prominent role in public arguments for the herbicide’s safety. Journalists, scientists, and advocates for atrazine have frequently cited the “6,000” studies.

In 2005, Anne Lindsay, then a top official in the EPA’s Office of Pesticide Programs, brought up the number of studies during congressional testimony. “Atrazine is one of the most well-examined pesticides in the marketplace,” she said, noting that “there are nearly 6,000 studies in EPA files on the human health and environmental effect of atrazine.”

Syngenta now cites the number in its press materials and on its website – not merely as a tally of studies but as proof of its safety. “Atrazine passes the most stringent, up-to-date safety requirements in the world,” said spokesman Paul Minehart. “In 2006, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) re-registered atrazine in 2006 based on the overwhelming evidence of safety from nearly 6,000 studies.”

EPA's List of Scientific Studies on Atrazine

TIME Magazine Lists Flouride as “Environmental Toxin”

Environmental Toxins

Chemicals in plastics and other products seem harmless, but mounting evidence links them to health problems — and Washington lacks the power to protect us

A report from TIME.com lists among other household Items – Flouride- as an “Environmental Toxin”.

Of course, activists and scientists have for years been aware of Flouride’s toxicity, but propaganda and Big Pharma have sought to keep these facts from the general public by showing flouride in a favorable light through the controlled corporate media.

The article went on to say that “Government studies support current fluoride levels in tap water, but studies on long-term exposure and cancers are ongoing”.

What It Is: A form of the basic element fluorine

Found In: Toothpaste, tap water

Health Hazards: Neurotoxic and potentially tumorigenic if swallowed; the American Dental Association advises that children under 2 not use fluoride toothpaste

What You Should Know: Government studies support current fluoride levels in tap water, but studies on long-term exposure and cancers are ongoing

So, What are the lethal levels for humans?

As of April 7, 1997, the United States FDA (Food & Drug Administration) required that all fluoride toothpastes sold in the U.S. carry the following poison warning:

WARNING: Keep out of reach of children under 6 years of age. If you accidentally swallow more than used for brushing, seek professional help or contact a poison control center immediately.

Potentially fatal dose = 5 mg of fluoride per kg of bodyweight.

Ingestion of fluoride can produce gastrointestinal discomfort at doses at least 15 to 20 times lower (0.2–0.3 mg/kg) than lethal doses. A 2-year-old, for example, may experience gastrointestinal distress upon ingesting sufficient amounts of flavored toothpaste. Between 1989 and 1994, over 628 people—mostly children—were treated after ingesting too much fluoride from their toothpaste. Gastrointestinal symptoms appear to be the most common problem reported.

In 1986 the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) established a maximum contaminant level (MCL) for fluoride at a concentration of 4 milligrams per litre (mg/L), which is the legal limit of natural fluoride allowed in the water. In 2006, a 12-person committee of the US National Research Council (NRC) reviewed the health risks associated with fluoride consumption and unanimously concluded that the maximum contaminant level of 4 mg/L should be lowered. The EPA has yet to act on the NRC’s recommendation. The limit was previously 1.4 – 2.4 mg/L, but it was raised to 4 mg/L in 1985.

Wikipedia

Excessive flouride consumption in studies has been shown to be the culprit in the following:

-A weakening of bones, leading to an increase in hip and wrist fracture
-Adverse effects on the kidneys
-possible liver damage
-Chromosomal damage and interference with DNA repair
-a correlation between increased fluoride and low IQ
-suppressive effects on the thyroid

While it is refreshing to see the truth about flouride being published in the mainstream media, it is disappointing to see, that when most people are told about the devastating effects of flouride in our drinking water, toothpaste, and other household items – they ignore the facts, or even categorize these facts as just another “Conspiracy theory”.