It’s easy to forget all that we’ve achieved as RAN races forward into the fray, fighting the battles that must be waged and won to protect the world’s remaining forests. We work hard to live in the present, and to think strategically about the future.

But the unexamined life is not worth living, as Socrates once said, so let us not be guilty of that particular offense. We have plenty to live for.

RAN accomplished great things this past year, which so many of you made possible. Here’s RAN’s Top Ten Highlights of 2009. Thank you for your support and for standing with Rainforest Action Network. We wouldn’t be RAN without you.

#1 RAN drops 70 foot banner off Niagara Falls to tell Canadian PM: No to dirty tar sands oil.

Read more about this on The Understory.

#3 RAN gets Gucci and other fashion industry leaders to stop bagging Indonesia’s rainforests

Read more about this on The Understory.

#5 RAN forces major packaging supplier PAK2000 to cut financial ties from Indonesian rainforest destroyer Asian Pulp and Paper.

Read more about this on The Understory

#6 RAN takes Copenhagen by storm demanding climate justice and a real deal for our future.

#8 RAN gets personal in the fight to stop the tar sands and freaks out Gordon Nixon, CEO of Royal Bank of Canada.

#9 RAN holds a “Carnival of Destruction” in NYC to tell Chase to stop funding dirty coal and mountain top removal.

Garrrrrrrr....!

It was an unusual site at the EPA on Friday, as a group of mountain-loving zombies turned up to let EPA Administrator, Lisa Jackson, know that Mountaintop Removal coal mining must stop.

“Where’s your Brains?” One of the walking undead demanded, while others shuffled about carrying signs that called out JPMorgan Chase as the top funder of MTR, “Chase Killing Communities” and declaring that “Coal Kills!”

The zombie mob made their way from their first stop, JP Morgan Chase’s SF offices on Howard St, where they caused quite a stir that had security running for the door locks and had bystanders chuckling and reaching out – carefully – to the zombies who offered information on this most egregious form of powering our country.

At the EPA offices staff on their way back from lunch were friendly and supportive, some going so far as to say that they wish they were doing more and that they wanted to see it stop as well.

One zombie told this reporter that they “Want to save the mountains and the communities of Appalachia, Tennesee and Kentucky” but that they are particularly upset about the blasting at Coal River Mountain, West Virginia. Coal River Mountain has been proposed as the site for a green energy wind farm, capable of producing clean energy for up to 700,000 West Virginia homes. If Massey Energy has their way, this will be a missed opportunity for the rest of us.

“Even a zombie knows that blowing up mountains for coal is stupid”, said one of the protesting ghouls.

There have been some recent moves by the EPA that are hopeful signs for environmentalists and coal mountain residents, with the recent stopping of the Spruce Mine operation and the holding back of 79 of 86 recent permits that failed to meet the Clean Water Act. The EPA has a long way to go, however, as Massey and its subsidieares and contemporaries continue to plunder the mountains and fuel our dangerous addiction to the dirtiest, most destructive forms of energy.

Unable to get into the building to deliver their messages, etched on tombstones, the zombies wandered into a nearby parking structure, perhaps hoping to gain entry, only to become disoriented and finally emerged back at the EPA office entrance.

Police were on hand and friendly as the zombies dispersed.

Two Ecuadoran heroes, Emergildo Criollo and Humberto Piaguaje, were in attendance to accept the Defenders of the Rainforest Award on behalf of the Assembly of Affected communities in their 17-year fight against Chevron – California’s largest corporation and current intransigent defendant in a precedent setting lawsuit.

Pachamama Alliance founders Bill and Lynne Twist were awarded as Rainforest Champions for their ongoing work to assist the Indigenous people of Ecuador gain an ever more powerful voice in the dealings with the “developed” world that moved into their own. Because of the Pachamama Alliance, the Achuar now have equitable footing on which to base their dealings with the outside world, having established an eco tourism industry that is completely indigenous-owned and operated.

After the awards, the party kicked off with Rainforest themed cocktails from Veev, organic vegetarian nibbles and desserts, as well as delicious ice cream treats from our friend, Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s.  Old friends and new were in attendance, from Randy Hurricane Hayes, to baby Ida, daughter of RAN board member Anna Lappé. It was a wonderful time of catching up, meeting up, and REVELing!

REVEL is a celebration of activism, and of the community that makes change possible.  RAN is planning a big year – we will see an end to mountaintop removal coal mining in Appalachia. Indonesia’s rainforests will be protected from further destruction for fashion and the expansion of the agribusiness profits-fueled oil palm plantations – both leading causes of deforestation and climate change. We’ll put a cap on further development of the Alberta Tar Sands project. And finally, Chevron will be forced to accept responsibility for the terrible, tragic damage they’ve left for the Indigenous people of Ecuador to suffer through.

Some of these campaigns will take longer than others, but we will win. RAN has never lost a campaign in our nearly 25 years of fighting for the Earth’s forests. It’s because of our strategies and tactics, the creativity of our staff and the ongoing commitment of our most ardent supporters: you.

And if you couldn’t make it this year, you won’t want to miss next year, as we celebrate RAN’s 25th year of fighting for the world’s forests.

Our heartfelt thanks to all for your continued support, and for coming out to celebrate with us last night. You are an integral part of our strategy, and beloved members of our community.

We had the great fortune of meeting with four equally impressive people in the area.  Each works with a different non-profit group that is fighting to stop this insane large scale devastation.  Mike Roselle from Climate Ground Zero talked about the campaigns of non-violent civil disobedience work that this new and emerging organization is doing where local and non-local volunteers are putting themselves at great risk for trying to stop MTR.  Mike is great.  He is truly a leader in the national and international environmental movement.  I know I want him on my side to stand up for a worthy cause.  It’s tough work, but thanks to Mike and the people at Climate Ground Zero, they’re bringing national attention to this horrid practice of MTR.

Mike Roselle (at right)

Judy Bonds from Coal River Mountain Watch (CRMW) comes from a family that has lived in Coal River Valley for 10 generations.  She clearly and powerfully talked to us about the rich history and culture of the people there and the mountains they live in.  But now, medicinal herbs such as ginseng, black cohosh and goldenseal are disappearing due to MTR.  Wild boars are almost extinct and the survival of 150 species of trees is being threatened.  People are being forced to move from their homes where they have lived for generations.  Where people were once connected to their land, they are now getting denied their culture.  It’s becoming a cultural genocide.  Gratefully, Judy and CRMW are both working to stop this environmental and cultural destruction and doing what they can to save and rebuild their communities.

Judy Bonds

Maria Gunnoe from Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition (OVEC) has family roots in the region dating back to the early 1800s.  She still lives on her family land, even though mountaintops around her have disappeared and the polluted river running by her house has flooded many times due to the lack of vegetation.

Maria Gunnoe

She took us on a tour of the area where we saw yet another town, Lindytown, turning into a deserted and destroyed ghost town because Massey Coal is taking over.  We heard about the polluted rivers and polluted air and the fact that more people including young children are getting cancer and dying from the toxins.  We heard about all the violence coming from Massey Coal to the local people there who are standing up against MTR.  Death threats, homes burned, dogs poisoned and delivered to bus stops for children to see, horses poisoned, verbal harassments, conflicts in stores, and attempts to run cars off the road are all now happening.  Are these acts necessary?  Is this really America?  This is very hard for me to understand.  It saddens and angers me to hear such stories.  I respect Maria and her values and thank her and OVEC for speaking up and educating communities about the environmental dangers of MTR.

Larry Gibson - Keeper of Kayford Mountain

Larry Gibson from Keeper of the Mountains Foundation is an impressive man who is also standing up against MTR.  His family has lived on or near Kayford Mountain since the late 1700s.  We walked a very short distance from his home there to the edge of one of the coal strip mining projects.  We looked down to see a 12,000 acre flattened gravel yard…an area that was once Kayford Mountain.  No picture can adequately convey what I saw and what it must feel like to live in an area that was once a beautiful, rich and secluded mountain, but has now been turned into a massive, ugly and barren open-pit dirt yard.  It’s mind boggling.  It’s beyond destructive.  It’s beyond unconsciousness.  Larry isn’t a brave man, he’s just a man standing up and speaking up for what is right.  And it’s right to save the mountains, preserve the values of the mountain culture and stop coal strip mining from destroying the history of these people and the glory of these mountains.  Many thanks to Larry for risking his life and telling his unbelievably sad story.

From above the destruction is extreme

It was a pleasure and honor to meet such passionate, concerned, authentic and caring people.  Against personal threats and other acts of hate crimes, these people are standing up not only for their land, culture, heritage, families, health and lives, but they are standing up for the health of the planet by dealing with the serious problem of coal contributing to climate change.  They all need support in whatever ways we can give them.  For information on the above non-profits and how to help, visit:

www.climategroundzero.org
www.crmw.net
www.ohvec.org
www.mountainkeeper.org

Finally, many thanks to Rainforest Action Network (RAN) for allowing me to join them on this valuable yet difficult trip.  RAN is a phenomenal non-profit group that affectively takes aggressive action to protect environments throughout the entire world.  RAN is supporting these groups in WV by actively fighting for a coal-free energy future.  According to Judy Bonds, RAN’s corporate campaigns to stop major banks from funding coal, logging, and tar sands are making a big difference.  RAN is also offering training, fundraising support and general advice to these smaller WV groups.

For everyone involved in standing up against MTR….I deeply thank you.

Sue Thompson
Boulder, CO

And just last year I saw her accept a Goldman Environmental Prize for her efforts as an organizer working to save the mountains and the communities she’s from and committed to. As a result of efforts and this attention Maria is gaining some notoriety, and with it there are pros and cons. On the one hand the issue is certainly gaining awareness which is critical if we are going to then raise the consciousness that will lead to an end to this terrible, destructive assault – on the other, those that support Coal (or more likely, the few that benefit the most from it) see Maria as more of a strident agitator than ever.

She’s an 8^th generation “mountain holler girl” who lives where her forebears made their home. She’s encircled by mountains – or their remains – and is just at the back of the town of Bobwhite, West Virginia. She has a teenage son and daughter, and a bunch of baby kittens, and two dogs – one her pet, the other for security.

One of Maria's new kittens

There is also a big, shiny chain link fence around her house. You don’t see many of these in this part of the world. This is for protection – something most folks here don’t need as much as Maria and her family does, though there are several who can very much relate to this necessity.

There used to be two mountains here in front of Maria's house

But it hasn’t always been this way. Only since the death threats, the killing of her daughter’s dog that she raised from a pup delivered to her school bus stop, the trucks trying to run her off the road, and more. Recently the coal trains that pass by her house have photographers at the back, cameras pointed her way.

Maria is one of many West Virginians who has deep roots in this part of the world. The old barn has GUNNOE painted on the side – her grandfather built the barn and her Brother painted on the name. And she and her forebears were baptized in the river that runs nearby – though now the water is polluted with chemical waste, part of the “coal washing” process, so the baptisms take place in the church.

The incidence of cancer is on the rise, and given that the water tests show the presence of the same chemicals that you get from processing coal, it’s obvious there is a link between the two. And this link is killing people.

And it was when the mountains around her home began to disappear, when the flooding started as a direct result of the valley fill behind her house, when what were the Twin mountains in front of her home became one mountain, and the frogs disappeared – these were all some of the signs that the coal companies were damaging her world, and she stood up to them.

Maria isn’t one to run from a fight, and she’s not backing down from this one.

“The people around me are my friends, I’m not so worried about them. It’s the ones who come from outside to work for Massey – they’re the ones who are causing us all trouble.”

Lindytown and Twilight from Above - this gives you some idea of where and how big this is

Maria took us to visit her friend, Laura Webb, after driving us through the remains of Lindytown and Twilight – the latest community that Massey has been intimidating and buying out in an effort to depopulate what stands in the way of cheap, easy coal. Laura was one of the last to agree to a buyout – and there wasn’t much reason to stay. Her neighbors had all moved away. The coal operations around her home were literally right above her – and across from her – and behind her. There was no safe place for her or her family anymore here.

The view from Laura's front yard - one of two MTR sites and the entrance to the Twilight Mine

And even after she signed the agreement to sell her property, she was given more messages to get out. One day a truck drove up and a man on the back used a boom to pull down her phone and power lines.

And in an example of how cruel the actors behind the intimidation are, while she was out looking for a place to move her mobile home, her horse was poisoned – she returned home to find it lying on its side in distress, its water trough empty and overturned.

“I stayed up all night with him, but there was nothing I could do to save him.”

Laura Webb was intimidated by Massey Coal

When I saw her she was two days over the agreement date and had a bunch of belongings as well as her house that needed to be moved. Massey could come along at any time and claim whatever is there, even have her arrested for trespassing. For some reason – small blessings – she hadn’t been bothered further as she scrambled to get out of what’s left of her town.

We wished Laura and her family well and Maria then took us up a rough road into the holler. We were going to visit one of three ancient cemeteries that were under threat from mining.

(CGZ blog post http://climategroundzero.org/2009/08/protecting-the-cook-family-cemeteries/)

The company builds fences and erects gates, using public safety as the justification for keeping people out of what had once been their common ground. In fact, for people to now visit any of these burial grounds, if they want to go lay some flowers on their grandparents’ grave or visit an ancestor’s final resting place, they must first undertake a safety training course (on their own dime), engage a company security guard to escort them (on their own dime), and wear hard hats and steel-toed boots which they must provide for themselves.

The cemetery we were heading for today was not available for visitation anymore and its future was in serious doubt. By law the company must provide a 100-ft buffer around such areas, but when Maria and others marked that off they found that their makers had been moved further inwards.

We made it up some treacherous road only to find that the company had moved the line once again, and before we could get to the site we had to turn around or risk arrest and the impoundment of Maria’s jeep. Something she said was assured and not something she could afford. So we turned around.

She took us through what was left of Lindytown – rows of empty houses, many of which had been looted and vandalized. Maria asserts that the coal company, Massey, that purchased the properties, opened up the materials to employees if “there was anything they would find useful.

Lindytown home that was vandalized

She showed us where less than a year ago children played and families made their home. She showed us where a woman died of a heart attack on the very day she was set to move from her home – her only home, where she had been born. She showed us the failed union hall – a sad statement in an industry-controlled area where unions have no presence, where workers get paid low wages and receive no benefits.

Used to be an underground coal mine would support up to 500 miners – which was good for the community, good for families, and better for the mountains. Non-union MTR employs as few as 19 miners per operation, and once the mountain has been dropped 800 or so feet, the operation closes up and moves on to the next site.

Maria then took us back to her house, passing a “We Support Coal” sign on the local grocery – a business she says serves many more miners than it does locals. Most locals aren’t coal supporters – most locals don’t work the mines. Most locals are suffering from poverty, poisoned water, and constant blasting and would be happy to see King Coal unseated. Maria has many friends locally.

Bob White Grocery - "We Support Coal"

Sometimes she gets chased by mine company employees trying to keep her from making her rounds of visiting sites and people affected by coal mining, and working to protect what’s under threat. She’s had to stop in at friends to switch cars so many times to throw off pursuit she can’t count how many its been. So far she’s been lucky – but she’s afraid of what would happen if she got caught out where there were no witnesses, where she was alone. But she doesn’t dwell on it.

Maria is a bright spirit who has a smile for everyone she meets. She’s gregarious and friendly and she tends to elicit smiles even from the coal miners she comes across at the gas station or convenience stores. Once at the grocery store a Massey employee, dressed in his work uniform, called out above the shoppers to affirm, “I work for Massey and I support Maria Gunnoe 110%!”

These are the kinds of things that show her that this battle can be won. Appalachia can support all sorts of economies, all kinds of industry, from tourism to herbalism to alternative energy. But it’s not going to happen until our government stops issuing the permits that allow the destruction to continue. It’s not going to happen until the Appalachian Restoration Act is made into law.

And it’s not going to happen while Don Blankenship and his ilk continue to hold sway in matters of politics and law enforcement in West Virginia.

But the day is coming when the blasting will stop and the mountains will be peaceful again. That day must come – and soon. The mountains can survive only so long while this assault continues with the support of State and Federal government.

You can find out more about Maria from this Google search, or by visiting the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition site.

For years now RAN has set the bar for annual environmental fundraising celebrations.  And this year’s event, on October 15^th will be no exception!

REVEL: The Art of Activism is indeed a party “so fun it should be illegal” – “don’t miss it for the world!”

My first REVEL was a few years back, and I was completely swept off my feet. Great people, program and party – though the highlight for me was seeing the late, and very great, Dame Anita Roddick inspire folks from the stage to take up the challenge to support RAN’s efforts to protect the world’s remaining forests. What an amazing person she was, what an amazing legacy she left us.

And being there when Australian Greens Senator, Bob Brown, brought the house down with his passionate call to arms in defense of the world’s forests was wonderful! And Dr. Vandana Shiva was also incredible…reminding us that our “Earth is not for sale.” And ex-Economic Hitman and shamanic ambassador, John Perkins, reminded all of us of the role the international financial institutions play in the continued plundering of our forests, putting profits before people, and how important is the work of RAN.

Of course, many folks simply remember the GREAT PARTY that we had – with music and dancing and great food and drink.

The next year was awesome! Amazing line up of honorees including visionary eco-entrepreneur Paul Hawken, Coal Activist and Organizer from Appalachia, Maria Gunnoe, and filmmaker Stuart Townsend, who set history right with his film about the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle in Battle in Seattle. We had an out of control concert by Bob Weir – who chose REVEL as the venue to celebrate his 60^th birthday – with his band, Rat Dog, as well as Tea Leaf Green, Harper Simon and Sean Lennon. What a night!

And last year was amazing! Great honorees: Doug and Kris Tompkins of the Foundation for Deep Ecology and the Patagonia Land Trust, as well as Brazilian ex-Minister for the Environment, Marina Silva and magical musician, Jack Johnson. We pulled out all the stops and had a rager all over again – and still managed to inspire everyone who came with the great work that’s going on – and the great community that makes it possible. Check out the photos here.

REVEL is a little different each year, but always that same great party.

This year we are holding it at the Bently Reserve – not too far from RAN HQ – and will be honouring representatives from The Assembly of Affected Communities – accepted by Emergildo Criollo & Humberto Piaguaje – Indigenous Ecuadorean activists fighting against corporate behemoth, Chevron.

We will also be honoring our friends, Bill & Lynne Twist – global visionaries of equity and sustainability for all, founders of The Pachamama Alliance.

So come out for this great night – where you can enjoy artisan cocktails, organic wines, local microbrews, delicious desserts, a tempting raffle, bidding in the fabulous silent auction, the World Rainforest Awards to honor some of the planet’s inspiring visionaries and activists, a raging dance party and late-night nibbles!

I hope to see you there. You can get tickets here.

Her family has fished in it, bathed in it, washed their clothes in it, gotten their drinking and cooking water from it, and played in it since long before she was born.

Today was the last day a member of her family would have anything to do with it.

“Hey!” Hollered her grandson. “What’s wrong with these fish?!”

He stood in water surrounded by dead fish, floating belly up, and holding two fat samples in his chubby little-boy hands.

“Get out of the water!” She and her daughter shouted in unison.

Something had been dumped in the water upstream where the mining was going on and it had poisoned the fish. And it wasn’t just the fish or her grandson that Judy was worried about, her whole town received water from that stream as part of the watershed that provided them with this most vital of life’s elements.

That was the first time Judy was outraged at the arrogance and tragic negligence of the coal company that Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship runs at great personal profit. Blankenship has been quoted as viewing productivity being the most important indicator of a person’s or company’s worth, and has built an empire out of destroying Appalachia in an effort to be the most productive coal extraction operation in history.

Judy is concerned not just for the health of the communities, but as someone very connected to the mountains, the foundation of life in her region. To listen to her talk about the land and the relationship her people have always had to it one feels they are in the presence of a forest dweller, a mystical shaman – someone who understands, intrinsically, the relationship between the earth, the animals, the waters and people.

Judy on the relationship that the Appalachian people have to the mountains

And the mountains here are so special. It’s a wonder that more people aren’t here fighting to protect them.  Not only would their beauty and terrain provide excellent tourism opportunities that would easily lift these communities up out of the growing poverty but the mountains themselves produce so many herbs and plants that are of great value.

Who is aware that these mountains provide over half of the world’s ginseng? I wasn’t.

Video of Judy on the natural characteristics of the mountain hollers and their bounty

What about harnessing the winds here in this propoal that would turn these coalfields into wind fields?

And there’s more, much more.

Judy discusses the impacts of MTR on the people and environment – and being a subject of King Coal

You can find out more about Judy here, as well as information on the mountains and the organization she founded to protect them against the destructive monster that is King Coal.

Not surprising, Judy also received the 2003 Goldman Environmental Prize for her work to save Appalachia’s mountains and communities.

With people like Judy and the folks at Coal River Mountain Watch working to stop the expansion of MTR, we have hope.

You can support their efforts here.

I didn’t have a clue.

Well, maybe that’s unfair.

I knew what was going on in the mountains of Appalachia, I knew that people were fighting a powerful company that is extracting coal and destroying mountains and communities, and I knew that Climate Ground Zero refers to where the main battle for our global climate is going on – here in the heart of Coal Country, in the US where we produce the lion’s share, per capita, of the world’s greenhouse gases and half of that comes from coal. I knew that this battle is seriously heating up. But I didn’t know how serious.

From Google Earth

Of course it’s serious that a company is mining coal with machines bigger than office buildings and tremendous amounts of explosives, carried daily in tankers that rip along these narrow two lane highways.

And of course it’s serious when people’s families are endangered, their homes destroyed by floods caused by the mining, and the mountains that sustain so much life, so much diversity, are being wiped out for corporate profit. In this area that is stunningly beautiful, terrible things are indeed happening.

Since 1991 Massey Energy has led the pack in the race to take all the coal available from the once-hallowed mountains of Appalachia. They have systematically led the charge and taken the lion’s share of profit in the most efficient form of coal mining available, Mountaintop Removal.

The EPA continues to grant the permits that allow this company to employ far fewer workers than ever before in the history of coal mining. An underground mine used to employ as many as 500 workers. Now these operations can employ as few as 19.

The West Va Department of Environmental Protection, the DEP or “Don’t Expect Protection” as they are known euphamistically, continues to allow this company to clearcut the forests in this incredibly rich biome, an area that has been identified as the oldest deciduous forest in North America and the literal source of the great diversity of forests North America once supported. The EPA continues to grant permits that allow the mountaintops to be pulverized with explosives, the coal seams gouged out and processed, and the remaining rubble to be pushed into the valleys, or “hollers”, which has so far led to the utter annihilation of 2000 miles of streams and waterways and countless plants and animals. Of the estimated 900 mountaintops in Appalachia, over half of them have been “dropped” and destroyed for the “cheap” coal that lies beneath.

Massive MTR Operation - thanks to Southwings for taking us up

It has also led to the deaths of residents through uncontrollable flooding as well as the tragic death of 3-year old Jeremy Davidson when a massive boulder dislodged during operations and crushed him to death when it rolled though his bed while he slept. http://www.ohvec.org/newsletters/woc_2005_02/article_15.html

As a parent this tragedy has extra meaning for me. As a citizen, one would expect greater accountability and protection. Not here and not now at least. Business continues as usual, although there is a case filed by the parents who hope their son’s tragic loss may amount to something more that will provide protection for residents.

Why is mining allowed so near residents? Because state and federal laws allow it. Laws prohibit surface mining within 300 feet of an occupied dwelling and within 100 feet of a public road. Otherwise, go for it.

Opposition has been growing, slowly over time, but that’s often how it goes with wars. And make no mistake, there is a war brewing in Appalachia’s mountains, and so far those who are stepping up do so to defend their homes, their families and the mountains that in many cases have been home to many generations of their families. This is a war that has the classic elements of a deeply oppressed people and a powerful overlord that has outright contempt for the people who have every right to continue making their homes here. And that contempt shows itself in many ways.

Clean, carbon neutral coal?

Depopulation, common here, is a practice that promotes an exodus of residents from an area by making life so hard, so dangerous, and so frightening, that they simply have no choice but to accept whatever offers they can manage on their properties, pack up and make way for the fences and the gates that follow them, constantly expanding the area under control of King Coal.

The “mining” operations bear the names of the communities that they displace: Twilight, Lindytown, Marsh Fork and others. Once the people are out of the way there is less threat of opposition, less risk of damage that could lead to lawsuits or other troubles, however unlikely. And once the people are gone there is no one to witness the filling of the “hollers”, the blackening of the streams, the absolute removal of mountains – no one to stand in the way or risk liability.

Climate Ground Zero is a name that has been given to a resistance movement of people who may not be displaced, for many of them aren’t from here, but they don’t have as much to lose as the locals and can operate more freely. People have come from local areas, yes, but also from all over the country in response to the pleas for assistance from some of the locals who have chosen to stay and fight for what is right, what is theirs, and what should be inviolate. Some have just come because they see the injustice and they feel they must do something. And so they come.

And it’s a good thing they have. Those who grow up in this area know that laws that apply in the rest of the country don’t apply here. Justice in the Appalachian sense implies that the company will get what it wants, and that those who resist will be made to suffer, and that eventually fighting will only hurt them and those they love. And when the economies that once supported thriving communities that bore the names of the operations I mentioned above have dried up because of lack of work, poor wages, ill health, and the stress of living with constant explosions and continual heavy machinery traffic, then there really is no reason to stick around.

I wish I could convey how very real this difference is between these beautiful mountains and the rest of the country, but honestly, you need to see it for yourself.

This helps: Check out the reality of MTR with this handy layer in Google Earth.

But there is every reason for those of us with the means and the passion for justice to come from without to help those who remain, and to stand up for the mountains and the voiceless life they support.

Under the direction, however casual but always effective, of RAN co-founder Mike Roselle, a staging area has been created that has seen a series of actions executed against the tyranny of King Coal’s reign. Non-Violent Direct Action has driven tyrants out all over the world; bringing peace and self-determination, gaining women the right to vote, saving species from commercial hunting, and so on. We have great leaders upon whose shoulders we stand; Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Mother Theresa and others.

James McGuinness and Mike Roselle of Climate Ground Zero were arrested on February 25, 2009, at Performance Coal's Edwight Mountaintop Removal site in southern West Virginia. The protesters chose to focus on the active mountaintop removal site above Marsh Fork Elementary School in Sundial, WV on the eve of the 37th year anniversary of the Buffalo Creek Disaster. photograph by Antrim Caskey

And it will save these mountains and these communities. An action in Wise County on September 7th drew attention to the construction of an unnecessary coal-fired power plant with 11 arrests and led to the revocation of that building permit. A subsequent action that stopped work at the Twilight Mine saw 14 activists arrested and made national headlines. Following that a rally – unheard of in this area and bolstered by the participation of celebrities and scientists and saw dozens arrested and gained national attention for an elementary school that lies directly under a massive removal operation.

And most recently a couple of tree-sitters kept a mountain safe from Massey Energy for six days, increasing awareness of this issue. They endured significant abuse by mining company employees – sleep deprivation, threatened with chainsaws, verbally abused, etc. And when they came down, finally, for fear for their safety, they were arrested and held on $25,000 bail – a ludicrous amount for a non-federal charge that amounted to trespassing and littering. Here where the media is 95% controlled by King Coal, as is 98% of the law this is what one begins to expect – though I’ll never get used to it. Fortunately those figures were adjusted down to a rational $1000 each – a small blessing in a sea of darkness.

The treatment of the activists by Massey was so abusive that two security guards walked off the job, unwilling to be a party to such inhuman, criminal behavior. Check out this video of the guards talking about their experience.

And when the actions are over, the activists gather again to share knowledge gained and plan for the next peaceful salvo that will help grow this resistance until finally the mountains are safe, the communities can get back to living again, and King Coal fades into a past that should have been history long ago.

We are witnessing the death of a dinosaur and the birth of a new era, and it’s happening at Climate Ground Zero. Be a part of it – and do so with your support of the folks at CGZ and with your support of RAN. Strength in numbers, creativity and courage.

Activists shut down a dragline at the Twilight Mine, Boone County, West Virginia

For starters, West Virginia is GREEN in the lushest, brightest, shadiest kind of way. There are myriad wildflowers and over 150 different kinds of trees. The hills surround you everywhere you are – except, of course where the hills have been removed, where the mountain tops have been stripped of their coal and then dumped into the adjacent valleys, the hollows; where a river’s headwaters begin and where numerous plants and animals and insects make a remarkable, complex, beautiful environment. Frogs and lightning bugs, lizards and squirrels, bears and deer and rabbits and racoons and you name it – this place is the real deal and has even been identified as the oldest deciduous forest in North America. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Lucy_Braun)

Here there is beauty as well as strife. The number of houses that are uninhabitable or in need of repair is surprising and disconcerting. More businesses seem to have closed than to be open in the many small towns you pass through; towns like Masseyville, Whiteville (just after Whitesville), Marsh Fork, Arnett, Pettry Bottom and here, Rock Creek.

There is a notable absence of commerce – (very) few restaurants, few small stores, a couple of nondescript chain groceries…and more tanning services than one could ever hope for. We counted 7 between Rock Creek and the highway to Charleston – but little else other than gas stations and random, small general stores.

And as you pass through it King Coal’s presence dominates. There are several mines you pass by – and these are just the ones by the road. They all have an ominous, dedicated “ambulance entrance”, and they all seem to find ways of passing coal across the road on various conveyors. Trucks, trucks and more trucks. Near Marsh Fork there is a coal processing area (more on that later) that was (mercifully) forced to erect a large dome over it to reduce the amount of coal dust raining down on the local community.  But those kinds of respites are rare in a country that sees more explosives blasted in one week than were dropped in total on Hiroshima on that terrible day. Here it happens all week long. And those who oppose it face strong, increasingly aggressive opposition from Coal and its employees.

A recent protest saw many community members come out for the first time, thanks in part to the presence of celebrity activist, Darryl Hannah and NASA’s Dr. James Hansen. According to some their willingness to forfeit the freedom to help raise the awareness of this tragic issue meant much to many locals, many of whom felt safe for the first time thanks to them and the others who joined in.

Today two tree-sitters, (see this earlier story) were finally removed by authorities supported by Massey Energy employees and contracted security. Aparently even Big Don Blankenship even made a dramatic appearance in his personal helicopter, swooping low over activists supporting the sitters, uncovering their hiding place and drawing unwanted attention.

For the last two days the miners had taken to making so much noise with their air horns and with drums and with chainsaws – finally threatening to cut the trees down under the sitters, starting the saw up and grinding it against the trees in an effort to unnerve the activists, that the folks decided they had to come down for their safety.

Nick Stocks, 25, and Laura Steepleton, 24 finally came down after constantly being kept from sleep and after suffering often explicitly rude verbal and physically  threatening abuse.

An unexpected ray of sunshine, one security guard is rumoured to have walked off the job in disgust at the way the tree-sitters were being treated.

According to folks at Climate Ground Zero (http://www.climategroundzero.org) they are both being held on an outrageous $25,000 bail – each – for charges such as obstructing an officer of the law and littering. Seems more than a little excessive – seems to support the notion that the laws that govern the rest of the company are somehow interpreted and used differently here.

The playing field here is not level. The law does not function as one expects it to as guaranteed by the constitution and the Bill of Rights. $25,000 bail each for obstructing destruction-as-usual – was there a felony committed here? No. But there seems to be enough influence in favor of King Coal that punitive measures such as these are possible, as unlikely as that may seem.
Apparently, this whole area is in Massey Energy’s deep pockets, and they mean to have it all. They keep up a constant battle to keep locals scared to speak out and go to great lengths to intimidate those that do. When you see the towns with failed businesses you wonder, if coal is so important to the wellbeing of these communities, where is the prosperity? I see only stolen dreams and a polluted river (apparently just downstream locals are told not to consume more than 6 ounces of fish per month if they choose to eat what they catch.)

Now Massey is taking it another step up, sponsoring the mega event, “Friends of America” rally – sponsored mostly by the “Friends of Coal”. They are giving away thousands – tens of thousands – of free tickets to a Labor Day out that includes performances by Ted Nugent and Hank Williams, Jr., and an appearance by none other than Sean Hannity.

No doubt the tickets are free but there will be plenty of vendors charging whatever they can to feed the throngs expected to take Massey CEO, Don Blankenship’s FREE TICKETS offer. I won’t be there.

But tonight I was fortunate enough to spend some time with the activists who are fighting to save these beautiful mountains, to save their communities and their homes, to protect the forests and ultimately something that in truth belongs to all of us, and yet should belong to no one.  Who speaks for them? People like Nick and Laura, and the many others at Climate Ground Zero (http://climategroundzero.org), Coal River Mountain Watch (http://www.crmw.net ), Appalachian Voices (http://www.appvoices.org), Keepers of the Mountains (http://mountainkeeper.org), Ohio Valley Educational Cooperative (http://ovec.org), Southwings Aviation (http://www.southwings.org) the Sierra Club (http://sierraclub.org), RAN (http://www.ran.org) and many others, who are helping establish a powerful force for resistance and change.

The folks here on the ground in West Virginia need our support and we owe it to them to give them every chance for success. These mountains are unbearably beautiful, and their loss is a tragedy too terrible to allow.

How many mountains must we lose before Obama’s EPA says enough is enough? (Take Action)

How many miles of streams must be buried forever under millions of tons of rock and mining debris before JP Morgan Chase takes a stand and stops funding these operations for their own profit, and our loss? (Take Action)

If we don’t help these brave people and these beleaguered communities, who will? Massey and King Coal have a lot of resources. We must ensure that these folks get the support they need. Together we are powerful, and if ever there was a need for us to join together around a common goal, a common threat, a common future, now is the time.

Stay tuned for more as tomorrow we see this issue from the sky, and spend some time with some of the local activists who have made this campaign their life’s focus.

Indie rock sensation Trevor Hall has been an avid supporter of the Rainforest Action Network for many years, performing at a benefit concert for the organization in San Francisco in 2005.

Now – Trevor and his label, Vanguard Records are teaming up with ThinkIndie.com to support RAN with some of the profits from the sales of his new album, launching July 28th.

For the first week of the album’s launch, from July 28th to August 2nd, Vanguard Records and ThinkIndie.com will donate a portion of the proceeds from Trevor Hall’s album sales to the Rainforest Action Network (RAN).

Trevor Hall’s self-titled Vanguard debut, produced by Marshall Altman (Matt Nathanson, Kate Voegele, Marc Broussard), embodies a soulfulness, depth and passion far beyond his 22 years. Trevor combines a unique musical mix of reggae and acoustic rock that serves as a landscape for his thought provoking, inspiring lyrics. This old soul infuses his songs with a deep sense of spirituality, as evidenced in the lead single “Unity,” written and performed with his friend Matisyahu.

Click here to get some Trevor Hall from the ThinkIndie site, and support RAN at the same time.

Thanks Trevor!

Kyle decided to do something to help the folks in Chile fight a coal plant proposed for their local area.

Changing where you bank might be the most simple and effective way to support your community and stop destructive projects all at the same time! Surfer, Kyle Thiermann shows you how your money gets used to create the world you live in by taking you on a trip to Chile.

The Carbon Logic Problem Statement | Grist. by Ken Ward

An acclaimed mountaineer, a Baptist minister and a distinguished economist were stuck in a pit. The mountain climber said, “Stand back boys, I’ll have us out in a jiffy,” but the walls of the pit were loose shale and she couldn’t gain purchase. Then the minster raised his arms high and in a deep sonorous voice called for deliverance but after an hour of prayer he too admitted defeat. Finally, the economist stood, brushed dirt of a shabby Harris tweed jacket and said, “This is easy. First, assume a ladder.”

Environmentalists are trying to get out of a deep pit too, and in our push for Waxman-Markey we are acting like the mountaineer, minister and economist. We support ACES because, well, it’s there, and we are accustomed to moving doggedly forward for the best we can get. We also hope for deliverance via a gentle greening, where fossil fuels wither away and a sustainable future of vegetable gardens, strong local communities and good jobs blossoms. Finally, we have invested in what may be termed serial delusional assumptions.

• In the beginning, we thought that Enron and others aiming to cash in on carbon trading (as they did in the sulphur market) would out-muscle fossil fuel giants.
• We believed that techno-policy crafted by tuned-in elites could be quietly slipped into place, avoiding a flat-out messy and risky political slug-fest.
• We were convinced that major corporations like BP, GE and WAL*Mart were honest in their pledge to shift away from fossil fuels and had both the means and will to do so.
• We had faith that a solid majority of the American public, properly educated, would support effective climate action, so long as we did not offend sensibilities with Chicken Little predictions.
• Finally, we now assume we can fix broken policy somewhere down the line, so anything is better than nothing.

The basic question before us, “how bad does it have to be before we pull out?” ought to excite a passionate and principled debate, but we’ve traveled so far from environmentalist fundamentals that we can manage only flaccid, enervating exchanges. As our major organizations ready themselves to swallow nuclear power in a Boxer-engineered Senate compromise, the few points of eco-logic in this drab, grey landscape are lit by leaders and organizations mostly outside mainstream environmentalism. MoveOn.org campaigns against gutting the Clean Air Act, Green Party leaders and community health advocates offer an articulate challenge to Waxman-Markey, and the wave of support building behind 350.org puts organizations in my home state, like the Mass Council of Churches and Sustainable Business Network, far out in advance of mainline green groups. Rainforest Action Network and Greenpeace are the only nationally known environmental organizations honest enough to acknowledge that the king has no clothes.

It seemed clear from the get-go that U.S. environmentalists would eventually find ourselves in such a jam, where the imperatives of pragmatic politics and seductions of techno-solutions would warp our better judgement, unless we stuck to a very clear interpretation of the precautionary principle. Bill McKibben recently remarked that, having already lost the arctic, we’re past the point of precaution; it’s now a stark matter of survival. True enough, but the core logic of the precautionary approach is valid and stands in counterpoint to our present pathway – a fundamental cognitive clash between scientific realism and political pragmatism.

There is no simple answer, but the Faustian Senate bargain before us is so antithetical to environmentalist principles that it ought to cause even the most hardened Hill advocate to pause. In such quiet, personal moments of uncertainty, I suggest it is worthwhile to consider what those trained in the Nader/PIRG tradition call the “problem/solution statement.” The point of the exercise is to maintain an absolute standard of reference for the immensity of the challenge before us and scale of the solution it demands.

Problem Statement. Differences in opinion on the bright line for averting cataclysm (1.5º vs. 2.0ºC limit on temperature increase and 275 vs. 300-350 ppm cap on carbon concentrations) are relatively small in light of overall trends, and our institutional support for the nominal CASE 450 ppm target is a concession we would not make left to our own devices.

The conceptual divergence in taking the next step from temperature/carbon concentration, however, is significant. Our entire enterprise is based on a single metric—emissions. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger are absolutely correct in identifying the pollution prevention mindset as a roadblock to understanding the problem. If we conceive climate in terms of smokestacks and tailpipes, we are dealing with the last step in a long series of choices and the solutions we contemplate are thereby cramped. It is seldom acknowledged that fossil fuel interests also promote the pollution prevention paradigm as a fall-back to denial (with the apogee in our simpatico thinking reached when environmentalists agreed to measure oil companies by their success in cutting plant emissions, while ignoring their main business). Relative investment in fossil fuels vs. renewables, as Ted and Michael suggest, is a better method of understanding the problem because it takes in the long lead time in capital investment (and, in their view, pits a positive green future head-to-head against a dirty, inefficient and regressive society of the past).

The better measure, I think, was conceived by Greenpeace International climate campaign Bill Hare and presented in his brilliant, prescient 1989 paper, The Carbon Logic.  Hare, who remains an adviser to Greenpeace, and co-author Malte Meinshausen, both researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, published an updated analysis of the Carbon Logic in the April 30, 2009 edition of Nature, Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2°C, which concludes that “less than a quarter of the proven fossil fuel reserves can be burnt and emitted between now and 2050, if global warming is to be limited to two degrees Celsius (2°C).”

An upcoming post will present a solution statement commensurate with this definition of the problem, but that analysis is not necessary to conclude that Waxman-Markey, with its explicit promotion of fossil fuels, stands in flat contradiction to the imperative before us, which is to halt exploration for new fossil fuel deposits and cap extractions at 1/4 of known reserves. If environmentalists do not acknowledge this reality, we are doing nothing but dreaming up imaginary ladders.

Why would I fly across the country on my own dime knowing I would most likely end up in jail in one of the poorest parts of America?

Well, have you ever heard of MTR?

Don’t feel bad, my friends are intelligent well-read and informed people, but most of them had never heard of MTR (Mountain Top Removal) either.

So, I went to Coal River to help bring much needed attention to this hidden, criminal (but somehow legal) form of mining. I was honored to be joining an inspiringly brave group of concerned Americans, which included – NASA climate scientist James Hansen who was among the first to sound the alarm on the climate crisis. The sharp, charismatic, 94 year old, former West Virginia U.S. Representative and Secretary of State Ken Hechler, who was the first congressman to introduce a Federal bill to abolish strip mining in 1971. (If passed the bill could have prevented this mess we find ourselves in). And Michael Brune, executive director of Rainforests Action Network who is committed to ending to this terrible, destructive practice. I was deeply moved to be arrested with those affected by MTR in Kentucky, and the many local residents fighting for their very lives, including a half dozen senior citizens, canes, walkers and all.

Me with Dr. James Hansen at Marsh Fork Elementary School

Mountain Top Removal is a devastatingly destructive form of mining and has already destroyed 2,000,000 acres in the Appalachian Mountains.

Coal companies have literally blown up over 500 mountain tops to access the coal seams and then dumped the refuse into the valleys below, killing over 3000 miles of HEADWATER streams. The EPA just gave the go ahead for an additional 42 mountaintops to be blown off with another 6 permits pending.

Mountain Top Removal leaves behind a virtual hideous moonscape of devastated earth, billions of gallons of poisonous toxic sludge, and boarded up towns with dramatically high rates of cancer.

Don’t get me wrong, I have great respect for, and am deeply indebted to the miners working in coalmines and on MTR projects who risk their lives daily to bring power to our country. I understand they feel threatened by anything that might take away their jobs. And, I don’t want to see them lose more jobs, as 75% of mining jobs have already been lost to the machines and explosives of MTR.

While it takes fewer miners to remove coal with Mountain Top Removal there are just as many dangers, accidents and fatalities! It is a cheaper way for the companies to mine and that’s why it’s becoming so pervasive.

Yesterday, I received this email from a woman in Virginia -

Dear Daryl,
Thank you so much for coming to West Virginia and trying to save our mountains from Mountain top removal. I am a 9th generation Appalachian and it pains us to see what is happening. If it was not for the Internet I wouldn’t have known about your efforts. Massey has quite a bit of influence of the local media in the coalfields. I am sorry you were arrested but I thank you for standing up for what is right.  We need to work on sustainable communities here in the mountains so that coal miners will have opportunities for jobs not so dangerous. My brother works, when he can’t find anything else, at the mines driving the large dump trucks that haul the coal out of the pits. It’s dangerous work even if you are not underground. You just wouldn’t believe the equipment they give them to work with. This one site he was in this massive huge dump truck that the floorboard was rusted out with open holes. Rocks would fly back into the cab from the tires. And when it rains, it’s a mudslide. One of his co -workers was killed when the dump truck went over an embankment last year. Reporting gets you fired. And yet these workers will defend the job because there is nothing else. So thank you for standing up with us. We do appreciate it.

Then there’s the sickness…

According to WVU’s institute for health policy research, coal county residents are more likely to suffer from chronic heart, lung and kidney diseases, cancers and generally suffer from excess numbers of premature death. There’s a high cancer risk for up to 1 out of every 50 Americans living near the more than 100 billion gallons of toxic sludge in the clay-lined and unlined  (the majority unlined) coal ash landfills and slurry ponds, such as the TVA Kingston ash sludge landfill that collapsed into the Emory River in December.

Tennessee Valley Authority officials consistently have said the ash spilled in December from the utility’s Kingston Fossil Plant wet landfill in Harriman, Tenn., and in January from its Widows Creek pond in Stevenson, Ala., is non-hazardous…  but after the spill, regulatory and independent testing have found high levels of toxicity in the spilled waste and raw water where the two spills occurred. 31 of the landfills and slurry ponds in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama are on or near major waterways!

The slurry pond above the Marsh fork elementary school where we held our protest holds 2.8 billion gallons (it’s one of the smallest ponds – one nearby in brushing fork holds 9 billion gallons) of sludge in unlined pits containing arsenic, lead, cadmium, and mercury.

Marsh Fork Elementary School site and toxic holding pond

Tragically but predictably in coal river valley, the children are often sick with headaches and asthma and of the 200 students and teachers at Marsh fork elementary school cancer rates are higher than average.

Three teachers have died from cancer and one is struggling with disease now.

In 2005 one student died from ovarian cancer at age seventeen and another was still battling ovarian cancer.

Today I received this from a man in Raleigh County, West Virginia –

West Virginia. It is hell.
Every morning a 6 am my cat starts coughing. My eyes burn, my nose burns (sometimes bleeds), I get ill, and my health continues to fall apart. I got two forms of cancer, I can’t drink the water.. and we are 15 miles from Marsha Fork where they are making (was supposed to be shut down) a cyanide based pesticide that in an accident killed 1800 people in India. My kid is lead poisoned, my wife is- and in a mile radius 10 people have had heart attacks or died from whatever is here. The dust is full of arsenic and the Massey power plants create a blue haze which is really sulfuric acid. EPA won’t come near this place. It is owned by the coal industry. Thousands, who live here and are dying from 100 miles of rivers under coal sludge, Do the earth a favor and check on this and if you feel like improving our life send us a ticket out of here. I am sending you a picture of my son. He is being poisoned here. It breaks my heart. We cannot even get workman’s comp and have huge families. We are the poor of southern West Virginia..

State regulators are telling the people that it’s an “improvement” to flatten a forested mountain, seed it with grass and hope that some shrubs will grow – and then allow hunters who have signed “the appropriate waivers of liability, indemnifications and assumptions of risks” to hunt whatever animals might choose to inhabit such barren fields.

As humorist Dave Barry says, we’re not making this up, although we wish we were.

Let me make one thing clear…  there is no such thing as clean coal!!!

I wish President Obama would stop using the term and take CEQ chief Nancy Sutley and EPA head Lisa Jackson to visit these unfortunate mining sites under their jurisdiction.

When we flip the switch to turn our lights on, most of us have no idea where that power comes from. According to the U.S. dept. of energy, more than 50% of our electricity comes from coal.

Coal emits much more carbon (CO2) per unit of energy than oil and natural gas. From the acid drainage of mines polluting rivers and streams, to the release of mercury and other toxins when its burned into the atmosphere, the fine particulates that wreak havoc on human health, and the colossal waste, coal pollutes every step of the way.

“Clean coal” is the industry’s attempt to “clean up” its dirty image – the industry’s green wash buzzword. It is not a new type of coal. “Clean coal” methods only move pollutants from one waste stream to another.  Coal is a dirty business!

The good news is we have a solution! A study of the long-term benefits of INFINITE Wind Power versus FINITE coal MTR in Coal River Mountain, West Virginia already exists. They show “excellent potential” for efficiency, productivity and economic benefit. Though it doesn’t have short-term financial returns, wind promises to provide clean, inexpensive energy and offer scores of safe jobs for the long term. Just check out the staggering figures from a report released by the American Wind Energy Association “wind industry jobs jumped to 85,000 in 2008, a 70% increase from the previous year”. Renewable energy will continue to grow exponentially where as mining jobs have decreased or remained relatively stagnant at “81,000 workers” for the over 20 years, according to the 2007 U.S. dept of energy report.

I can understand why those who live in coal towns are frustrated, because while we have this technology available to us NOW – it is still just “a promise” in these regions.

Being led away by the police

It’s imperative we let our president, our elected public servants and entrepreneurs know that this is where we want our investment to be directed.

Hopefully some wise, forward thinking heroes will step up the plate, build the wind farm and take this incredible win, win, wind, opportunity to bury the dirty dinosaur of Mountain Top Removal forever.

Daryl Hannah
http://www.crmw.net/
http://www.appvoices.org/
http://ilovemountains.org/
http://www.ram.org/obamamtr

You can follow Daryl on Twitter: http://twitter.com/dhlovelife

Cattle graze in front of wind mills of the Spanish utility Endesa in the Eolico Park, Spain. SOURCE: AP/Javier Barbancho.

By Vanessa Cárdenas | May 20, 2009

Léalo en español

When so-called experts with little credibility and ties to the energy industry come out against renewable energy investments, you would think we would take their advice with a grain of salt.

Yet that’s not the case with media pundits, elected officials, and others who—egged on by the conservative Heritage Foundation—have latched on to a dubious study from Spain to scare lawmakers and the public into thinking that developing clean-energy technologies raises prices and costs jobs.

Spain is a global leader in renewable energy, but this study claimed that government subsidies for renewable energy projects such as windmills and solar panels cost the Spanish economy $8 billion and eliminate 2.2 jobs for every “green” job created. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The study, authored by the relatively unknown Gabriel Caldaza, estimates that renewable projects in Spain created only 50,000 jobs, yet U.N. estimates show those projects actually created 188,000 jobs.

Caldaza also claims that solar energy projects cost Spain 15,000 additional jobs last year. Yet Caldaza fails to disclose that these job losses in Spain were actually caused by the worldwide economic crisis, not government funding for clean-energy projects. In reality, government estimates show that the clean energy sector in Spain grew by 500 percent in the last three years, and it will likely create 270,000 more jobs by 2020.

Caldaza also inaccurately forecasts impending economic doom in the United States if the current administration keeps its sights set on renewable energy development. Caldaza asserts, without offering any analysis of the U.S. economic situation, that if the Obama administration continues to subsidize renewable energy projects, “the U.S. could lose 6.6 million to 11 million jobs while it creates three million largely temporary ëgreen jobs.’”

These dire projections have made Caldaza the darling of the American extreme right wing. Never mind that leading Spanish experts from Fundación Ideas para el Progreso in a letter to Congress decrying Caldaza’s study characterized his research as “not reliable or credible,” and further described the research institute he’s affiliated with as having “clear links to the energy industry.”

Investing in clean and renewable energy is not only beneficial to the environment and our health; it actually reduces household energy bills while creating jobs. A 2008 Center for American Progress study found that investing $100 billion over two years in green energy would generate 2 million jobs, creating four times more jobs than if the same amount were spent in the oil sector. And these jobs would be concentrated in manufacturing and construction—two of the worst affected sectors by the recession. Investing in green jobs could therefore act as an economic stimulus and help low skill workers such as construction workers, roofers, and assemblers.

Clean-energy companies have already over the last year invested in American manufacturing facilities and created needed employment in the United States. According to the American Wind Energy Association, or AWEA, the wind energy industry currently employs 85,000 people and generated over 35,000 jobs in 2008. Yet the AWEA warned in a letter to Congress that the United States could lose its wind energy industry—and the billions in investments and thousands of jobs that come with it—to other countries unless it adopts improved renewable energy standards. These standards, which would require at least 25 percent of electricity to come from renewable energy sources by 2025, are currently being debated by Congress and have already been adopted by states such as Colorado and New Mexico.

And what about prices? The Union of Concerned Scientists estimates that American consumers will save $95.5 billion from lower energy costs by 2030 if the government adopts the national renewable electricity standard currently being debated in Congress. A national renewable electricity standard, a key piece of this legislation proposed by Representatives Waxman and Markey, would save households and businesses in every state billions of dollars in electricity and natural gas bills. This would correspond to more than $5 billion in savings each for California, Texas, and New York.

The bottom line is that it is in our best interest to make a serious investment in clean and renewable energy and follow Spain’s lead. To get there, we will have to focus on the facts and not on such tall tales.

For more information, see:

• Tall Tales from Spain, by James Heintz and Andrew Light
• The Real Spanish Experience, letter from Spanish thought leaders

Moises Saman for The New York Times. An open oil pit near La Joya de los Sachas, Ecuador.

SHUSHUFINDI, Ecuador — Mention to Anita Ruíz the name of the giant oil company Chevron, and she trembles with rage. At her wooden hut here in the Amazon forest, where oil-project flares illuminate the night sky, she points to a portrait of her youngest son, who died seven years ago of leukemia at age 16.

“We believe the American oilmen created the pollution that killed my son,” said Ms. Ruíz, 58, who lives in a clearing where Texaco, the American oil company that Chevron acquired in 2001, once poured oil waste into pits used decades ago for drilling wells.

Texaco’s roughnecks are long gone, but black gunk from the pits seeps to the topsoil here and in dozens of other spots in Ecuador’s northeastern jungle. These days the only Chevron employees who visit the former oil fields, in a region where resentment against the company runs high, do so escorted by bodyguards toting guns.

They represent one side in a bitter fight that is developing into the world’s largest environmental lawsuit, with $27 billion in potential damages.

Chevron is preparing for a ruling by a lone judge in a tiny courtroom on the top floor of a shopping center in Lago Agrio, a town rife with slums that Texaco founded in the 1960s as its base camp in the Amazon.

Chevron faces claims for an era when oil companies were less purposeful about protecting the environment than they are today. It also faces potentially huge damages in a country where American corporations once wielded strong influence but are now treated with discourtesy, if not contempt.

The sympathies of the judge, a former military officer named Juan Nuñez, are not hard to discern, and he appears likely to rule against Chevron this year. “This is a fight between a Goliath and people who cannot even pay their bills,” Mr. Nuñez, 57, said in an interview in his office, where more than 100,000 pages of evidence were stacked to the ceiling.

But his ruling is not likely to end the case. Already, the dispute is the subject of intense lobbying in Washington, which could apply pressure to Ecuador on Chevron’s behalf. If the company loses, it is ready to pursue appeals in Ecuador and, if necessary, to seek international arbitration.

Texaco laid down stakes here in the 1960s, and began producing oil in the early 1970s when Ecuador was still under military rule. Before the oil began to flow, the region was inhabited by forest tribes, including the Cofán and the Siona-Secoya.

Political tension permeated Texaco’s presence in Ecuador much of the time it operated here in a partnership with the government, and by the time it was prepared to leave, in the early 1990s, a cleanup of its operations was needed.

So Texaco reached a $40 million agreement with Ecuador to clean a portion of the well sites and waste pits in its concession area, absolving it of future liability. But that cleanup, carried out in the 1990s, was far from the bookend Texaco hoped to achieve.

Instead, villagers in Ecuador became convinced they were getting sick from the pollution left behind. They filed suit in 1993 in the United States, and later claimed that their grievances were not covered by Texaco’s settlement agreement.

As the case snaked its way through American courts, Ecuador seemed to fall to pieces, going through 10 presidents in a decade by 2006. The American lawsuit was eventually thrown out, on grounds the case should not be tried in the United States, and the plaintiffs reformulated it and filed it here.

Today, Chevron has absorbed Texaco, and Ecuador has gone through a metamorphosis under the leftist President Rafael Correa. He has repeatedly sided with the plaintiffs, calling Chevron’s Ecuadorean past “a crime against humanity.”

Such sentiment holds strong appeal to those who claim that people here, like Ms. Ruíz’s 16-year-old son, are dying from the pollution that Texaco spawned. Citing scientific studies, the plaintiffs claim that toxic chemicals from Texaco’s waste pits, including benzene, which is known to induce leukemia, have leached for decades into soil, groundwater and streams. A report last year by Richard Cabrera, a geologist and court-appointed expert, estimated that 1,400 people in this jungle region — perhaps more — had died of cancer because of oil contamination.

Chevron rejected the claims, contending that Mr. Cabrera had no medical evidence to back up his conclusion that the company should pay $2.9 billion just to compensate for excess cancer deaths.

The lawsuit here focuses more on environmental cleanup than cancer deaths, but the issue remains hotly disputed, particularly after a judge in California dismissed a separate claim against Chevron for cancer deaths in 2007, finding that false claims had been put forth by the plaintiffs’ lawyer, Cristobal Bonifaz, who was instrumental in starting the fight against Texaco in the 1990s but is no longer involved in the suit.

Nearly every other detail in the case is disputed as well, save one: Chevron and the plaintiffs agree that the expansion of oil exploration in northeastern Ecuador spoiled what had once been a pristine jungle.

More than four decades later, evidence of the contamination is unavoidable at well sites near Lago Agrio and other towns in the region.

Some pools of waste dug by Texaco combining noxious drilling mud and crude oil still lie exposed under the sun, seeping into nearby water systems.

Other pits, ostensibly cleaned up by Texaco after the company handed over operations to the national oil company, Petroecuador, have varying amounts of pollutants near the surface, leading to clashes among scientists for the two sides about the exact levels and their health implications. Petroecuador has a poor environmental record of its own and faces criticism for at least 800 oil spills since 1990.

In what may be the most contentious part of the legal battle, Chevron argues that it cannot be held responsible for damage done by Petroecuador after it took over the site, or by the Ecuadorean government’s broader project to colonize its jungle frontier, which brought more than 40,000 settlers to the region by the 1970s using roads that Texaco built.

The plaintiffs claim Chevron must be held responsible for the damage where Texaco once operated, up to the present, claiming the systems put in place by Texaco allowed Petroecuador to go on polluting. If Chevron has a problem with that, said Steven Donziger, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, then it should sue Petroecuador.

“The damage caused by Texaco is still causing harm more than 18 years after Texaco ceased operating, and will continue to do so for centuries until it is cleaned up,” Mr. Donziger said.

Despite the potential size of the damages, Chevron insists its solvency is not at stake. But the legal battle is denting the company’s environmental image. Ecuador’s attorney general last year indicted two of Chevron’s lawyers, accusing them of fraudulently conspiring to prove that Texaco had cleaned up waste pits.

That maneuver infuriated Chevron. “In politicizing and corrupting the case as much as they have done, they are signing on to 10 or 20 years more of litigation,” said Silvia Garrigo, a lawyer who is Chevron’s manager of global issues and policy. “Any enforcement action is going to be met with a challenge by us.”

Chevron has fought back with trade lawyers and lobbyists, using highly paid talent like the former United States trade representative Mickey Kantor, and the former Clinton White House chief of staff Mack McLarty to push the Obama administration to strip Ecuador of trade preferences, on the grounds that it broke its agreement to absolve the oil company of liability.

“I can’t warrant what Texaco did 42 years ago or 40 years ago or 35 years ago,” Mr. Kantor said. “All I know is they spent $40 million to clean it up. They were given a release signed by the government of Ecuador and Petroecuador.”

The lobbying effort in Washington appears to be an effort to pressure Ecuador to come to the table and work out a deal. “We want to resolve this in a reasonable fashion,” Mr. Kantor said.

Texaco may be gone, but the destiny of people near Lago Agrio is still intertwined with that of the United States, and anger simmers here. Those who claim to have suffered the greatest harm face years of delay, at best, before any payout. Some may not live to see the case resolved.

José Guamán, 62, acknowledges that possibility. He lives near a well once operated by Texaco. Guiding a visitor around his property, he pointed to a covered waste pit where his late wife, María, once fell and emerged covered in black ooze. She died at 45, leaving behind their two children. Mr. Guamán said he did not know what had caused her death.

“But if I know one thing, it is that petroleum curses anyone who touches it,” Mr. Guamán said. “If that applies to us, then it should apply to the Americans as well.”

Simon Romero reported from Shushufindi, Ecuador, and Clifford Krauss from Houston.

Air Pollution Endangers Lives of Six in 10 Americans | Green Business | Reuters.

By Environment News Service - Environment News Service

WASHINGTON, DC, April 29, 2009 (ENS) – Six out of every 10 Americans – 186.1 million people – live in areas where air pollution endangers lives, according to the 10th annual American Lung Association State of the Air report released today.

Some of the biggest sources of air pollution – dirty power plants, dirty diesel engines and ocean-going vessels – also worsen global warming, the Lung Association says in State of the Air 2009.

As America deals with the linked challenges of air pollution, global warming and energy, the Lung Association urges Congress, the U.S. EPA and individuals to choose solutions that help solve all three challenges together.

Nearly every major American city is still burdened by air pollution, and the air in many cities became dirtier since last year, the report finds, despite “substantial progress” made against air pollution in many areas of the country and more attention paid to the environment by America’s growing green movement.

“This should be a wakeup call. We know that air pollution is a major threat to human health,” said Stephen Nolan, American Lung Association National Board Chair. “When 60 percent of Americans are left breathing air dirty enough to send people to the emergency room, to shape how kids’ lungs develop, and to kill, air pollution remains a serious problem.”

State of the Air 2009 includes a national air quality report card that assigns A-F grades to communities across the country and details trends for 900 counties over the past decade.

The report ranks cities and counties most affected by the three most widespread types of pollution – ozone, or smog; annual particle pollution; and 24-hour particle pollution levels.

The report finds that air pollution hovers at unhealthy levels in almost every major city, threatening people’s ability to breathe and placing lives at risk.

“The more we learn, the more urgent it becomes for us to take decisive action to make our air healthier,” said Nolan.

Many cities, like Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, Charlotte, Philadelphia, Washington, DC, and Baltimore have made improvements in their air quality over the past decade.

Only one city, Fargo, North Dakota, ranked among the cleanest in all three air pollution categories.

Seventeen cities appeared on two of the three lists of cleanest cities: Billings, Montana; Bismarck and Sioux Falls, North Dakota; Cheyenne, Wyoming; Colorado Springs, Ft. Collins, and Pueblo, Colorado; Farmington and Santa Fe-Espanola, New Mexico; Honolulu, Hawaii; Lincoln, Nebraska; Midland-Odessa, Texas; Port St. Lucie, Florida; Redding, Salinas, and San Luis Obispo, California; and Tucson, Arizona.

The three cities most polluted by ozone are all in California – the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside metropolitan area; Bakersfield, a center of agriculture, petroleum extraction and refining, and manufacturing in the San Joaquin Valley; and Visalia-Porterville, a San Joaquin Valley agricultural community.

Pittsburgh-New Castle, Pennsylvania tops the list of cities most polluted by 24 hour fine particle pollution, while the three California cities that top the most polluted ozone list are close behind in this category and also for year-round particle pollution.

Ozone

In March 2008, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency adopted a new, tighter standard for ozone pollution. The new standard showed that unhealthy ozone levels are more widespread and more severe than previously recognized.

Evaluating the most recent data against the new standard, the American Lung Association found that approximately 175.4 million Americans – 58 percent – live in counties where ozone monitors recorded too many days with unhealthy ozone levels, far more than the 92.5 million identified in the State of the Air 2008 report.

Sixteen cities making this year’s 25 most ozone-polluted list experienced worse smog problems than last year.

The Lung Association’s review found consistent improvements in ozone in some cities, such as Los Angeles, with its long-standing ozone problem.

But two cities, Dallas-Ft. Worth and Las Vegas, have higher ozone levels than 10 years ago.

Ozone is the most widespread form of air pollution. When inhaled, ozone irritates the lungs, resulting in something like a bad sunburn. The health effects of breathing ozone pollution can be immediate. Ozone can cause wheezing, coughing and asthma attacks. Breathing ozone pollution can even shorten lives.

“More than 175 million Americans live in areas with unhealthy smog levels, that’s 80 million more than we identified in last year’s report,” said Charles Connor, American Lung Association president and chief executive. “We at the American Lung Association believe that the new ozone standard is not yet strong enough to protect human health, an opinion nearly all scientific experts share.”

In March 2008, the EPA adopted a standard of .075 parts per million, ppm, after legal action by the American Lung Association forced the agency to complete a formal review. This standard is not as strict as the standard of .060 ppm recommended by the Lung Association.

The association, along with states, public health and environmental groups, has taken the EPA back to court in an attempt to force the agency to adopt the .060 ppm standard before its scheduled five-year review in 2013.

Particle Pollution

State of the Air 2009 grades counties for both 24-hour and year-round levels of particle pollution – a toxic mix of microscopic soot, diesel exhaust, chemicals, metals and aerosols.

“It is the most dangerous and deadly of the outdoor air pollutants that are widespread in America,” the Lung Association says in its report, warning that “breathing in particle pollution can increase the risk of early death, heart attacks, strokes and emergency room visits for asthma and cardiovascular disease.”

One in six people in the United States lives in an area with unhealthy year-round levels of fine particle pollution (termed annual average levels).

Nine cities in the list of the 25 most polluted by year-round particle pollution showed measurable improvement, including five cities that reported their best year-round levels since the Lung Association began tracking this pollutant: Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Atlanta, York and Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

The annual average level of particle pollution worsened in a dozen cities, including Bakersfield and Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas.

Roughly three in 10 Americans live in counties with unhealthful spikes of particle pollution which can last from hours to days (termed 24-hour levels).

Thirteen cities had more days, or more severe days, of spikes than in last year’s report. Eleven cities have improved continually since the 2007 report.

New data show that women in their 50′s may be particularly threatened by air pollution and that diesel truck drivers and dockworkers who are forced to breathe exhaust on the job may face a greater risk of developing lung cancer or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.

California researchers have tripled their estimate of the number of people that particle pollution kills each year in their state.

“The science is rock-solid. We now know that air pollution can impair the lung function of even the healthiest people,” said Norman Edelman, MD, American Lung Association chief medical officer. “Air pollution worsens asthma and is a direct cause of heart attacks, which makes people living with lung and heart disease especially vulnerable.”

Dr. Edelman suggests that people living in areas of high particle pollution “must recognize that this is the fact of their lives, and they must be more careful about other life factors – stop smoking, eat well, exercise.”

In addition, Dr. Edelman suggests, people who live with particle pollution “must take action help us and other organizations to change the EPA regulations. It’s personal, it’s affecting them and their neighbors.” In addition, he said, they can take local political action to change regulations such as engine idling, and clean up diesel-powered school buses.

Low income people and some racial and ethnic groups often face greater risk from pollutants. Pollution sources like factories and power plants may be closer to their homes, the Lung Association points out. Many live near areas with heavy highway traffic or have poor access to health care, which makes them even more vulnerable. Some racial and ethnic groups have a higher prevalence of diseases like asthma or diabetes, which compounds the ill effects of air pollution for these groups.

“We need to renew our commitment to providing healthy air for all our citizens a commitment the United States made almost 40 years ago when Congress passed the Clean Air Act,” Connor said. “After four decades, we still have much work to do.”

“America needs to cut emissions from big polluters like coal-fired power plants and ocean-going vessels,” Connor said. “We need to fix old dirty diesel engines to make them cleaner and strengthen the ozone standards to better protect our health. We also need to improve the decaying infrastructure of air monitors. America must now enforce the laws that help us improve our nation’s air quality.”

See the full lists of best and worst cities at ens-newswire.com

Industry Ignored Its Scientists on Climate – NYTimes.com.

For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

“They didn’t have to win the argument to succeed,” Mr. Monbiot said, “only to cause as much confusion as possible.”

William O’Keefe, at the time a leader of the Global Climate Coalition, said in a telephone interview that the group’s leadership had not been aware of a gap between the public campaign and the advisers’ views. Mr. O’Keefe said the coalition’s leaders had felt that the scientific uncertainty justified a cautious approach to addressing cuts in greenhouse gases.

The coalition disbanded in 2002, but some members, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the American Petroleum Institute, continue to lobby against any law or treaty that would sharply curb emissions. Others, like Exxon Mobil, now recognize a human contribution to global warming and have largely dropped financial support to groups challenging the science.

Documents drawn up by the coalition’s advisers were provided to lawyers by the Association of International Automobile Manufacturers, a coalition member, during the discovery process in a lawsuit that the auto industry filed in 2007 against the State of California’s efforts to limit vehicles’ greenhouse gas emissions. The documents included drafts of a primer written for the coalition by its technical advisory committee, as well as minutes of the advisers’ meetings.

The documents were recently sent to The New York Times by a lawyer for environmental groups that sided with the state. The lawyer, eager to maintain a cordial relationship with the court, insisted on anonymity because the litigation is continuing.

The advisory committee was led by Leonard S. Bernstein, a chemical engineer and climate expert then at the Mobil Corporation. At the time the committee’s primer was drawn up, policy makers in the United States and abroad were arguing over the scope of the international climate-change agreement that in 1997 became the Kyoto Protocol.

The primer rejected the idea that mounting evidence already suggested that human activities were warming the climate, as a 1995 report by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had concluded. (In a report in 2007, the panel concluded with near certainty that most recent warming had been caused by humans.)

Yet the primer also found unpersuasive the arguments being used by skeptics, including the possibility that temperatures were only appearing to rise because of flawed climate records.

“The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change,” the advisory committee said in the 17-page primer.

According to the minutes of an advisory committee meeting that are among the disclosed documents, the primer was approved by the coalition’s operating committee early in 1996. But the approval came only after the operating committee had asked the advisers to omit the section that rebutted the contrarian arguments.

“This idea was accepted,” the minutes said, “and that portion of the paper will be dropped.”

The primer itself was never publicly distributed.

Mr. O’Keefe, who was then chairman of the Global Climate Coalition and a senior official of the American Petroleum Institute, the lobby for oil companies, said in the phone interview that he recalled seeing parts of the primer.

But he said he was not aware of the dropped sections when a copy of the approved final draft was sent to him. He said a change of that kind would have been made by the staff before the document was brought to the board for final consideration.

“I have no idea why the section on the contrarians would have been deleted,” said Mr. O’Keefe, now chief executive of the Marshall Institute, a nonprofit research group that opposes a mandatory cap on greenhouse gas emissions.

“One thing I’m absolutely certain of,” he said, “is that no member of the board of the Global Climate Coalition said, ‘We have to suppress this.’ ”

Benjamin D. Santer, a climate scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory whose work for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was challenged by the Global Climate Coalition and allied groups, said the coalition was “engaging in a full-court press at the time, trying to cast doubt on the bottom-line conclusion of the I.P.C.C.” That panel concluded in 1995 that “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

“I’m amazed and astonished,” Dr. Santer said, “that the Global Climate Coalition had in their possession scientific information that substantiated our cautious findings and then chose to suppress that information.”

Jeff Biggers: Mother Gunnoe: Mountaintop Removal Organizer Wins Goldman “Environmental Nobel” Prize.

“Pray for the dead, and fight like hell for the living” Mother Jones

Listen here, King Coal.

Maria “Mother” Gunnoe, a fearless community organizer for the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition in West Virginia, whose home sits on the frontlines of an atrocious mountaintop removal operation in Boone County, has just been awarded the prestigious Goldman Prize. Considered the “Nobel prize for the environment,” the award recognizes a grassroots leader on each continent and their extraordinary actions to protect the natural world and human rights.

Gunnoe is the second anti-mountaintop removal activist in Appalachia to win the Goldman Prize in the last six years: West Virginian Judy Bonds was recognized in 2003 for her work against devastating strip mining operations in the Coal River Mountain area.

Since 1997, when Gunnoe served as a volunteer on underground mine fires and air quality issues, the West Virginia and Cherokee native has been one of the most vocal advocates for justice in the Appalachian coalfields. Refusing to back down to numerous threats from King Coal thugs or leave her ancestral land, she has emerged as an inspiring heroine in the coalfields for the rest of the nation. In 2000, her house and orchards along the hills of her grandfather’s homeplace became the frontlines for a mountaintop removal operation that would eventually lead to wide scale erosion, flooding and water contamination.

Gunnoe’s home has been flooded seven times in the last eight years.

She writes: “The mountains are slipping into the hollow and in turn, it’s washing by me, and [it's] flooding the people across from me. Everyone downstream from where that mountaintop removal site is gets flooded and their wells are contaminated. My well is contaminated. Can’t drink my water. I buy on average about $250 worth of water a month, and that’s on a slow month.”

Since President Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act in 1977, which shamefully recognized mountaintop removal as an approved mining technique, over 500 mountains have been clear cut and blown to bits in Appalachia, and an estimated 1,200 miles of streams have been jammed with mining waste.

A frequent speaker around the nation, and a mother of two teens, Gunnoe has also pointed to the issue of human rights violations from mountaintop removal.

In the essay collection, Like Walking onto Another Planet, she wrote: “People around here are swiggin’ down contaminated water all day long, every day. The health affects are sometimes long-term. It’s usually pancreatic cancer or some kind of liver disease, or kidney stones, gall stones – digestive tract problems. And then, too, people’s breathing. The blasting is killin’ people – just smotherin’ them to death through breathin’ all of the dust. The computers and electronics and stuff in my house stay completely packed up with black coal dirt and rock dust together. Why do they expect us to just take this? It’s not gonna happen down at the state capital. I mean they’re not gonna go up there and blast off the top of a mountain in the background of the Capitol.”

Here’s a clip of Gunnoe describing the flooding at her home in Bob White, West Virginia

For more information on Gunnoe and the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, see:
www.ohvec.org

And have a look at the official Goldman site – there’s a great description of Maria, the issue and a video that really tells her story and her relationship to MTR in her community.

“Green is green as in the color of money”
- Brand director of General Electric, Brandweek, July 26, 2006

“Greenwashing” is the act of misleading the public regarding the environmental practices of a company or the environmental benefits of a product, service, or business line.  Due to the public’s increased awareness of environmental issues, including global warming, deforestation, and the loss of endangered species, greenwashing has become a staple of corporations marketing efforts.  All of the companies in this article have made some effort to address these concerns.  Some of them appear to be trying harder than others, and even a few of them have made legitimate efforts to become responsible corporate stewards of the environment.  Evidenced by the support of environmental groups and corporate responsibility professionals, many of these companies’ green initiatives have made a positive impact.

A majority of America’s largest companies have become part of the “green” movement. Some have fleets of hybrid trucks. Others install solar panels on their large buildings to consume energy more cost effectively with less of an impact on the environment.  Many give generously to environmental non-profit organizations.

The irony of the “green” movement of US companies is that many of the firms that spend the most money and public relations effort trying to show the government, the public, and their shareholders that they are trying to improve the environment are also among the most prolific polluters in the country.  Pollution does not mean that the companies are doing anything illegal.  Instead, it simply refers to natural consequence of the companies’ industrial efforts which result in contamination to the air, soil or water by the discharge of substances that are toxic to the environment.
24/7 Wall St. has put together a list of the Top Ten Greenwashers in America.  There may be some large companies that are greater polluters than these firms.  There may be other corporations that do more to promote their pro-environment credentials.  But those can be counted on two hands.

Every company on this list makes a substantial investment in creating a perception that they are friendlier to the environment than their peers are or that they are on the side of good or that saving the global ecosystem should be part of a corporation’s broad public responsibility–its good citizenship.  These firms often spend millions of dollars on advertising to support the way that their companies are perceived in the green world.  But, hidden behind these efforts, each corporation on this list is a Herculean polluter.  And, that fact points to a hypocrisy which is almost completely hidden from the public.

In the process of creating this list, 24/7 Wall St. examined hundreds of state and federal documents and interviewed experts in environmental law, and officials who review data for non-profit organizations which have charters to track environmental violations.  We also reviewed annual reports from companies on their environment efforts.  It was important to balance all of these.  Some sources had axes to grind, but that was weighed in the process.

A more complete description of our methodology runs at the end of the article.

1) General Electric (GE)

In May 2005 GE announced its $90 million “Ecomagination” advertising campaign. According to Jeff Immelt, the company’s CEO, “Ecomagination is GE’s commitment to address challenges such as the need for cleaner, more efficient sources of energy, reduced emissions and abundant sources of clean water.”  The company said that revenue from 70 Ecomagination products and services would be $17 billion in 2008.  Since its inception, Ecomagination has provided GE with countless opportunities to reflect its corporate concern over the environment.  Arguably the whole effort is greenwashing.

On Super Bowl Sunday GE debuted its ad campaign for Smart Grid Technologies.  The premise behind this technology is that IT systems and products can make power grids more efficient.  The ad explains that “Smart grid technology from GE will make the way we distribute electricity more efficient simply by making it more intelligent.”  This will benefit the environment.  The more efficient our energy grid, the less power we use.  The less power used, the less carbon dioxide is emitted.  That GE used Super Bowl Sunday to launch this initiative is important, not only because of the huge sums spent for the advertising time, but also because it marked the first time that GE has bought time during the Super Bowl.

GE also launched a website to further create buzz around its efforts.  The online videos and interactive features include significant coverage about how the technology can be employed to better use alternative energy by improving the ability of the grid to deliver locally generated wind, sun and biogas power across the country.  The technology will also facilitate the purchase of energy generated by the consumer from systems like wind turbines and solar panels.  The cumulative effect of promoting the benefits that the technology will have on alternative energy is that it appears to equate the two.

The reality is that smart grid technology in one form is already required by 42 states.  Although alternative energy may benefit from this new service, there are myriad ways that it will improve consumer spending and carbon emissions without adopting better alternative energy efforts.  Ecomagination’s stated goal is to “meet customer demand for more energy-efficient products” by investing in “innovative solutions to environmental challenges.”  The character of this statement is fair, but it belies the company’s larger corporate identity and its history as one of the country’s worst polluters.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency’s Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), for the electrical equipment industry, GE was the fifth largest producer of chemicals with four facilities in the top 100 generating 332,336 pounds in waste in 2007.  In the miscellaneous manufacturing industry, GE’s GE Osmonics facility was the fourth highest producing facility of TRI production-related waste with 1,919,437 pounds. According to the University of Massachusetts Political Economy Research Institute (PERI), General Electric is the most toxic company when considering the amount of population exposed to its pollution and its toxicity level from its plants.

According to the EPA, “From approximately 1947 to 1977, the General Electric Company (GE) discharged as much as 1.3 million pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) from its capacitor manufacturing plants” at two facilities on the Hudson River.  The EPA says that “The primary health risk associated with the site is the accumulation of PCBs in the human body through eating contaminated fish.”  The EPA has found that the cancer risk from eating fish from the Upper Hudson exceeds the EPA standard by 700 times.

On December 4, 2001, the EPA issued a “record of decision” calling for the dredging of 2.65 million cubic yards from the upper section of the Hudson River to remove approximately 150 thousand pounds of PCBs.  According to the company’s website, “From 1990 to 2007 GE has spent over $1 billion in addressing PCB-related issues, with the majority of those expenses (82%) coming from just three sites” including the Hudson River.  However, Riverkeeper and other non-for-profit organizations focused on the environment contend that GE has stymied the government’s efforts to clean up the river and enforce the dredging requirement.  In 2008, Alex Matthiessen, president of Riverkeeper, stated that CEO, Jeffery Immelt “continues to be, as is GE, very defensive about the Hudson River cleanup.”

Each year the League of Conservation Voters publishes the “Dirty Dozen,” a program targeting candidates for Congress “who consistently vote against clean energy and conservation.”  Out of this list, GE’s PAC has donated thousands of dollars to six of the dirty dozen.  Additionally, GE’s PAC donated to two leading deniers of global warming, Senator Jim Inhofe, included in the Dirty Dozen list, and Congressman Joe Barton.
2) American Electric Power (AEP)

According to the company, American Electric Power’s 2008 Sustainability Report is a “comprehensive report offering a frank discussion” about their environmental performance and their strategies for sustainability.  Michael G. Morris, the chairman, president, and CEO, says that sustainability is “Transparency and accountability, along with a close working relationship with our stakeholders, will grow our business, serve our shareholders’ interest and create a better world for our children and grandchildren.”

In an effort to be more energy efficient, the company adopted principals set forth by the Clinton Global Initiative, committing approximately $100 million over the next five years to build or update its facilities using the LEED green building rating system.  In 2008, construction was completed on a new facility for which the company is seeking LEED certification and which it claims “will use 15 percent less energy and 20 percent less water than comparable non-LEED building.”  Through another initiative the company will conform to the International Management System Standard ISO 14001, which outlines the requirements for organizations to operate in an environmentally sustainable manner.  The company further argues that is has “completed more than two-thirds of our $5.4 billion investment program to reduce airborne emissions from our coal-fired power plants,” in order to comply with the federal environmental regulations.

Although these investments are laudable, it appears that they were not entirely motivated by the company’s desire to be a good steward of the environment.  As the report sets forth, “AEP’s court-approved settlement of the New Source Review (NSR) litigation provides us with additional opportunities to reduce our power plant emissions.”  The complaint by the U.S. EPA and others alleged that AEP had made major modifications at some of its coal-fueled generating units without obtaining the necessary permits and without installing controls required by the Clean Air Act to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide (“SO2”), nitrogen oxide (“NOx”) and particulate matter.  Despite the company’s eagerness to be a leader in environmental conservation, “AEP did not admit to wrongdoing by agreeing to this settlement.”

According to Frank O’Donnell, President of Clean Air Watch, an environmental policy group and whistleblower, “AEP is one of nation’s biggest polluters, now that GM is making fewer cars, and is one the key lobbyist against political interest on global warming.”  O’Donnell also says that the company “aggressively seeks to block legislation unless it receives a huge financial wind fall in the deal.”  The company’s corporate PAC donated to five members of the Dirty Dozen as well as Congressman Barton.

On October 9, 2007, the Department of Justice, eight states, and 13 citizen groups announced a settlement agreement with AEP under the Clean Air Act, obtaining caps on emissions of pollutants from 16 plants in five states.  According to the EPA, it is the single largest environmental enforcement settlement by several measures.  The EPA estimates that the company will spend more that $4.6 billion to achieve the emission caps.  The settlement also will have one of the greatest individual impacts on pollution, reducing it by 813,000 tons per year.  According to assistant administrator for EPA’s enforcement and compliance assurance program, Granta Nakayma, “Today’s settlement will save $32 billion in health costs per year for Americans.  Less air pollution from power plants means fewer cases of asthma and other respiratory illnesses.”
3) ExxonMobil (XOM)

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, the country’s largest oil spill.  As a result of the disaster, the ship spilled approximately 10.8 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound, Alaska.  Since that time, ExxonMobil has spent millions of dollars in an attempt to regain the public’s trust.  In an effort to continue to improve the way the company is perceived, it has begun to aggressively market its green initiatives.

ExxonMobil’s Corporate Citizen’s Report, published May 21, 2008, states that the company “is working on technologies with the potential for near-term impact on greenhouse gas emissions” including: investing $100 million improving natural gas technology, working with car makers to increase fuel economy by 30 percent, improving lithium-ion battery technology in order to enable lower-emission hybrid vehicles, and developing a hydrogen system that could improve driving efficiency by 80 percent.

In a commercial broadcast in 2008, the company sought to promote this perception further.  The ad features a series of ExxonMobil employees who share their thoughts on the need for greater energy efficiency and alternative fuels.  An engineer states that “With the increased demand for energy in the world there is a growing concern about the risk of climate change.”  Another engineer suggests “One of the best things we can do is be efficient with our energy.  The less energy we use the less impact there is on the environment.”  Finally, a research engineer says that efficient fuels, engines, and batteries for hybrid cars will be important because “energy has to be used in the most efficient way to meet the needs of our lives but also to minimize the impact on the environment.”

For some time, policy and research groups have worked to discredit the reality of global warming.  According to the U.K.’s Royals Society, a highly regarded scientific academy, these groups “misrepresent the science of climate change by outright denial of the evidence.”  In 2007, The Guardian reported that academics were offered $10,000 each “by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.”  Research performed by ExxonMobil watchdog, ExxposeExxon, suggests that “Since at least 1998, ExxonMobil has spent $17 to $23 million to bankroll these groups.”

According to the company’s 2008 Corporate Citizen’s Report, ExxonMobil has finally admitted that its funding efforts to research groups that deny global warming has an adverse effect on the environment.  “In 2008 we will discontinue contributions to several public policy interest groups whose position on climate change could divert attention from the important discussion on how the world will secure the energy required for economic growth in an environmentally responsible manner.”

On December 17, 2008, ExxonMobil settled an action with the EPA arising from Clean Air Act violations. As a result of the company’s failure to monitor sulfur content in some fuel gas streams between 2005 and 2007, EPA tests found sulfur levels in excess of regulatory limits. This was a violation of a 2005 agreement. The total fine for the two EPA actions was more than $20 million.

4) DuPont (DU)

In 2008 Dupont launched a marketing campaign called “Open Science.”  According to the company’s website, “DuPont Open Science uses the power of collaboration to do extraordinary things.  Explore how DuPont and its partners are helping the United States cultivates, taps new energies, and makes industries safer and eco-friendly.”  The site goes on to encourage the reader  to “Explore how DuPont and its partners are tackling the issues of our age: food shortages, dwindling petroleum, and global warming.”

Along with this initiative, the company debuted a TV advertisement.  The TV spot features a series of miniature cityscapes depicting scenes where conditions are improved by Open Science.  Among the changes that Open Science achieves are rebuilding cities “making them safer and more sustainable”; “it can bring solar power to remote villages”; “it makes materials lighter which saves fuel”; and“it can feed a growing planet.”  DuPont’s website provides perfect illustrations for each of these initiatives.  In one such example, DuPont explains its efforts to help Greensburg, Kansas recover from one of America’s worst tornados.  According to the piece, the company helped “rebuild Greensburg as a model sustainable community” by a financial gift and “eco-friendly” products.

DuPont’s efforts and partnerships are, in many cases, charitable works that have a positive impact on the environment. The ad and the campaign in general have an aggregate affect on all of DuPont’s detailed “eco-friendly” projects leaving the impression that DuPont is a good steward of the environment and believes in open science.  Open Science, before DuPont co-opted the name, refers to the concept in science of providing accurate accounts of methodology  that results in a transparent research process that encourages collaboration.  In reality, DuPont’s partners are in large part its customers.  And, as has been the case for DuPont for some time, its business practices are far from transparent and fall short of being friendly to the environment.

On December 12, 2005 the EPA reached a $16.5 million settlement with the DuPont arising from violations alleged by the agency that the company failed to report the possible health risks associated with perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), a chemical compound used to make Teflon.  The settlement included $10.25 million civil administrative penalty and $6.26 million for Supplemental Environmental Projects.  According to the EPA, “A SEP is an environmentally beneficial project that the violator agrees to undertake in exchange for mitigation of the penalty to be paid.”  At that time, the penalty was the largest in the agency’s history.

The violations alleged by the EPA included “multiple failures to report information to EPA about substantial risk of injury to human health or the environment that DuPont obtained about PFOA from as early as 1981 and as recently as 2004.”  The violations fell into three categories: human health information, environmental contamination, and animal toxicity studies.  The enforcement action arose from DuPont’s failure to disclose information that the company had obtained regarding the level of PFOA in 12 individuals who had been exposed to drinking water which contained the chemical.

According to DuPont’s Progress Report on PFOA Phase Out, in February 2007, former DuPont Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, Charles O. Holliday went beyond the stated goal of the EPA program when he publicly announced the company’s commitment “to eliminate the need to make, buy or use PFOA by 2015.”  However, despite the fact that it has complied with the terms of the phase out, the company continues to deny PFOA’s harmful effects.  Although the EPA has not made any definitive conclusions regarding potential risks, including cancer, at this time, additional research is still being conducted to determine the cancer-causing risks of PFOA.   However, in 2005, the Science Advisory Board performed a formal peer review of the chemical that, while not conclusive, stated the PFOA cancer data was consistent with EPA Guidelines for Carcinogen Risk Assessment Descriptor and “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

On January 8, the Environmental Appeals Board granted EPA and DuPont’s joint motion seeking a three-year extension on its testing of PFOA.  Executive Director of the Environmental Working Group, Richard Wiles, said the data from DuPont tests is critical to determining whether consumer Teflon products are a major source of PFOA in the environment.  “As long as they can delay development of this data, that basically means that they don’t have to comply with the phase-out agreement,” Wiles said.
5) Archer Daniels Midland (ADM)

Biofuel, ethanol and biodiesel, have quickly become the darlings of the green economy.  They are heralded as renewable energy sources that some say can either reduce or entirely replace reliance on petroleum to fuel internal combustion engines.  According to the company’s site, “a world in need of clean, renewable fuels to meet growing energy demand and achieve greater energy security is turning to agriculture for answers.”  As one of the largest diversified agribusinesses in the world, the company maintains that it has the necessary scale and expertise to be a leader in the production of biofuels. Its mission is “to unlock the potential of nature to improve the quality of life.”

The company points out that biofuels have measurable benefits to the environment including a reduction in greenhouse emissions, by limiting cardon dioxide, carbon monoxide and particulate matter associated with petroleum-based diesel, while also serving as a renewable energy source.  Produced from corn and sugar cane, ethanol is blended with gasoline to produce a fuel that can improve engine performance and reduce pollution.  Produced from vegetable oil and alcohol, biodiesel is blended with gasoline, reducing greenhouse emissions from diesel engines.

The truth is that both ethanol and biodiesel emit less global warming pollution than burning petroleum-based gasoline.  Unfortunately, producing biofuels creates enormous amounts of global warming pollution, so much so that many argue that they offset the benefits gained when the fuel is used to power engines.  This is the sin of the hidden trade-off.  In this case, a company promotes the green attribute of a product without consideration for other environmental factors. ADM publicly touts biofuels’ green benefits, while failing to mention that the energy necessary to grow the corn requires significant amounts of fossil fuels, offsetting the environmental benefits.  According to the journal Science, “corn-based ethanol, instead of producing a 20% savings, nearly doubles greenhouse emissions over 30 years and increases greenhouse gases for 167 years. Biofuels from switchgrass, if grown on U.S. corn lands, increase emissions by 50%.”

In 2006, Wilmar Holdings, the largest producer of palm oil, announced the proposed acquisition of “five plantation companies which have interests in land in Kalimantan province, Indonesia” in order to increase capacity for palm oil production. The planting of palm-oil producing plants requires land which is cleared of trees. The acquisition document proves that ADM Asia Pacific Limited, a subsidiary of ADM, acquired 30% interest in the companies.  According to Greenpeace, the enormous growth of the palm oil industry is due in part to increase demand for biofuels.  Although the problem is occurring across Southeast Asia, “the problem is particularly acute in Indonesia which has been named in the 2008 Guinness Book of Records as the country with fastest rate of deforestation. It is also the third largest emitter of greenhouse gases, largely due to deforestation,” environmental group said.

Since receiving increased attention from a number of environmental and political organizations, ADM has sought to distance itself from palm oil plantation efforts in Indonesia.  Following a series of public attacks ADM stated that it “affirmed our Company’s commitment to responsible palm oil through our membership in the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil,” an organization that encourages sustainable palm oil production.  On February 24, Wilmar International Limited entered into two separate acquisition agreements with Archer Daniels Midland Europe BV and Archer Daniels Midland Singapore Pte Ltd for the acquisition of all its interests in two jointly-held companies, Wilmar-ADM Investments Holding Pte Ltd & PT Karya Putrakreasi Nusantara.

6) Waste Management, Inc. (WMI)

In 2006, Waste Management introduced a new television advertising campaign focusing on environmental messages.  According to WM senior vice president of sales and marketing David Aardsma, “the goal of the Waste Management ad campaign is to link everyday collection to environmental protection in the minds of consumers.”  The campaign, titled “think green” was intended to inform the public that the company was the largest recycler in North America and that their landfill gas-to-energy project produced renewable energy,

The television spot featured cinematic shots of lush forests and woodland creatures interspersed with the company’s truck driving on a road past the trees.  A narrator is heard saying “This lush expanse of green does more than beautify our world.  Trees help clean the air of carbon dioxide, a major greenhouse gas.  As North America’s largest recycler, last year alone, Waste Management recycled enough paper to save over one million trees.  From everyday collection to environmental protection, think green, think waste management.”

In 2008, WM launched greenopolis, a social networking site that encourages users, including individuals, organizations, schools and businesses, to learn about the environment and earn rewards by making a positive impact.  About the launch, Joe Vaillancourt, managing director of Waste Management said, “Waste Management is an environmental company that is committed to not only providing its comprehensive waste and environmental services, but also engaging customers and all of its various stakeholders to think about the environment.  We believe that by promoting and creating a dialogue about things such as conservation, recycling and renewable energy, that awareness about our environmental operations and our business offerings will increase.”  Techcrunch’s Michael Arrington thinks it has a more subversive purpose: “Greenopolis, I suspect, is designed to show that Waste Management cares about the environment more than anything else. So in a way, it’s like an advertisement.”  EarthFirst.com and others seem to take similarly skeptical position.

According to Elizabeth Royte, a journalist for the Natural Resources Defense Council’s onearth, since 2005, Waste Management has spent more than $90 million on TV commercials and print advertisements emphasizing the number of trees it saves through recycling, the amount of land it has set aside for wildlife habitats, and how much energy it generates through incineration.  However, what the ads fail to disclose is that burning trash doesn’t come without a price.  Although the technology continues to improve, incinerators still discharge small levels of mercury, lead, and dioxin into the atmosphere.  Royte also writes, “They also generate more carbon dioxide per megawatt-hour of energy generated than do power plants, and their ash is toxic.”  An additional consequence of incineration is that it discourages using landfills.  Because power plants that use incinerators require a consistent flow of garbage, they are necessarily antagonistic to principles such as recycling, composting and reducing waste.

Waste Management’s corporate PAC has donated to two members of the dirty dozen, Mitch McConnel and Sam Graves.  The company also made a donation to Congressman Barton.

7) International Paper (IP)

In the early 1990s, following a series of reports issued by the United Nations on sustainable development and rainforest conservation, the forest products industry began to receive increased attention over its land-use strategies regarding logging.  Specifically, these companies, including International Paper, received negative publicity regarding their use of chemicals, clear-cutting, and inadequate conservation protection.  Informed by increased awareness of sustainable practices, third-party certification has become a critical tool for promoting ecologically responsible forestry practices.

The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) is an international non-profit founded in 1993 by environmental groups, the forestry profession, and community groups.  Its stated purpose “is to improve forest management worldwide” by providing “a model for environmentally appropriate, socially beneficial and economically viable forest stewardship.”

In 1994, International Paper, in collaboration with the American Forest & Paper Association (AFPA) – the national trade association for the forest, pulp, paper, paperboard, and wood products industry – founded the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI).  According to AFPA website, the association’s members “agreed to adhere to a set of forestry principles that would meet the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

According to an independent study commissioned by both FSC and SFI, although SFI was initially developed as an industry led self-improvement program, “it has evolved into a program that promotes third-party certification of forestry practices of member companies and licensees.”  However, contrary to this assessment, environmental groups, including The Sierra Club, The Nation Environmental Defense Fund and the Rainforest Action Network have published reports critical of what they characterize as weak standards for certification.  According to these groups, because SFI standards were developed by the same industry that requires certification, SFI certification provides a measurement for sustainability that is weak on oversight and contrary to its stated purpose.

The US Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building Rating System is a rating tool of the nonprofit for green building design and construction that seeks to provide measurable results for building owners and occupants.  The LEED green building certification program for new construction requirements are intended to “encourage environmentally responsible forest management.”  The most recent version of LEED, with a scheduled launch of April 27, requires that new construction seeking the LEED designation must “Use a minimum of 50% (based on cost) of wood-based materials and products that are certified in accordance with the Forest Stewardship Council’s principles and criteria, for wood building components.”

FSC is not without its critics. It may be that some groups find both acceptable.  However, despite this criticism, 24/7 Wall St is unaware of any environmental groups that have suggested that SFI is better than FSC.

According to International Paper’s 2008 “Sustainability Update,” FSC certification in the U.S. reflects a fraction of the certification used by the company’s businesses.  Of the company’s 16 domestic paper mills only one uses FSC certification.  Similarly, domestic container plants and wood procurement systems both use SFI certification in lieu of FSC.

According to TRI, for the paper industry, International Paper was the largest producer of chemicals with fifteen facilities in the top 100 generating 42,554,027 pounds in waste.  The company also had the second highest producing facility of TRI production-related waste with 43,320,612 pounds.  According to PERI, International Paper is the thirty-first most toxic company with a toxic score of 49,385.

In 2008, the Rainforest Action Network condemned a proposal by International Paper to build a pulp mill and establish 1.2 million acres of plantation forest in Indonesia’s rainforest.  This came as a surprise to RAN because the company had established an internal policy that it would not expand into Indonesia because it is a global warming and biodiversity hot spot.

Following the release, Thomas E. Gestrich, president of International Paper Asia, explained the company’s plans in Indonesia.  Mr.Gestrich said that he would prefer land that had already been cleared, but failed to explain how the company would secure hundreds of thousands of meters of forest without disturbing the natural habitat, waters or indigenous peoples.

Out of the LCV’s Dirty Dozen, International Paper’s PAC has donated thousands of dollars to 5 of the Dirty Dozen, including the leading denier of global warming, Senator Jim Inhofe.

BP (BP)

In 1998, British Petroleum and Amoco announced a merger into a single company called BP Amoco.  In 2000, according to the company’s website, BP, now a group of companies that included Amoco and others “unveiled a new global brand with a distinctive new mark, a sunburst of green, yellow and white.”  According to Sourcewatch, a project of the Center for Media and Democracy, “in late July 2000 BP launched a massive $200 million public relations and advertising campaign, introducing the company with a new slogan – ‘Beyond Petroleum.’”  According to an EPA press release, on July 25th, 2000 the company entered into a settlement with the EPA and agreed to spend more than “$500 million on up-to-date pollution-control technologies and work practices at nine refineries to reduce emissions from all sources – from stacks, leaking valves, wastewater vents and flares.”

In December of 2000, CorpWatch, a non-profit focused on corporate violations of environmental fraud, gave BP a “greenwash” award.  CorpWatch gives out the awards “to corporations that put more money, time and energy into slick PR campaigns aimed at promoting their eco-friendly images, than they do to actually protecting the environment.”  In a 2001 speech to shareholders, BP’s Chief Executive John Browne said “When we launched the brand we used the phrase beyond petroleum. Some people thought that meant we were giving up oil and gas. I’m sorry to disappoint our competitors. Beyond Petroleum means that what we’re giving up is the old mind set – the old thinking which assumed that oil companies had to be dirty and secretive and arrogant. I don’t believe we should be any of these things.”

“Beyond petroleum” is still the company’s motto today.  A commercial that played in 2008 suggested that alternative energies were important to BP.  Composed of a series of brief statements that appear to be the opinions of the average American, the comments state what BP’s energy policy should be with respect to alternative fuels.  “First we insure that we find all the oil that is avail to us in North American.  Natural gas is probably the cleanest and the most accessible fuel we have.  I’d love seeing more wind power. I think it would be in their best interest to continue to pursue things like solar energy.  I think biofuel is a very viable alternative.  Any business person that’s worth their salt is going to diversity as much as they can.”  The commercial closes by showing a series of icons depicting oil, natural gas, wind, solar, and biofuels, followed by the ad’s s tagline: “investing in America’s most diverse energy portfolio: bp. beyond petroleum.”

O’Donnell has a poor opinion of the company’s green initiatives saying “several years ago, BP, which probably spent as much as any company in the world to promote their green brand, was, at the same time, actively lobbying against efforts to limit global warming legislation – beyond petroleum and into the backrooms.”  In 2008, the company’s corporate PAC contributed to half of the Dirty Dozen and to Congressman Joe Barton.

According to environmental watchdogs, things have not changed a great deal since 2000.  A 2009 study published by Greenpeace reported that BP “allocated 93 percent ($20 billion) of its total investment fund for the development and extraction of oil, gas and other fossil fuels.  In contrast, solar power was allocated just 1.39 percent, and wind a paltry 2.79 percent.”  Along with its aggregate investment in alternative energy – including wave, tidal, and biofuels – this amount is only 6.8 percent of BP’s total investment.  Greenpeace claims that this information is from internal company documents which it obtained.

As recently as last month, BP entered into a settlement with the EPA stemming from charges related to violations of The Clean Air Act. According to Catherine R. McCabe, the acting assistant administrator for the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance, “BP failed to fulfill its obligations under the law, putting air quality and public health at risk.” She added, “Today’s settlement will improve air quality for the people living in and around Texas City, many of whom come from minority and low income backgrounds.” BP has agreed to invest at least $161 million on “pollution control, enhanced maintenance, and monitoring.” Furthermore, the company must spend a total of $18 million, $12 million in civil penalties, and $6 million for supplemental environmental projects in the community.
9) Dow Chemical (DOW)

In 2006, The Dow Chemical Company announced its new advertising campaign. Dubbed “The Human Element”, the accompanying press release stated that the campaign sought to reintroduce the company the company, announcing “its vision of addressing some of the most pressing economic, social and environmental concerns facing the global community in the coming decade.”  Dow vice president of global communications and reputation, Patti Temple Rocks,  explained that the initiative is more than an ad campaign, calling it a statement to the world “about the future direction of our business.”  She went on to say, “It will be our calling card to people around the world to people who care about the future relationship between business, society and the environment.”

In 2008 the company’s Human Element advertising won a national advertising award for the best overall television commercial.  The ad, “The Bond  Between Us All,” focused on climate change. The commercial beat out advertisement from brands including Altoids, Bud Light, IKEA, and Nike.  Another excellent commercial featured in 2008, is set to a string quartet and features picturesque scenes of nature and human creativity coupled with eloquent narration that describes how the company seeks to embrace life’s most important character, the human element.  The narration provides, “The human element is the element of change.  It gives us our footing to stand fearlessly and face the future.  It is a way of seeing that gives us a way of touching issues, ambitions, lives.”

In May of 2001, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry received a petition from Michigan-based environmental groups seeking public health assessment of dioxin contaminated in Midland, Michigan.  In a subsequent report by the agency it was recorded that “levels of dioxins detected in soil in the city of Midland and in the fish in the Tittabawassee River downstream of Midland exceed health-based comparison values.”  The report further stated that dioxin is believed to cause carcinogenic effects at extremely low levels of exposure.

In January of 2002, Michigan-based environmental organization, Lone Tree Council, issued a press release calling for “federal probe into major dioxin cover-up in Michigan.”  According to the release, documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act indicated that Michigan Department of Environmental Quality Director Russell Harding had suppressed state health assessments that revealed dioxin levels in the Tittabwassee Riber floodplain, which were downstream from the company’s plant in Midland 80 times Michigan’s cleanup standards.  In February of 2002, MDEQ announced the Tittabawassee/Saginaw River Flood Plain Dioxin Environmental Assessment Initiative.

In 2007, Dow agreed to three EPA orders issued under the Superfund Act for sediment cleanup on the Tittabawassee River.  However, despite this agreement, Dow Chemical has been slow to respond.  As recently as 2008, the company claimed that it needed to measure the amount of the pollution before it could establish a cleanup program.  Although the company removed contaminants from four environmental hotspots, particularly polluted areas, it has spent over $40 million on sediment sampling as well as other studies.  According to the EPA, these areas include some of the highest dioxin levels recorded in the Great Lakes region.  In July of 2008 an agreement was reached between Dow Chemical and the EPA to clean up dioxin contamination in the Riverside Boulevard neighborhood.

As of this year environmental groups and the EPA remain frustrated with the progress the company has made.  In a March 3 EPA press release, the agency stated that “Dow Chemical Co. has agreed to conduct another Superfund removal action to clean up dioxin contamination in the Tri-Cities area.”  The project, focusing on the Saginaw Township’s West Michigan Park, was scheduled to begin in mid-April and go through early June.  According to a 2003 work plan issued to the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality, the park “is essentially a level field with an open expanse of grass for ball sports.”  The park includes picnic tables and a play area for children.  According to the 2003 report issued by MDEQ on Dow’s sampling study the company found that the range of dioxin contamination in the soil in West Michigan Park was 140 to 670 ppt (parts per trillion) with an average of 413 ppt.  In 2002, MDEQ established the residential action standard for soil containing dioxin at 90 ppt.  According the company’s 2003 work plan, the planned interim measures included a hand-washing station and replacement of sand in children’s play area along with cosmetic measures.

On March 2, , Lisa P. Jackson, the new head of the EPA, sent a letter to community and environmental groups who had voiced concern over Dow’s slow progress, She said that she would stop negotiations with Dow until EPA had been given the opportunity to take the groups’ concerns into consideration.  “My goal is to ensure an expeditious and robust cleanup, and I will take steps to ensure that the dioxin contamination is addressed in a manner that is protective of human health and the environment and that the process is open and transparent,” she wrote. It has been a long time coming.

10) General Motors (GM)

On July 5, 2007 General Motors Chevrolet division launched its “gas-friendly to gas-free” campaign.  The branding effort seeks to reposition GM as an environmentally responsible car company.  The press release stated that Chevrolet will “launch a major ad campaign intended to let the world know about its far-reaching approach to reducing petroleum consumption.”  In 2007, GM began to run commercials for the Chevrolet Volt, an electric prototype car that was not scheduled for production for several years.

One such ad featured the car sitting on a grassy hill surrounded by children with their ears pressed against the hood.  The children ask why the car is humming and a man explains, “That’s the sound of the future, the extended range electric car powered by the miracle of the advanced lithium-ion battery pack.  And they expect you get to 40 miles without a drop of gas.”  The ad then shows a series of icons representing fuel economy, E85 ethanol, hybrid, electric, fuel cell.  It concludes with the motto, “Chevy, from gas friendly to gas free.  That’s an American revolution.”  According to its website, these efforts include fuel efficiency, biofuels, hybrid, electric, and hydrogen fuel cells.

On September 16, 2008 the company unveiled the Chevrolet Volt electric vehicle.  “The Volt symbolizes GM’s commitment to the future,” said Rick Wagoner, the company’s former chairman and CEO.  Unlike a traditional hybrid vehicle that is both battery and gas powered, the company claims that the Volt is entirely electric.  Although the battery can only go 40 miles on a single charge, a gasoline engine will turn on once needed that will power the electric motor.  The company justifies the fact that the car should be considered electric, because the gas engine powers the electric motor and doesn’t power the wheels.

In addition to electric cars, GM has begun advertising its cars that run on ethanol, biofuels and fuel cells.  According to a 2008 press release, “GM has been working on hydrogen-powered fuel-cell propulsion systems for 11 years.  Fuel cell vehicles use hydrogen which is converted onboard into electricity.  Powered by hydrogen, the consequence of using fuel cell technology is no emissions.  Although this kind of alternative energy would be a remarkable step forward, the company indicates that the technology is still very immature.” The press release adds that “under a carefully scripted development plan at General Motors that culminates in as many as one million affordable FCVs by 2020.”  That’s quite a ways a way to be marketing it now.

In 2008, GM vice chairman Bob Lutz appeared on the Colbert Report, a satirical news and comedy program..  Lutz, interviewed by show’s host, Steven Colbert, lauded the environmental benefits of the Volt.  Following up, Colbert said “that’s tantamount to admitting that we have to do something about global warming, sir.  You don’t believe global warming is real, you said so?” In response, Lutz stated “I accept that the planet is heated, but I, like many noted scientists, don’t believe in the CO2 theory . . . In the opinion of about 32,000 t of the world’s leading scientists” global warming is the result of sun spots.  He appeared to be very sincere.

O’Donnell says “GM has long been one of the most anti-environment companies in America’s history, dating back to its efforts to limit car emission standards.  Because of their lobbying efforts, they created a loophole to reduce the average fuel economy of a car-makers fleet.  GM had legislation passed that provided “if you make certain number of cars that are flex fuel – cars that can take both regular and biofuel – the average fuel economy of all of the company’s cars can go down below emission standards.  The loophole enables car companies to use ethanol as a pretext for reducing fuel economy.” The company’s corporate PAC donated to over seven of the Dirty Dozen and Congressman Barton.

In 2007, according to a study by Union of Concerned Scientists, General Motors ranked as the second worst polluter, just above DaimlerChrysler, out of eight major car companies.  In addition, GM manufactures the most cars that have 15 MPG  or worse in city driving.  In 2008 the numbers were not much better for GM.  According to greenercars.org, the American Council for Energy-Efficient Economy’s site for consumer research on the environment, GM’s numbers have not improved.  The company had the most car models on the list with four.  Not surprisingly, the Hummer H2, which is exempted from fuel economy regulations because it is considered heavy-duty, was rated number 1.
Methodology
24/7 Wall St. evaluated the public actions of a number of global companies in order to measure which were engaged in extensive greenwashing.  Environmental groups and public relations firms have enumerated several standards that can be used to evaluate whether a company is engaged in the practice.  However, at the heart of greenwashing is a company’s desire to represent its business as environmentally friendly at the expense of honestly portraying their environmental character.

Common methods used by corporations include advertising, press releases, and websites.  Less obvious methods that are equally pernicious include trade groups that lobby the public on the company’s behalf, touting the adoption of non-governmental standards serving environmental protection, and establishing endowments for green academic research.  A number of the companies that 24/7 Wall St. selected have been identified by environmental groups as greenwashers.

In order to demonstrate that greenwashing misrepresents the environmental character of the company, 24/7 Wall St. considered adverse environmental causes in several ways.  Chief among these is pollution data.  As a result of the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act of 1986 and Pollution Prevention Act, EPA annually collects data from companies on releases and transfers of certain toxic chemicals and waste management activities from industrial facilities.  The agency then publishes the data through the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) program.  As part of the program, the TRI data is indexed and made publicly available through the EPA’s online databases and software.

The TRI database, called the TRI Explorer, allows queries based upon several criteria including industry code, chemical type, and facility.  Using TRI explorer, 24/7 Wall St. created toxic chemical release reports based upon industry and facility.  Using this methodology we identified the companies which released the largest amount of toxic chemicals according to 27 different industrial codes identified by the EPA.  This data included the ranking of each company’s facilities compared to the performance of other companies in the industry.  Frequently, the larger the share of the industry the company enjoyed the greater total amount of toxic release.

Relying on the TRI program, a number of organizations, including nonprofits and trade groups, create additional databases that further analyze this information based upon issues including the facilities reporting the release of the toxic chemicals, the companies which own the facilities, the level of toxicity of the chemicals, and the risk of public exposure to the chemicals.  24/7 Wall St. also used these databases, including the Political Economy Research Institute’s Toxic 100 index.

Enforcement data includes court orders, civil actions, and administrative rulings.  Generally, these arose from private or governmental concern over the company’s environmental conduct vis-à-vis EPA and State environmental regulations.  24/7 Wall St. reviewed case law and EPA enforcement actions to identify companies that had poor environmental records.  In addition to settlements and awards against the companies, 24/7 Wall St. also considered the company’s responses to environmental concerns raised by agencies and the public.  The greater the number of actions, the monetary value of the awards or settlements, and the reluctance of the companies to abide by the agreement were all factors that we took into consideration.

Finally, lobbying efforts had a substantial impact on whether companies were on the list.  Using OpenSecerts.org, a “nonpartisan guide to money’s influence on U.S. elections and public policy,” 24/7 Wall St. calculated the amount of contributions that each company made through their corporate PACs.  Specifically, we considered whether or not the company donated to particular members of the House and Senate who are known to have bad voting records on environmental laws.  All of the companies on our list donated to at least three Senators or Congressman who have such records.

By Ash Allen
Edited by Douglas A. McIntyre

Van Jones. What an amazing human being he is. One of the most passionate, articulate speakers I’ve ever had the pleasure to see and to meet. Not only does he have an impressive array of accomplishments to his name (Yale Law grad, co-founder of the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, founder and executive director of Green for All) but he’s a truly remarkable man. A notoriously loving father of two, he grew up in Oakland and has risen above so much to become a truly inspired, and remarkably inspiring leader. And, he was on the RAN board of directors before he chose to narrow his focus – a focus that has led him to serve in this most hopeful of administrations in Washington. We now truly have a friend in the White House. Read on below to catch this New York Times story on his being chosen for this new and vital role, and check him out towards the end of this short RAN video.

Van – we’re all behind you.

——

Author-activist tapped as White House ‘green’ jobs adviser

Author and activist Van Jones will serve as a special White House adviser for “green” jobs, enterprise and innovation.

Jones, 40, will work within the Council on Environmental Quality, which coordinates President Obama’s climate, energy and other environmental policy initiatives with federal agencies.

“Van Jones has been a strong voice for green jobs, and we look forward to having him work with departments and agencies to advance the president’s agenda of creating 21st century jobs that improve energy efficiency and utilize renewable resources,” CEQ Chairwoman Nancy Sutley said in a written statement last night.

Jones, a Yale Law School graduate and veteran human rights and environmental activist, participated last month in the first meeting of the White House Task Force on Middle-Class Working Families. The panel, convened by Vice President Joe Biden, focused on how the public sector can create “green-collar” jobs such as installing solar panels and retrofitting inefficient buildings (E&ENews PM, Feb. 27).

Jones urged Biden and other administration officials who participated in the Philadelphia panel to use the $787 billion economic stimulus to provide training for such jobs, which cannot be outsourced. Economically depressed areas should be a priority, he underscored.

“Let’s green the ghetto first,” Jones said to applause.

Jones will now help shape the administration’s energy and climate initiatives, with special emphasis on improvements and economic opportunities in vulnerable communities, CEQ officials said.

Jones, who could not be reached for comment, is the author of the 2008 book “The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems” and the co-founder of the Oakland, Calif.-based Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. Most recently, he served as a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, an influential think tank in Washington, D.C.

Joe Romm, a current Center for American Progress senior fellow and former assistant energy secretary during the Clinton administration, called Jones a “tireless” advocate for green-collar jobs in inner cities.

“He pushed this issue when no one was interested in it,” Romm added.

Jones’ candor and talent for firing up audiences will help in his new job, Romm posited.

“A big part of these bully pulpit jobs is selling ideas inside and outside of the administration,” he said. “Selling is one of his strong suits.”

Jones, who does not need Senate confirmation, will start his new job March 16, a CEQ spokeswoman said.

Copyright 2009 E&E Publishing. All Rights Reserved.

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