Monday, 25 Feb 2002

The Polluter Pays ... Less and Less

The Superfund toxic waste cleanup program was founded under the slogan "the polluter pays" and got its name from the vast financial reserves in the account. Now both the slogan and the name are misleading; the Bush administration has announced that it will not reinstate corporate taxes to boost the dwindling funds in the account, which means the majority of the cost of cleanup will be picked up by taxpaying citizens. Superfund is used to clean up "orphan sites" -- those where the polluter cannot be identified or cannot pay, as well as for emergency cleanups. In 1995, under industry pressure, Congress let the taxes that fund the Fund expire; the Superfund coffer has since declined from a high of $3.8 billion in 1996 to a projected $28 million next year. Over roughly the same period, taxpayer funding of Superfund cleanups increased from $250 million (about 21 percent of the overall fund) in '94 to a projected $700 million next year (more than 50 percent of the fund).

Silicon Death Valley

Nineteenth century labor conditions and 21st century technology are clashing in impoverished areas of Asia, where millions of tons of obsolete high-tech gear are shipped from the U.S. to be stripped of valuable parts. The practice, which is highly dangerous for both workers and the environment, is documented in a new report released today by the Silicon Valley Toxics Coalition of San Jose and the Seattle-based Basel Action Network. The report documents unsafe practices ranging from tending coal-fires to melt lead solder off of circuit boards to using nitric and hydrochloric acids to extract gold from computer chips. Most workers wear no protective gear whatsoever, the sludge produced by the extraction processes is dumped into rivers and irrigation ditches, and black ash from coal and chemical fires coats entire villages. The U.S. is one of only three countries (the others are Haiti and Afghanistan!) that hasn't ratified the 1989 Basel Convention to regulate international trade in toxic material.

Solutia-ns

Chemical giant Monsanto and its spin-off company Solutia are legally responsible for polluting the town of Anniston, Ala., with PCBs, a jury ruled Friday morning. The verdict represents an initial victory for the people of Anniston, but the battle is far from over: Some 3,500 individual claims of illness and financial loss have yet to be tried in this case alone, and all told, more than 25,000 people have sued or are suing the companies from damages related to PCB production in the area. The folks at Solutia said they were "disappointed" by the jury's unanimous ruling of guilt on charges of negligence, wantonness, fraud, trespass, nuisance, and outrage. Monsanto's legal team has asked the judge to dismiss the claims of 2,042 plaintiffs it says have no detectable PCBs in their blood or have not been tested. Anniston's Monsanto-owned chemical company produced PCBs from 1935 to 1971.

What a Heel

With President Bush still scoring stunningly high in public opinion polls, the environment is shaping up to be his Achilles' heel -- and Democrats aren't hesitating to aim their arrows. Sens. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.), both potential presidential candidates for 2004, have attacked Bush's environmental policies, and former Vice President Al Gore has decried the president's laissez-faire approach to global warming. To capitalize on the president's weak point, Democrats are angling to recast environmental issues as national security issues, saying the war on terrorism highlights the need for an energy policy that doesn't rely on oil. In what may be an even more important shift, Dems are trying to refashion environmentalism (once thought of as the province of the elite) as a populist concern, arguing that Bush's policies favor massive companies (can anyone say Enron?) at the expense of the environment and the little guy.

A Tale of Two Tribes

Two Inuit tribes -- the Inupiat and the Gwich'in -- live just 150 miles apart, but when it comes to the debate over oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, a vast ideological gulf separates them. A few hundred Inupiat live in Kaktovic, the only town inside the borders of the refuge; about 150 Gwich'in live in Arctic Village, just outside the refuge's southern border. The Inupiat say opening 1.5 million acres of the 19-million-acre refuge to drilling is critical to their survival, while the Gwich'in say it would destroy their community and way of life. (The Inupiat have a stake in the oil, so drilling could lead to an influx of cash into their community; the Gwich'in, meanwhile, survive off the land, especially the caribou that calve in the part of the refuge where the drilling would take place.) Members of both tribes have come to Washington, D.C., to plead their cases, and advocates and opponents of drilling alike have tried to leverage the opinions of native groups to bolster their cause.