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The Weinberg Group and manufacturing uncertainty

Some good stuff on Environmental Science & Technology today.

Check out the piece on the Weinberg Group, a scientific consulting firm that specializes in helping chemical companies battle off lawsuits and criticism of their products, by coordinating marketing and hiring scientists to produce contrary studies. The marketing proposal to DuPont about PFOA (PDF) (a dangerous chemical used to make Teflon) that Paul D. Thacker got his hands on is pretty stunning. Among other things, it says:

[W]e will harness, focus and involve the scientific and intellectual capital of our company with one goal in mind -- creating the outcome our client desires. ... This would include facilitating the publication of papers and articles dispelling the alleged nexus between PFOA and teratogenicity as well as other claimed harm.

Greens like to talk about the Precautionary Principle -- preventing the use of chemicals before they've been definitively shown to cause harm. But I doubt most people know just how many resources are available to rich corporations to help them keep selling chemicals that have been shown to cause harm. There's a whole industry devoted to manufacturing uncertainty about issues important to corporations. How about a Cautionary Principle?

They are big — really, really big

In an interesting (albeit hopeless) op-ed called "Imagine a world where ExxonMobil gives back," Gar Alperovitz offers some interesting perspective on Exxon's recent profits:

In the quarter ended Dec. 31, the giant company made $10.7 billion -- the equivalent of more than $115 million for every one of its 92 days, nearly $5 million each hour, more than $80,000 every minute, nearly $1,350 each second.

ExxonMobil's overall 2005 revenues of $371 billion amounted to more than $1 billion a day! The total was larger than the entire economies of all but 16 of the 184 countries ranked by the World Bank. It was 40 percent greater than the gross national product of Indonesia, a member of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries with a population of 242 million.

More than a billion dollars a day. That's something else.

The whole thing's worth reading.

6,500,000,000

According to the World Population Clock, earth's (human) population will hit the 6.5 billion mark at exactly 7:16 p.m. EST this Saturday.

The Midas Crutch

EPA may replace ozone-depleting chemical with cancer-causing chemical Here’s a hypothetical: Say you were a nation that signed a pact to phase out ozone-depleting chemicals. Say you therefore needed an […]

No More Bull in the China Shop

China orders corrupt environmental protection officials to go straight In the wake of several destructive and internationally embarrassing pollution disasters, China is ordering local environmental protection officials to start, um, […]

SCOTUS CWA cases

Judith Lewis has an excellent post on the Clean Water Act cases headed to the Supreme Court today, including some interesting comparisons of press coverage from various regions. The nut is: In places where wetlands have been disappearing, they want federal protection. In places where they haven't yet, property rights rule the day.

As usual, everyone is for "small government" until they need government help.

Hayward responds

I took a few shots a Steven Hayward's recent piece in the Weekly Standard here. As is his wont, he replied quite courteously by email, portions of which I've pasted below the fold:

Building green while sitting on your couch

In case you have forgotten -- it's been a long week, with a holiday, hooray! -- last week's Dig This claimed that I will use my weekly soapbox here to promote house-related stuff that's affordable to the average human being.

Well, today's column is aimed at the average human being that owns a TV. If you are one of these lucky folk, you too can tune in to PBS this summer for the first-of-its-kind Building Green:

Um

Did someone actually ask this question?

Environmental justice

As the Director of the Sierra Club's Environmental Justice program, I'm thrilled to see that Grist is doing an in-depth analysis of various poverty and environment issues across the country. It is all too easy for many Americans, even those interested in environmental issues, to forget that low income communities and people of color suffer disproportionately at the hands of corporations and are neglected by our government officials.

Hurricane Katrina brought this disturbing fact into the limelight, and for awhile, Americans were painfully aware of the inequalities that pervade where we live, our access to resources, and how we're treated during a natural emergency. But as the hurricane fades from public consciousness, we can't forget those realities.

Odds are that no matter where you live, there's a community living with environmental injustice nearby. No person should be condemned to living in a polluted community, and we must all work to ensure that people of color and low-income people are not disproportionately affected by pollution. We must see this work as integral to the environmental movement as a whole. Sierra Club supports environmental-justice efforts by assisting communities that deal with air pollution, mountaintop-removal mining, destruction of sacred sites, industrial facilities being built in neighborhoods, and sickness and death caused by chemical exposure. Find details on the work we are doing to support communities facing environmental injustices at our site.

Thanks for all of the work everyone is doing!