Millions of Americans at Risk as Chemical Lobby Blocks Legislation

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
August 25, 2009
11:26 AM
CONTACT: Greenpeace
Jane Kochersperger, (202) 680-3798 cell; Mae
Stevens, Policy Analyst, (202) 319-2454 direct


Millions of Americans at Risk as Chemical Lobby Blocks Legislation
Lobby Includes Former Members of Congress & Senior Obama Supporters

WASHINGTON - August 25 - In a new Greenpeace investigation into the lobbying of the chemical industry against chemical security legislation, researchers identified an army of 169 lobbyists who successfully led a campaign to kill legislation in 2008. If passed, the legislation would have significantly reduced the consequences of terrorist attacks on "high risk" chemical plants in the U.S.

Among the chemical industry's legion of lobbyists are former Members of Congress, legislative directors, and chiefs of staff. Most notably, Moses Mercado, of Olgivy represented the American Chemistry Council (ACC), American Petroleum Institute, Chevron, Hess and Monsanto. Prior to his work with Ogilvy, Mercado worked for former Representative Dick Gephardt (D-MO) and was chief of staff for Representative Gene Green (D-TX), who is a key member of the Energy and Commerce Committee, which is currently taking up comprehensive chemical security legislation. Mercado was also a Super Delegate (TX) for Obama and turned down a paid position in the presidential campaign because of his registered lobbyist status and instead volunteered extensively for Obama during the campaign.

Other prominent examples in the revolving door crowd include: former Representative Cal Dooley (D-CA), who was appointed CEO of the ACC in 2008; former Representative Gerry Sikorski (D-MN), who was the author of chemical plant right-to-know legislation in 1986 and a former member of the Energy & Commerce Committee; and former Governor John Engler (R-MI), who is the CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers whose members include major chemical companies.

As Senators, Barack Obama and Joe Biden were champions of legislation almost identical to what is now pending in Congress. In 2006, Barack Obama said: "We cannot allow chemical industry lobbyists to dictate the terms of this debate. We cannot allow our security to be hijacked by corporate interests." Yet while the chemical industry again tries to stall legislation in Congress, the new Obama administration has been silent. Greenpeace posted a video of the Senators' speeches on the issue at: http://vimeo.com/6036562

"It is not yet clear whether industry lobbyists, such as Moses Mercado, who had unprecedented access to Obama in 2008, have been effective in weakening the President's policies on chemical security," said Rick Hind, Legislative Director of Greenpeace.

"Regardless of their resources, we can not let the security of the U.S. be compromised by corporate lobbyists. It's time for Congress and the President to stand up to these influence peddlers and protect the millions of Americans still at risk," said Hind.

In June, a comprehensive bill (H.R. 2868) that would replace the 740 word temporary law prohibiting any requirement of safer chemicals and exempting thousands of chemical facilities moved out of the House Homeland Security committee. If passed, the new legislation would require the highest risk chemical plants to use safer chemicals or processes to reduce the catastrophic risks that currently endanger millions of Americans where feasible. The bill will next be taken up in the House Energy & Commerce Committee in September along with H.R. 3258, a companion water facility bill.

In a March 2009 letter to Congress, 34 chemical industry trade organizations again expressed their opposition to safer chemical processes. This letter served as a roadmap to trace industry trade organizations and the lobbyists they hired to kill chemical security legislation. The American Chemistry Council (ACC) is the largest chemical industry trade association. The two largest member companies of the ACC, Dow and DuPont, are active members of many of the trade associations that signed the March 2009 letter.

Using a conservative methodology, Greenpeace estimated a range of spending by the chemical industry lobbying against public safeguards in 2008. The range has a base minimum of nearly $13 million but may be as much as $44 million. The data was obtained from the official lobby reports gathered from the website http://sopr.senate.gov, the official site of the Office of the Secretary of the Senate.
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Independent campaigning organization that uses non-violent, creative confrontation to expose global environmental problems, and to force solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.

http://www.commondreams.org/newswire/2009/08/25-3

Appalachia and Colombia: The People Behind the Coal

Comment: Mining is mining, uranium and coal mining ruins people lives, land and air with the Federal and State gov't approving the mining!

Aviva Chomsky is professor of history and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts. The most recent books she has written are Linked Labor Histories: New England, Colombia, and the Making of a Global Working Class. (Duke University Press, 2008) and They Take Our Jobs! And Twenty Other Myths about Immigration. (Beacon Press, 2007). She has also recently co-edited The People Behind Colombian Coal: Mining, Multinationals and Human Rights/Bajo el manto del carbón: Pueblos y multinacionales en las minas del Cerrejón, Colombia (Casa Editorial Pisando Callos, 2007) and The Cuba Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Duke University Press, 2003).

Chomsky is also a founder of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, which has been working since 2002 with Colombian labor and popular movements, especially those affected by the foreign-owned mining sector. She just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation (May 28 – June 6) that traveled to two regions devastated by coal mining: the state of Kentucky and to northern Colombia. The Kentucky segment was sponsored by Kentuckians For The Commonwealth (KFTC), where participants witnessed the impact of Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on local communities. In Colombia the delegation met with human rights activists, trade unionists, members of Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities, and others affected by coal production in Colombia.

Hans Bennett: Having just returned from the Witness for Peace delegation’s trip to Kentucky and Colombia, can you please tell us about your visit to Kentucky, and about the group ‘Kentuckians For The Commonwealth’ (KFTC)?

Aviva Chomsky: KFTC is a community organization working on social justice issues, one of them being local resistance to mountaintop removal coal mining that is destroying lands and communities in Appalachia. I’ve been working with them since last summer, when 4 people from that organization came with us on our delegation to the Colombian coal region. The connections they made between the two regions were amazing. In both, big companies run roughshod over some of the poorest and most marginalized people. People are losing their land, their water, their right to clean air, and their homes to the coal mines. The Kentuckians felt a real link with the Colombian communities, that they were part of the same struggle. Last fall, we worked with KFTC to organize a tour for two Colombian coal union leaders. They spent a week in Kentucky, seeing for themselves the results of mountaintop removal, and speaking to different audiences there. The Colombians were also incredibly moved by the destruction of land and lives in Kentucky. They couldn’t believe that this was happening in the First World. We decided we’d really like to organize a delegation that would visit both regions—and that’s what we did this summer. We spent 3 days in the Kentucky coal region, and then went to Colombia. We also had 5 people from Appalachia, all involved in different aspects of the movement against mountaintop removal, with us on the Colombian part of the delegation.

HB: What did members of the group share with the delegation?

AC: One thing that really struck me was the ways that people in both the Colombian and the Kentuckian coal regions talked about the land. I’m from the city, and have lived a pretty cosmopolitan life. For people in eastern Kentucky, like those in northern Colombia, the land is tied to the essence of their identity. People have generations-long ties to the land, they farm the land, they feel personally connected to the mountains, to the rivers, to the farms. Also, in both regions, people are aware that they are seen as expendable, not only by the coal companies, but by the centers of power. Both regions suffer from a lack of state services, and have been really politically marginalized. But also in both regions, there is a really powerful sense of collective identity that I think has contributed to the strength of the social struggles there.

In one interview a few years ago, a Colombian indigenous leader explained to us that for his people, the earth was “la madre tierra,” mother earth. “It hurts us to see the earth damaged,” he said, pointing to the gaping hole of the mine. People in eastern Kentucky talked the same way about their mountains.

HB: What has been the impact of the coal mining industry, Mountain Top Removal mining and Valley Fills on the local communities?

AC: The impact has been devastating. I’ve never been anywhere else in the United States where you can’t drink the water! But the tap water smells so sulfurous that I was even wondering if it was safe to shower in. People in the region complain of the same kinds of illnesses and reactions that we’ve seen in Colombia—respiratory ailments, rashes and skin diseases, eye diseases—reactions to coal particles in the air and in the water. Rivers that used to run crystal clear have turned into toxic sludge. People’s homes are being surrounded by the various impacts. A mountainous region is being flattened. A way of life and a people are being forced into extinction.

After visiting Kentucky, the Colombian union leaders told us they were shocked by how “irrational” the mining was there. I didn’t really understand what they meant until I saw it myself. In Colombia, there are huge 7-foot seams of coal. The mines there are giant operations that have opened up many-mile long areas. In Kentucky, whole mountains are being felled for little seams that are only a few inches wide! And believe it or not, there seem to be more serious reclamation efforts going on in Colombia than in Kentucky.

HB: After visiting Kentucky, the delegation flew to Colombia, which your flyer explains is “the largest recipient of U.S. military aid in the hemisphere, and also the country with the highest levels of official and paramilitary violence, including forced displacement, killings of journalists, trade unionists, and human rights activists.” The flyer asserts that “foreign corporations are some of the major beneficiaries of this situation.” How do the corporations benefit from this? How does US financial and diplomatic support for the Colombian government influence the situation?

AC: Colombia is the poster child for neoliberalism in Latin America. Since the 1970s the United States—and the international financial institutions that it plays a leading role in, like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund—have been pushing a development model on Latin America that calls, essentially, for governments to act in the interests of multinational capital. Governments are supposed to invite in foreign investment, and provide it with low taxes, low wages, and low regulation. They are supposed to cut back on social spending, and offer state enterprises up to the private sector. And, they’re supposed to quash any popular protest against these policies, using force if necessary. These policies have gone by names such as structural adjustment, the Washington Consensus, the Chicago Boys prescriptions (referring to the role of Milton Friedman and other economists from the University of Chicago), or neoliberalism. The United States has played a key role in the implementation of these policies—from working for the overthrow of elected socialist president Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, and their implementation there, to Plan Colombia today, by which the United States provides military and economic aid that goes directly to implementing this economic model and crushing protest.

Union leaders have been some of the most visible victims. In the U.S.-owned Drummond mine in northern Colombia, three union leaders were assassinated in 2001. The company is currently facing a lawsuit in the United States for allegedly paying a paramilitary force to carry out the murders. Another U.S. company, Chiquita Brands, admitted to making payments for years to the paramilitaries. They claimed that they made the payments to protect their workers, but banana workers—and especially union activists—were the main victims among the hundreds murdered by paramilitaries during the 1990s and early 2000s.

HB: Before we talk about the delegation’s visit to Colombia this month, I’d like to first refer back to our 2007 interview in Z Magazine titled Colombia Solidarity Work, and ask you to please give an update about what has been going on since then, during this two year period since then.

AC: When we visited the Cerrejón mine in the summer and late fall of 2006, the company had taken the stance that it would not recognize or negotiate with the displaced Afro-Colombian community of Tabaco. It also insisted that community issues and union issues be kept completely separate. The union had included a demand about the rights of the communities in its 2006 bargaining proposal, and the company absolutely refused to include this in the contract—although they did agree to a side letter inviting the union to participate in the company’s social programs.

In the summer of 2007, Cerrejón announced that it was forming a Social Review Panel to evaluate its relations with the communities and provide recommendations. The Panel concluded that the displacement of Tabaco was a festering wound, and that the company simply had to rectify this if it wanted to develop any kind of working relationship with the local communities. The company agreed, finally, to engage in collective negotiations with former Tabaco residents, aimed at a resettlement of the community. This was a struggle that had been going on for ten years! In December of 2008, the company signed an agreement with the community defining the terms of the relocation and for compensation for the people who had been displaced. This was a huge victory.

Still, in some ways we were struck with how much has not changed. Although the agreement was signed with Tabaco, the relocation process has not yet begun—so people are still displaced. In the other communities we work with, the company has been engaging in collective negotiations for relocation—but they are still desperately poor, landless, and living in the shadows of the world’s largest open-pit coal mine.

In the Cesar Department, where the U.S.-owned Drummond mine operates, things are even worse. Union leaders there live in daily fear for their safety and lives. We had hoped to return to one community that we visited last summer, Mechoacán—but it had been wiped off the map. We met with the communities of Boquerón, El Hatillo, and Plan Bonito, that are slowly being strangled by the mine. Drummond, unlike Cerrejón, still refuses to recognize any right to collective relocation for these communities, and is simply trying to starve people out in hopes that they will leave.

HB: Okay, now let’s talk about your recent visit to Colombia. Who did you meet with and what did they talk about? What were the key issues addressed?

AC: The main issues we’ve been working on, with our partners in Colombia, are labor rights and community rights, in the areas where the multinational coal mines operate. The coal region in Colombia is in the north, close to the Caribbean coast, in the Cesar and La Guajira Departments. The people who have lived there for decades, in some cases centuries, are mostly Afro-Colombian and indigenous peasants who have survived by farming, hunting, fishing, and day labor on ranches owned by large landholders in the area.

Multinational mining came to La Guajira in the 1980s, to Cesar in the 1990s. These mines are almost unbelievably gigantic operations—Cerrejón claims to be the largest open-pit coal mine in the world, and Drummond is currently undergoing expansion that it says will make it overtake even Cerrejón’s size. Each one employs thousands of workers, some directly, and some through subcontractors.

The main people we spent time with there were the unions at the two mines—including the Injured Workers Association at the Drummond mine—and the communities that have been displaced, or are in the process of displacement. Everyone we met with there seemed to share the belief that getting their stories out to the U.S. public was essential to protecting their lives and their livelihoods. Drummond is a U.S. company, and much of the coal produced by both mines is imported by U.S. power plants. People in Colombia are also acutely aware at the huge influence that the United States has on their country’s policies. Mostly, they want us to tell their stories here in the United States, so that people here will pressure Drummond, the companies that buy the coal, and the U.S. government, to make sure that workers and communities in the coal region have the same rights that we here enjoy—the right to personal safety, the right to clean water, to education, to safe working conditions, to form unions, to be able to provide for their children, to not live in fear of their government or of the companies that operate in their midst.

HB: How does the union organizing in Colombia compare to the organizing in Kentucky, and the US in general?

AC: We were shocked to learn that there are no unionized mines left in eastern Kentucky. Not even in Harlan County. Yet despite a high level of disillusionment with the United Mineworkers among many of the people we met with in Kentucky—because of its weak or non-existent critique of surface mining, and because of the capitulations it has made to industry that people believe are responsible for its demise in the region—people there have an incredibly high level of union consciousness. Nearly everybody we met talked to us about how their fathers, their uncles, their grandfathers, had fought and in some cases shed blood, to bring in the union.

Unions in Colombia—especially those in the coal mines—are extremely militant, and have a strong current of leftist analysis and environmental consciousness that are pretty uncommon among unions in the U.S. today. The union leaders we met with talk about foreign mining companies raping the land and the people, looting their country’s natural resources, lining the pockets of shareholders with coal produced with the blood and the land of Colombians.

In both the U.S. and Colombia, union density has been falling. In Colombia, the main cause has been violence against unions; in the U.S., deindustrialization has played a big role. The AFL-CIO has a checkered history in Colombia, as it does in the rest of Latin America. Historically, the federation has been closely linked to U.S. foreign policy goals through the American Institute for Free Labor Development or AIFLD. I think the AFL-CIO is trying to overcome this past, and the suspicion it has generated in Latin America. Yet it is also struggling with internal conflicts, and now the accelerating economic crisis, and I think it has not made as much progress as it could in the area of trying to develop real international solidarity.

HB: How does the coal mining trade fit into the current global energy crisis and fossil fuels’ effects on the environment, including global warming?

AC: We had an interesting conversation about this during one of our meetings in Colombia. One of our delegates works with the Move America Beyond Coal campaign, and she asked Jairo Quiroz, the president of the Sintracarbón union that represents workers in the Cerrejón coal mine, more or less the same question: don’t we just have to stop mining and burning coal altogether, given its environmental impact? Jairo’s response really challenged all of us, I think. “There is no clean source of energy,” he said. “You in the United States are the ones who use most of the world’s energy resources. What do you propose to use, if we stop mining coal? Petroleum and natural gas are no better for the environment than coal is, and both contribute to global climate change. Nuclear energy also requires mining, and creates waste products even more dangerous than coal’s. Solar energy and wind energy are only viable where those resources are sufficiently available, and they also require production, transmission and storage techniques and equipment that depend on mining (for turbines, batteries, solar panels, etc.) and the use of toxins. So-called biofuels are the worst of all, because they expand the agro-industrial model which has profound environmental effects—from deforestation to desertification to overuse of pesticides and fertilizers—and it also disrupts the whole food chain by channeling agricultural land to the production of fuel instead of food.” Basically, his point was that rather than pointing the finger at coal, we needed to think about the underlying causes of environmental destruction—like our overuse of energy. “As long as you want to keep using that much energy,” he said, “we’re going to keep mining coal.”

There’s always a challenge, in a campaign for social and political change, to choose a target that’s narrow enough that you can effectively organize around it, but making sure that you don’t get distracted from the larger goals by the narrow target. In Salem, we have a coal-fired power plant. Some people argue, from an environmental perspective, that we should shut down the plant. But what are the larger implications of that argument? Unless we are planning to stop using electricity altogether, it just means that we’ll be getting it from another plant somewhere else. It can turn into a kind of NIMBY-ism [i.e., “not in my back yard”]—we don’t want to have to see the impact of our standard of living, we want to displace it onto somebody else. That’s how our system works—and that’s how we’re encouraged to think. We need to think more profoundly about the causes of global warming and environmental destruction if we really want to address them.

This may seem only peripherally related, but one of the communities we visited, in the Cesar Department, was located right next to the trash dump for the city of La Loma. Trash is blowing around, and it smells awful. Also, many of the communities we work with have no running water—thus no real latrines. These issues made me think about the multiplications of our privileges in the First World. We don’t have to see where our energy comes from, and we don’t have to see where our waste goes—we just live in this bubble of plenty and our waste is invisibly whisked away—all of which encourage us to continue abusing and wasting the earth’s resources!

HB: How has the recent election of several leftist and ‘left of center’ Presidents throughout Latin America (most recently in El Salvador) changed US power and influence? How do you think the US is reacting to this? What role with Colombia play in US strategy given that it is one of the last remaining right-wing governments?

AC: The United States is clearly counting on Colombia to play a major role in maintaining and promoting what they call “U.S. interests”—which generally means the interests of U.S. corporations—in Latin America. Ecuador’s new government recently announced that it is not renewing the U.S. lease on its military base in Manta, Ecuador. So among other things, it looks like Colombia will be the site of the new base that will replace Manta.

There are really two things that a leftist government in Latin American needs to accomplish—neither one of them simple. One is to redistribute their countries’ resources internally, to address the region’s devastating social and economic inequalities. The other is to reformulate Latin America’s relationship with the rest of the world, to break out of the pattern established after 1492, in which Latin America provides cheap labor, and cheap resources, for the benefit of Europe and later the United States. These are monumental problems, and the United States government has shown itself pretty committed to keeping the status quo, even if doing so requires violence, murder, invasions, or coups.

Many of the people I spoke with on this trip seemed to feel a lot of hope that we’re entering a new era, in which the United States will choose—or be forced—to accept major structural changes in Latin America. Despite Obama’s diplomatic language, he’s already shown that he’s quite ready to use military methods to further what the U.S. defines as its interests in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But other factors—the swing to the left in Latin America, the work towards alternative regional economic integration, the economic crisis, and the growing global awareness of the environmental crisis and the planet’s limited resources—could contribute to some real changes.

HB: How can readers best help support the current work of the North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee, Witness for Peace, and those in Colombia who you recently visited?

AC: We’re hoping to bring one or two community leaders from the Colombian coal region to the U.S. on speaking tours this fall. We are also planning another delegation for next summer. And, we do occasional “urgent action” requests in support of the work our Colombian partners are doing. You can join the Witness for Peace or NSCSC e-lists to get updated information about all of these activities, or write to us directly at nscolombia@comcast.net if you want to get more involved in the planning.

Hans Bennett is an independent multimedia journalist, whose website is www.insubordination.blogspot.com.

It's Gone, Baby, Gone for More Appalachian Mountains

Comment: Sad that Mt Top Removal will not be stop by 4th Circuit Court and they contribute to our sad Cheaspeake Bay D + grade water grade. Of course, the D + will be a F - when each headwaters of Virginia Rivers (all dumps into the bay) will have an uranium mining on them if the State of Virginia approves Uranium Mining & Milling!


Here we go again: Today the federal appeals court (4th Circuit) in Richmond rejected a request by public interest groups to reconsider its decision last month to overturn a lower court ruling that had curtailed mountaintop removal coal mining in West Virginia. With a 4-3 majority ruling against a rehearing, it looks like the Army Corps of Engineers can proceed with its plans to issue permits that will result in coal companies filling more valleys (and burying more headwater streams) with mining waste.

rperks's diary :: ::
Of the judges who favored a new review of the case, Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson hit the nail on the head by writing in his dissent:

"...West Virginia is witnessing in the Appalachian headwaters the long, sad decline that Virginia and Maryland have seen with the Chesapeake Bay. Once the ecologies of streams and rivers and bays and oceans turn, they cannot easily be reclaimed. Most often than not, the waterway is simply gone for good."

Sad to say, but with the U.S. Court of Appeals continuing to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, the prospect of stopping mountaintop removal once and for all in the courts appears to be a long shot

Since the legal system seems to provide little or no recourse these days, it's up to our elected officials to finally do the right thing. All the more reason to wonder (and worry over) why the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently opted to allow more than three dozen mountaintop removal permits in West Virginia to proceed.

The current situation is more than a bit muddled and I certainly don't presume to know what's going on at the moment. But let's step back and assess where we find ourselves in this fight right now...

First off, there is no doubt that the Obama administration is infinitely better than the Bush administration on this issue -- that's primarily because the previous administration was so horrible. Clearly, the new administration has taken a couple of positive steps forward. Carefully examining the environmental impact of proposed mountaintop removal operations, as EPA has done in some cases, is necessary. It is also heartening that the Interior Department has moved to rescind the Bush administration's weakening changes to the long-standing stream buffer zone rule. But these necessary and appropriate steps fall far short of what is sufficient.

The Obama administration seems to be assuming that some mountaintop removal mining -- perhaps even a lot of it -- is okay. But the people who live in Appalachia know better. Mountaintop removal, the world's worst strip mining, is unacceptable. Period. Objecting to some proposed mining permits, but green-lighting others, does not recognize this basic fact. Nor does reinstating the old, more stringent buffer zone rule without committing to enforce it, as prior administrations had unfortunately done.

To do right by the people of Appalachia, President Obama needs to end mountaintop removal. There are bi-partisan bills in Congress right now -- the Clean Water Protection Act in the House and the Appalachia Restoration Act in the Senate -- that target the practice, and the president can announce his intent to sign legislation that ends mountaintop removal once and for all.

Similarly, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers can immediately take steps to reverse the administrative regulation they adopted in 2002 that gave the Corps the authority to permit the dumping of waste in surface waters, which also would curtail mountaintop removal coal mining.

You'd think that halting the Appalachian Apocalypse would be a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the false perception still holds that coal is the economic engine of the region's downtrodden economy. This is a myth perpetuated by the politically powerful coal industry. Consider West Virginia as an example. Jobs from mining account for just 3.3% employment in the Mountain State -- we're talking less than 20,000 jobs total, compared to the halcyon days back in 1940 when there were more than 130,000 coal miners in the state.

It's important to note that back then practically all coal miners worked underground. Whereas an underground operation might employ hundreds of miners for several years, the typical mountaintop removal operation -- which is far more environmentally destructive -- is largely mechanized and therefore employs only a handful of miners for several months or a few years at most. Think about it this way: banning mountaintop removal would actually INCREASE jobs because more miners would be needed to go back inside the mountain to dig out the coal rather than blowing the top off the mountain with high explosives and filling the valleys and streams down below with toxic debris.

I encourage everyone to consider the compelling -- and common sense --economic case against mountaintop removal.

Simply put, if we're banking our country's energy future on the dirty energy of the past -- particularly that which is produced by sacrificing Appalachia's mountains, streams, forests, wildlife, and fellow Americans living in the coalfields -- then we risk undermining the Obama administration's investments in 21st Century clean energy solutions that will protect our planet, produce more jobs and preserve our natural resources.

http://www.wvablue.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=4498

NUCLEAR POWER: No More Reactors at North Anna

Comment: This is a scary article; the State of Virginia did not enforce the law for a corporation!!!Why??? Because Corporations dictate to the most States!!! So if uranium mining is approved, will the country of Canada dictate to the State of Virginia??? Will Virginia let Canada ruin our water, air & land ......it looks like to me....... $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$

LOUIS ZELLER TIMES-DISPATCH COLUMNIST
Published: May 24, 2009

The recent ruling of the Circuit Court of the City of Richmond was short and to the point:

"Virginia law requires regulation of Dominion's thermal pollution discharge because the exception for waste treatment simply doesn't apply here." With this ruling, a decades-old viola tion of the law was ended. The impact of the decision could benefit the many thousands of people who use Lake Anna annually.

Dominion's permit violated the law.

In 2007 the Virginia Water Control Board approved a permit for Dominion Virginia Power to discharge hot water from its North Anna nuclear power plant into Lake Anna. The permit was illegal for several reasons.

First, under the U.S. Clean Water Act, Virginia must protect water quality of the lake, but the state failed to limit hot water discharges flowing from the North Anna nuclear reactors directly into Lake Anna.

Second, heat is a pollutant and the maximum water temperature in cooling lakes is set by federal law: 89.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Lakeside residents report that water temperatures reach dangerous levels in the summer, as high as 104 degrees. The Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League and others have documented the serious harm to Lake Anna caused by excessive heat levels.

Third, the state water board applied the wrong law and analysis in concluding that part of Lake Anna was entitled to an exemption for waste treatment facilities. Dominion can no longer rely upon this error to exceed water quality standards at Lake Anna.

Finally, the state water board violated federal law when it applied a less protective Virginia law. The granting of federal authority to any state to enforce the Clean Water Act and issue permits comes with a floor below which no state may go. Virginia's environmental agencies are no exception.

Dominion has tried to argue that since it built the dam years ago, it should be able to do whatever it wants with the "hot side" of the lake. But it does not matter who created the lake. Lake Anna is public "waters of the United States" and is governed by the Clean Water Act.

It does not matter that the permit has been granted many times before. Committing an error more than once does not justify the original error. What matters is that Virginia is bound to enforce water quality standards. These standards include the limitation of heat pollution to all of Lake Anna.

So, what next? Once the court enters an order, Dominion's permit will be set aside and the Virginia State Water Control Board will have to evaluate the adverse impacts of hot water discharges to Lake Anna from two nuclear reactors. The board will have to bring the permit into compliance with the law. Meanwhile, the plant will continue to operate, producing electric power. Plant workers will continue to draw paychecks. Dominion will continue to pay taxes to Louisa County. The people living on Lake Anna will continue about their business.

What will not happen? Dominion will not put a fence around the lake. Such a move would be impractical, counterproductive, and would not address the problem of hot water in the lake. Dominion can continue to monitor lake conditions and maintain lake water levels. Nothing in the court's decision prohibits the company from acting in a responsible manner, working for the common good, and doing the right thing.

Indeed, if Dominion were to do something rash, that would be purely Dominion's decision. It would not result from the court's ruling. Dominion can and should continue both to operate its facility and to comply with the law. There should be no disruption of residents' and visitors' ability to enjoy all of Lake Anna.

Dominion's proposal to add a third nuclear reactor to the North Anna plant is not directly affected by the court's decision; it was not part of the lawsuit.

However, one question is inescapable: If two reactors on Lake Anna strain its ability to provide enough cooling water, what would a third reactor do? In response to water quality problems, Dominion has already trimmed its proposal by eliminating its plans for a fourth unit. This decision was smart, practical, and necessary. If Dominion cannot operate two nuclear reactors within federal requirements, a third is out of the question.

Armed with the Richmond Circuit Court's decision, Virginia's Department of Environmental Quality and the State Water Control Board now have the opportunity to improve conditions at Lake Anna.

Dominion Virginia Power may appeal this decision, but the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League plans to continue its campaign to end Virginia's breach of the law, to protect public health, and to improve environmental quality.

Louis Zeller is science director of the Blue Ridge Environmental Defense League. Contact him at bredl@skybest.comor

http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/opinion/commentary/article/ZELLER524_20090522-203709/269405/