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Rachel's Democracy & Health News #926

"Environment, health, jobs and justice--Who gets to decide?"

Thursday, September 27, 2007............Printer-friendly version
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Featured stories in this issue...

Why Is Uncle Sam So Committed To Reviving Nuclear Power?
  The long-advertised "nuclear renaissance" got under way this week
  when NRG Energy applied for a federal license to build two nuclear
  power plants in Texas, enticed by an offer of free money from Uncle
  Sam. "The whole reason we started down this path was the benefits
  written into the Energy Policy Act of 2005," says NRG's chief
  executive, David Crame.
U.N. Climate Panel Report's Key Findings
  Here is a concise summary of the findings of the Feb., 2007, report
  from the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC),
  representing the work of 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations.
Frog Deformities Linked To Farm Pollution
  The discovery of deformed frogs in many parts of the U.S. and
  overseas has caused concern for the survival of their populations.
  Without normal limbs, frogs are easy targets for predators. New
  research may have found an important contributor to this problem:
  fertilizer running off farm fields.
Driving CO2 Underground
  The coal industry is ready to bet its future (and, indeed, the
  future of the planet) on the hope of burying carbon dioxide under
  ground forever. But, "Real data on costs, monitoring requirements, or
  the fate of CO2 after years or centuries of being held in an
  underground repository are absent and won't become available any time
  soon."
Sentinel at the EPA: An Interview with William Sanjour
  Hat's off to Bill Sanjour! He spent many years at U.S.
  Environmental Protection Agency rooting out fraud and deception by
  agency higher-ups, then living with the negative consequences of his
  own honesty, clarity, and courage.

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From: Rachel's Democracy & Health News #926, Sept. 27, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]

WHY IS UNCLE SAM SO COMMITTED TO REVIVING NUCLEAR POWER?

By Peter Montague

The long-awaited and much-advertised "nuclear renaissance" actually
got under way this week. NRG Energy, a New Jersey company recently
emerged from bankruptcy, applied for a license to build two new
nuclear power plants at an existing facility in Bay City, Texas --
the first formal application for such a license in 30 years.

NRG Energy has no experience building nuclear power plants but they
are confident the U.S. government will assure their success. "The
whole reason we started down this path was the benefits written into
the [Energy Policy Act] of 2005," NRG's chief executive, David Crame,
told the Washington Post. In other words, the whole reason NRG
Energy wants to build nuclear power plants is to get bundles of free
money from Uncle Sam. Who could blame them?

Other energy corporations are nuzzling up to the same trough. The
federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is expecting to receive
applications for an additional 29 nuclear power reactors at 20
sites. The NRC has already hired more than 400 new staff to deal
with the expected flood of applications.

But the question remains, Can investors be fooled twice? Financially,
the nuclear power industry has never stood on its own two feet without
a crutch from Uncle Sam. Indeed, the nuclear power industry is
entirely a creature of the federal government; it was created out of
whole cloth by the feds in the 1950s. At that time, investors were
enticed by offers of free money -- multi-billion-dollar subsidies,
rapid write-offs, special limits on liability, and federal loan
guarantees. Despite all this special help, by the 1970s the industry
was in a shambles. The British magazine, the Economist, recently
described it this way: "Billions were spent bailing out lossmaking
nuclear-power companies. The industry became a byword for mendacity,
secrecy and profligacy with taxpayers' money. For two decades neither
governments nor bankers wanted to touch it."

Now the U.S. federal government is once again doing everything in its
power to entice investors, trying to revive atomic power.

First, Uncle Sam is trying hard to remove the financial risk for
investors. The Energy Policy Act, which Congress approved in 2005,
provides four different kinds of subsidies for atomic power plants:

1. It grants $2 billion in insurance against regulatory delays and
lawsuits to the first six reactors that get licenses and begin
construction. Energy corporations borrow money to build plants and
they must start paying interest on those loans immediately, even
though it take years for a plant to start generating income. The
longer the licensing and construction delays, the greater the losses.
Historically, lawsuits or other interventions by citizens have
extended the licensing timeline, sometimes by years, costing energy
corporations large sums. Now Uncle Sam will provide free insurance
against any such losses.

2. Second, the 2005 law extends the older Price-Anderson Act, which
limits a utility's liability to $10 billion in the event of a nuclear
accident. A serious accident at a nuclear plant near a major city
could create hundreds of billions of dollars in liabilities. Uncle Sam
has agreed to relieve investors of that very real fear.

3. The 2005 law provides a tax credit of 1.8 cents per kilowatt-hour
for the first 6,000 megawatts generated by new plants. Free money,
plain and simple.

4. Most important, the law offers guarantees loans to fund new atomic
power reactors and other power plants using "innovative" technology.
Investors need no longer fear bad loans.

One obvious conclusion from all this is that, more than 50 years into
the nuclear enterprise, atomic power still cannot attract investors
and compete successfully in a "free market." This industry still
requires an unprecedented level of subsidy and other government
support just to survive.

An energy corporation's motives for buying into this system are clear:
enormous subsidies improve the chance of substantial gain. However,
the federal government's reasons for wanting to revive a moribund
nuclear industry are not so clear. If the "free market" won't support
the revival of nuclear power, why would the federal government want to
pay billions upon billions of dollars to allay investor fears?

It certainly has little to do with global warming. At the time the
2005 energy bill was passed by a Republic-dominated Congress the
official position of the Republican leadership was that global warming
was a hoax. Even now when some Republicans have begun to acknowledge
that perhaps we may have a carbon dioxide problem, science tells us
that nuclear power plants are not the best way to reduce our carbon
dioxide emissions. They're not even close to being the best
way. (Lazy journalists are in the habit it repeating the industry
mantra that nuclear power produces no greenhouse gases. This is
nonsense. Read on.)

Substantial carbon dioxide emissions accompany every stage of nuclear
power production, from the manufacture and eventual dismantling of
nuclear plants, to the mining, processing, transport, and enrichment
of uranium fuel, plus the eventual processing, transport, and burial
of nuclear wastes.

A careful life-cycle analysis by the Institute for Applied Ecology
in Darmstadt, Germany, concludes that a 1250 megaWatt nuclear power
plant, operating 6500 hours per year in Germany, produces greenhouse
gases equivalent to 250,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide per year.
In other (unspecified) countries besides Germany, the same power plant
could produce as much as 750,000 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide
equivalents, the Institute study shows. (See Figure 3, pg. 5)

The study concludes that, in the emission of global warming gases
(measured per kilowatt-hour of electricity made available), nuclear
power compares unfavorably to...

** conservation through efficiency improvements

** run-of-river hydro plants (which use river water power but require
no dams)

** offshore wind generators

** onshore wind generators

** power plants run by gas-fired internal combustion engines,
especially plants that use both the electricity and the heat generated
by the engine

** power plants run by bio-fuel-powered internal combustion engines

Of eleven ways to generate electricity (or avoid the need to generate
electricity through efficiency and conservation) analyzed by the
Institute, four are worse than nuclear from the viewpoint of
greenhouse gas emissions, and six are better.

[For a great deal of additional solid information showing that nuclear
power is no answer to global warming, check in with the Nuclear
Information and Resource Service (NIRS)].

A study completed this summer by the Institute for Energy and
Environmental Research (IEER) in Takoma Park, Maryland concluded that
it is feasible, within 35 to 60 years, to evolve an energy system to
power the U.S. economy without the use of any nuclear power
plants or any coal plants. See the IEER study, Carbon-Free and
Nuclear-Free; A Roadmap for U.S. Energy Policy.

So the rationale for the U.S. government's Herculean efforts to revive
a decrepit nuclear power industry cannot be based on concern for
global warming or energy independence. The facts simply don't support
such a rationale.

Whatever its motivation, the U.S. federal government is doing
everything in its power to revive atomic power. In addition to
removing most of the financial risk for investors, Uncle Sam has
removed other obstacles like democratic participation in siting and
licensing decisions.

Throughout the 1970s, energy corporations complained that getting a
license took too long. In response, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission
(NRC) has spent more than a decade "streamlining" the process for
building nuclear plants. Most of the "streamlining" consists of new
ways to exclude the public from information and decisions. For
example, members of the public used to be able to question witnesses
during licensing hearings. No more. There used to be two sets of
hearings -- one for siting the plant, and another for constructing the
plant. No more. These two set of issues have been rolled into a single
license and a single hearing. The purpose is to accommodate the needs
of the nuclear industry, to help it survive. As attorney Tony Roisman
observed recently, "The nuclear industry has come to the agency [the
NRC] and said, 'If you don't make it easy for us to get a license, we
are not going to apply for one.'" So the agency is making it easy.

Perhaps it is natural for NRC commissioners to justify a strong bias
in favor of keeping the nuclear industry alive even if safety and
democracy have to be compromised. After all, if there were no
corporations willing to build new nuclear power plants, soon there
would be no need for a Nuclear Regulatory Commission. So NRC
commissioners know in their bones that their first priority must be to
keep the nuclear industry alive. Every bureaucracy's first priority is
self-perpetuation. Furthermore, historically a position as an NRC
commissioner can lead directly to a high-paying job, often in the
nuclear industry itself.

To grease the skids for a nuclear revival, the most important change
the NRC has made has been to creatively redefine the meaning of the
word "construction." This change was enacted in April, 2007, with
lightning speed -- six months from initial proposal to final adoption.
By way of comparison, it took the NRC eleven years to adopt
regulations requiring drug testing for nuclear plant operators.

"Construction" has traditionally included all the activities
undertaken to build a nuclear power plant, starting with site
selection, evaluation, testing and preparation, construction of
peripheral facilities like cooling towers, and so on. Even the
earliest stages of siting are crucially important with a facility as
complex and dangerous as a nuclear power plant.

In April of this year, the NRC officially redefined "construction" to
include only construction of the reactor itself -- excluding site
selection, evaluation, testing and preparation, construction of
peripheral facilities and all the rest. At the time, one senior
environmental manager inside NRC complained in an email that NRC's
redefinition of "construction" would exclude from NRC regulation
"probably 90 percent of the true environmental impacts of
construction." Under the new rules, by the time the NRC gets involved,
a company will have invested perhaps a hundred million dollars. Will
NRC commissioners have the backbone to toss that investment into the
toilet if they eventually find something wrong with the site? Or will
they roll over for the industry and compromise safety?

The lawyer who dreamed up the redefinition of "construction" is James
Curtiss, himself a former NRC commissioner who now sits on the board
of directors of the nuclear power giant, Constellation Energy Group.
This revolving door pathway from NRC to industry is well-worn.

One NRC commissioner who voted in April to change the definition of
construction is Jeffrey Merrifield. Before he left the NRC in July,
Mr. Merrifield's last assignment as an NRC commissioner was to chair
an agency task force on ways to accelerate licensing.

In April, while he was urging his colleagues at NRC to redefine
"construction," Mr. Merrifield was actively seeking a top management
position within the nuclear industry. In July he became senior vice
president for Shaw Group, a nuclear builder that has worked on 95% of
all existing U.S. nuclear plants. Mr. Merrifield's salary at NRC was
$154,600. Bloomberg reports that, "In Shaw Group's industry peer
group, $705,409 is the median compensation for a senior vice
president."

No one in government or the industry seems the least bit embarrassed
by any of this. It's just the way it is. Indeed, Mr. Merrifield points
out that, while he was an NRC commissioner providing very substantial
benefits to the nuclear industry by his decisions, his concurrent
search for a job within the regulated industry was approved by the
NRC's Office of General Counsel and its Inspector General. From this,
one might conclude that Mr. Merrifield played by all the rules and did
nothing wrong. Or one might conclude that venality and corruption
reach into the highest levels of the NRC. Or one might conclude that
after NRC commissioners have completed their assignment inside
government, everyone in the agency just naturally feels they are
entitled to a lifetime of lavish reward from the industry on whose
behalf they have labored so diligently.

As recently as this summer, Uncle Sam was still devising new ways to
revive nuclear power. In July the U.S. Senate allowed the nuclear
industry to add a one-sentence provision to the energy bill, which
the Senate then passed. The one sentence greatly expanded the loan
guarantee provisions of the Energy Policy Act of 2005. The 2005 Act
had specified that Uncle Sam could guarantee loans for new nuclear
power plants up to a limit set each year by Congress. In 2007 the
limit was set at a paltry $4 billion. The one-sentence revision
adopted by the Senate removed all limits on loan guarantees. The
nuclear industry says it needs at least $50 billion in the next two
years. Michael J. Wallace, the co-chief executive of UniStar Nuclear,
a partnership seeking to build nuclear reactors, and executive vice
president of Constellation Energy, said: "Without loan guarantees we
will not build nuclear power plants."

The Senate and the House of Representatives are presently arm-
wrestling over the proposed expansion of loan guarantees. In June, the
White House budget office said that the Senate's proposed changes to
the loan-guarantee program could "significantly increase potential
taxpayer liability" and "eliminate any incentive for due diligence by
private lenders." On Wall Street this is known as a "moral hazard"
-- conditions under which waste, fraud and abuse can flourish.

All these subsidies to revive a dead duck run directly counter to free
market ideals and capitalism's credo of unfettered competition. So the
intriguing question remains, Why? Why wouldn't the nation go whole-hog
for alternative energy sources and avoid all the problems that
accompany nuclear power -- routine radioactive releases, the constant
fear of a serious accidents, the unsolved problem of radioactive waste
that must be stored somewhere reliably for a million years, and -- the
greatest danger of all -- the inevitable reality that anyone who can
build a nuclear power plant can build an atomic bomb if they set their
minds to it. The recent experience of Israel, India, North Korea and
Pakistan in this regard is completely convincing and undeniable.

So why is Uncle Sam hell-bent on reviving nuclear power? I
don't have a firm answer and can only speculate. Perhaps from the
viewpoint of both Washington and Wall Street, nuclear power is
preferable to renewable-energy alternatives because it is extremely
capital-intensive and the people who provide the capital get to
control the machine and the energy it provides. It provide a rationale
for a large centralized bureaucracy and tight military and police
security to thwart terrorists. This kind of central control can act as
a powerful counterweight to excessive democratic tendencies in any
country that buys into nuclear power. Particularly if they sign a
contract with the U.S. or one of its close allies for delivery of fuel
and removal of radioactive wastes, political control becomes a
powerful (though unstated) part of the bargain. If you are dependent
on nuclear power for electricity and you are dependent on us for
reactor fuel, you are in our pocket. On the other hand, solar, wind
and other renewable energy alternatives lend themselves to small-
scale, independent installations under the control of local
communities or even households. Who knows where that could lead?

Then I think of the present situation in the Middle East. Saddam
Hussein started down the road to nuclear power until the Israelis
bombed to smithereens the Osirak nuclear plant he was building in
1981. That ended his dalliance with nuclear power and nuclear weapons
-- but that didn't stop Don Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney from using
Saddam's nuclear history as an excuse to invade his country and string
him up.

And now something similar is unfolding in Iran. Iran wants nuclear
power plants partly to show how sophisticated and capable it has
become, and partly to thumb its nose at the likes of Don Rumsfeld and
Dick Cheney -- and perhaps to try to draw us into another war that
would indelibly mark us for the next hundred years as enemies of
Islam, serving to further unite much of the Arab world against us.

Is this kind of thinking totally nuts? I don't think so. Newsweek
reported in its October 1, 2007 issue that Dick Cheney has been
mulling a plan to convince the Israeli's to bomb the Iranian nuclear
power plant at Natanz, hoping to provoke the Iranians into striking
back so that the U.S. would then have an excuse to bomb Iran. I'm not
making this up.

So clearly there are more important uses for nuclear power than just
making electricity. Arguably, nuclear reactors have become essential
tools of U.S. foreign policy -- being offered, withheld, and bargained
over. They have a special appeal around the world because they have
become double-edged symbols of modernity, like shiny toy guns that can
be loaded with real bullets. Because of this special characteristic,
they have enormous appeal and can provide enormous bargaining power.
Witness North Korea. And, as we have seen, nuclear reactors can
provide excuses to invade and bomb when no other excuses exist.

So perhaps Uncle Sam considers it worth investing a few hundred
billion dollars of taxpayer funds to keep this all-purpose Swiss army
knife of U.S. foreign policy available in our back pocket. In the past
five years, we've already devoted $800 billion to splendid little
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, at least partly to secure U.S. oil
supplies. Uncle Sam's desperate attempts to revive nuclear power can
perhaps best be understood as part of that ongoing effort at oil
recovery.

Meanwhile, investors should think twice before buying into the
"nuclear renaissance" because there's another "renaissance" under way
as well: A powerful anti-nuclear movement is growing again and they
will toss your billions into the toilet without hesitation. Indeed,
with glee.

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From: Reuters, Sept. 27, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]

U.N. CLIMATE PANEL REPORT'S KEY FINDINGS

Here are the key findings on climate change from a February 2, 2007
report by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which
represents the work of 2,500 researchers from more than 130 nations.

Evidence Of Human Causes

** "Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures
since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase
in anthropogenic (human) greenhouse gas concentrations," it says. The
IPCC says "very likely" means at least a 90-percent probability.

** "The level of confidence that humans are causing global warming has
increased a lot," report author Peter Stott said.

Temperature Increases

** It is very likely that extremes such as heat waves and heavy rains
will become more frequent.

** "For the first time we have a best estimate of what we can achieve
if we keep emissions levels lower," said report chair Susan Solomon.

** The report does not include possible warming from methane, a potent
greenhouse gas, escaping from melting permafrost.

** Warming is expected to be greatest over land and at high northern
latitudes, and least over the Southern Ocean and North Atlantic.

Sea Level Rises

** The report cites six models with core projections of sea level
rises ranging from 7.2 to 23.6 inches this century. That is a narrower
and lower band than the 3.5 to 34.6 inch gain forecast in 2001.

** If the Greenland ice sheet melts proportionally to the temperature
increases, then sea levels would rise by up to 31.6 inches this
century.

** Some models show an ice-free Arctic in summer by 2100, meaning that
sea ice floating in the water disappears, but not ice resting on
Greenland.

** If the Greenland ice sheet melted completely, that would lead to a
23.1-foot (7-metre) sea level increase.

Changing Ocean Currents

** The report predicts a gradual slowdown this century in ocean
currents such as the one that carries warm water to northwest Europe.

** "It's very unlikely there will be an abrupt breakdown in ocean
currents in the 21st century," said Jurgen Willebrand, the report's
author with special expertise in ocean effects.

Hurricanes

** The report says it is "more likely than not" that a trend of
increasing intense tropical cyclones and hurricanes has a human cause.

** It predicts such tropical cyclones will become more intense in the
future.

** "There may not be an increase in number, there may be a
redistribution to more intense events -- which is what has been
observed in the Atlantic since 1970," Stott said.

Copyright Reuters 2007

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From: New Scientist, Sept. 26, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]

FROG DEFORMITIES LINKED TO FARM POLLUTION

By Catherine Brahic

Fertiliser run-off could be causing an increase in frog deformities in
North American lakes, according to a new study.

Frogs with extra or malformed legs have been a focus of attention in
North America since 1995, when schoolchildren in Minnesota studying
wetlands found a high number of frogs with missing or extra legs.

Theories abounded on what was causing the malformations (see Freak
frogs). Some said pollution was to blame, but in 1999, Pieter Johnson
of Stanford University in California, US, showed that a flatworm
parasite (Ribeiroia ondatrae) was a major culprit.

But, "at low abundance, Ribeiroia ondatrae does not cause much
damage," says Johnson, now a researcher at the University of Colorado.

He now believes fertiliser pollution may be to blame for boosting the
number of parasites in lakes and ponds.

Pollution-parasite link

Run-off from non-organic farms contains large amounts of nutrients
contained in fertilisers such as phosphorus and nitrogen, which
eventually end up enriching the waters in nearby ponds, lakes and
rivers -- a phenomenon known as eutrophication. According to Johnson,
the amount of phosphorus that runs from rivers into the oceans has
increased about three-fold since the industrialisation of agriculture.

These enriched waters boost the growth of algae within them, which in
turn has a cascade of effects on the local food chain.

Johnson and his colleagues created 36 mini ponds in isolated tubs that
were filled with clear, non-polluted lake water. In half the tubs,
they added 200 micrograms of phosphorus per litre of lake water.
Polluted lakes can have up to five times that concentration, according
to Stephen Carpenter of the University of Wisconsin, a study co-
author.

The tubs were populated with algae, as well as frogs and small aquatic
snails. The snails, which feed on algae, are key to the flatworm
parasite's life-cycle -- it is inside them that the worm reproduces
before infecting frogs.

The researchers found that by boosting the growth of algae, the
nutrients eventually increase the number and size of the water snails.
In turn, this pushed up parasite numbers. "When their eggs hatch, the
parasites have to find a snail within 12 hours or else they die,"
explains Johnson.

Infected tadpoles

In tubs containing additional nutrients, snail biomass increased by
50% and infected snails produced twice as many parasitic worms. The
infection rate in frogs increased between two and five fold.

"If there are more snails, the parasites are more likely to find a
snail. And if the snails have more food, they survive longer. Once
infected they become zombies whose sole function is to release
parasites," Johnson told New Scientist.

The parasites then attack the frogs at the tadpole stage, infecting
the cells that eventually give rise to the frog's limbs. Cysts form in
the infected areas as the frogs develop, causing missing limbs, extra
limbs, and other malformations.

The discovery of deformed frogs has caused concern for the survival of
their populations. Without normal limbs, the frogs are easy targets
for predatory birds. What is more, many die long before they
metamorphose from tadpoles to adult frogs.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
(DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707763104)

Copyright Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

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From: Chemical & Engineering News (pg. 74), Sept. 24, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]

DRIVING CO2 UNDERGROUND

Despite many unknowns, hopes abound that carbon sequestration can
stanch global warming

By Bette Hileman and Jeff Johnson

Restructuring the world's energy supply to cut carbon dioxide
emissions is like turning a ship the size of Wyoming or West Virginia.
It can be done, engineers and scientists say, but they warn that the
ship's pilot better have a clear plan, a highly experienced crew, and
ample time to bring the big ship around in what are likely to be rough
seas.

Like Wyoming and West Virginia, the big ship is full of coal. Most of
the world's electricity and more than one-third of its anthropogenic
CO2 atmospheric emissions come straight from coal. Coal-fired power
plants generate a bit more than half of the U.S.'s electricity and an
ever-growing amount of the world's. Coal is integral to the climate-
change problem as well as key to any climate-change solution.

To avoid catastrophic global warming, most climate scientists believe
the atmospheric level of carbon dioxide cannot be allowed to rise
above 550 parts per million. They calculate that if CO2 levels pass
this threshold, the world will experience runaway climate change and a
host of disasters. Among them, much of the Greenland ice sheet will
likely melt over a century, raising sea levels by meters. Currently,
the atmospheric CO2 concentration is 383 ppm, 37% above the
preindustrial level of 280 ppm.

To keep atmospheric CO2 below 550 ppm, these scientists say, global
emissions must start falling by 2020 or 2030 at the latest, a
seemingly impossibly short time to overhaul the world's energy supply.

A massive reduction of carbon emissions can happen through some
combination of vast improvement in vehicle efficiency and overall
energy efficiency; widespread and rapid deployment of renewable energy
sources, such as wind and solar power; much more nuclear power; and a
huge reduction in emissions from coal-fired power plants and other
CO2-emitting industrial point sources.

Many scientists are betting that the fastest and cheapest way to curb
CO2 is to effectively sweep it under the rug. The solution, they say,
is to capture the gas at industrial emission point sources, compress
it, and inject it deep into Earth, where it will be sequestered and
isolated forever. Preliminary studies estimate that global geologic
reservoirs could hold some 9.5 trillion metric tons of CO2, more than
300 times the 26 billion metric tons of CO2 the world vents to the
atmosphere each year from all anthropogenic sources.

There are more than 8,000 industrial point sources around the world,
emitting 60% of global CO2. Coal-fired power plants make up more than
half of those point sources. These coal plants emit about 10 billion
metric tons of CO2 annually, 38% of the world's yearly CO2 emissions.
However, the world depends heavily on these same plants for
electricity. And while the U.S. is now only slowly adding to its
complement of coal-fired power plants, China is building more than one
plant a week, experts say.

CO2 sequestration is a gigantic undertaking, and like the enormous
volumes of CO2 to be captured and held, the stakes in sequestration's
success or failure are huge. If successful, sequestration offers a
path to avoiding a global climate-change disaster while retaining coal
as an energy source. It could even allow the coal industry to expand.
If a quest to implement sequestration proves unsuccessful, however,
the result would be a waste of valuable time and resources that could
have been vigorously directed toward non-carbon-emitting energy
sources and extreme energy efficiency, rather than relying on a false
solution that protects a historically powerful industry.

When quizzed about the merits of carbon sequestration versus those of
nuclear, wind, or solar energy technologies, James J. Dooley, senior
staff scientist with Battelle and the Joint Global Change Research
Institute, stops the discussion to underscore the size of the problem.

"We are talking about a transformation here," he stresses. "We are
going to be transforming the global energy system from one that is
optimized around venting greenhouse gases to the atmosphere to one
that is a multi-decadal effort to rebuild the global energy system and
one that is optimized to deliver all the services it did before but
with far, far fewer atmospheric emissions. This is not tinkering
around the edges of the economy. This will transform how we make
energy."

Dooley is a big supporter of carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
He notes that the oil industry has for years injected pressurized CO2
into depleted oil deposits to recover oil, that some 3,000 miles of
CO2 pipeline already exists in North America, and that CCS technology
is understood, although it has never been used or even tested on this
scale.

Indeed, real data on costs, monitoring requirements, or the fate of
CO2 after years or centuries of being held in an underground
repository are absent and won't become available any time soon.
Development of CCS will take decades, as CO2 continues to build up in
the atmosphere.

Despite this lack of experience with CCS, the strategy has a host of
supporters. The coal industry and utilities back it, and if
implemented on a large scale, it would allow the utilities to keep
burning coal while reducing CO2 emissions to the atmosphere. It is
popular with the oil and gas industry because it would alleviate a
shortage of pressurized CO2 that is used for enhanced oil recovery.
The Department of Energy says a flood of CO2 could quadruple the
country's recoverable oil reserves.

And many environmental groups are on the CCS bandwagon. The Natural
Resources Defense Council and Environmental Defense, for example, see
it as a bridge to a carbon-free energy future that relies much more on
solar and wind power and energy-efficient buildings. Environmentalists
now demand that no new coal-fired power plants be constructed in the
U.S. unless they are designed for CO2 capture. California, Oregon, and
Washington have mandated such a policy.

But Dooley and other climate scientists worry that the world, and
particularly the U.S., lacks a comprehensive plan and the experience
and time to cut global CO2 emissions enough to make a difference for
the future. He stresses that there is no driver for CCS.

CCS is a carbon-mitigation technology, he stresses. It takes energy to
run it. "There is no reason for a power provider to reduce the output
of its plant absent a belief that we are going to address climate
change. Without a climate policy that says we are going to reduce
emissions, you are not going to get that first [CCS] plant built,"
Dooley says.

He is joined in his concern by several scientists interviewed by C&EN
who, like Dooley, helped write a defining report by the United
Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on CO2
capture and storage. The report was published in 2005 but remains an
important publication in this debate.

Howard J. Herzog, program manager of the Carbon Sequestration
Initiative at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and David Keith,
director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy, Environment &
Economy at the University of Calgary, Alberta, warn that the world and
the U.S. better pick up the pace for research and deployment of CCS
technologies if Earth is to avoid the more drastic impacts of climate
change.

A medium-sized 500-MW coal plant produces about 3 million tons of CO2
per year, an average of 2.4 tons of CO2 for every ton of coal, Herzog
says. "There are the equivalent of more than 500 medium-sized coal
power plants in the U.S."

Although the volume of CO2 is huge, he notes that it is comparable in
scale to other industrial activities. For instance, if 60% of the CO2
produced from U.S. coal-fired utilities were captured and compressed
to a liquid, the volume would equal the nation's yearly oil
consumption, or 7.3 billion barrels, Herzog calculates.

Dooley envisions a future in which hundreds, if not thousands, of new
CCS power plants would be operating around the world. He believes coal
would continue to be a primary source of baseload electricity, but CCS
would be required for that to happen. And he argues that other
industrial sectors must also be included for a carbon-limiting system
to work.

"The atmosphere is completely indifferent to where a CO2 molecule
comes from," he adds. He lays out a future in which the location of a
new coal-fired power plant would be largely determined by its
proximity to a geological reservoir that could hold a lifetime of a
plant's CO2 emissions, as well as to rail lines, electrical
distribution, and water.

CO2 could be captured from such a plant in basically three ways: amine
separation of CO2 from the exhaust gases of conventional coal plants;
coal combustion in pure oxygen to produce an almost pure stream of
CO2; and coal gasification, converting coal to CO2 and hydrogen, which
then can be used as a fuel or to make electricity.

Currently, integrated gasification combined cycle technology (IGCC) is
the leading candidate for future carbon capture from coal-fired power
plants due to its higher efficiency and greater ease of capture than
conventional power plants. A few IGCC electrical generation
demonstration plants are in operation and more are planned. But none
capture CO2.

After capture, CO2 would be compressed to a supercritical state and
transported to a storage or injection site. Primarily the same types
of pipelines that are suitable for natural gas can transport CO2, and
construction costs would be similar, about $200,000 per mile. Hauling
CO2 by ships, trucks, and railcars has been ruled out due to costs,
says John T. Litynski, program manager of the Environmental Projects
Division at DOE's National Energy Technology Laboratory (NETL).

IPCC estimates that capturing and compressing CO2 would draw 10 to 40%
of the energy of a conventional plant. More than half the costs of CCS
would be to capture CO2, Dooley says, estimating a total cost of $50 a
ton of sequestered CO2 for the first power plants. Estimates of the
increased cost per kilowatt-hour of electricity range from a penny to
more than a dime.

In 1992, when scientists and engineers began research on carbon
sequestration in geological repositories, they considered injecting
CO2 into deep saline sandstone and basalt formations under land or
under the seafloor, storing it in depleted oil and gas reservoirs,
placing it on the seafloor where vast pressures presumably would keep
it in place, and pumping it into unminable coal seams.

Now, as a result of both research and public opposition, the options
have been winnowed down considerably. Only three are being actively
developed: storage in deep saline aquifers in sandstone, injection
into basalt formations, and injection into depleted oil and gas
reservoirs.

Among those dropped was deep-sea placement. Research suggested that
after diffusion, CO2 would return to the ocean surface and eventually
to the atmosphere. And sea life would be killed under and near a pool
of CO2 due to its acidity and oxygen deprivation.

But the primary reason for dropping ocean disposal was public
opposition, DOE officials say, and that holds a message for the
overall success of carbon sequestration, no matter where it's tried.

In 2002, an international consortium that included DOE planned to
inject 60 tons of liquid CO2 into the deep ocean off the coast of
Kona, Hawaii. When environmentalists attempted to block research ships
from leaving the port, the consortium backed down. "We decided we were
going to run into so much public opposition that it would not be
worthwhile," says David J. Wildman, focus area lead for geological and
environmental sciences at NETL.

DOE also cut back research on CO2 storage in unminable coal seams.
Results show that Eastern coal, which is bituminous, reacts with CO2
and swells, limiting storage and blocking injection, says Wildman. DOE
is continuing small levels of research and plans to inject CO2 into
unminable western seams of subbituminous coal in the San Juan Basin in
New Mexico.

The best hopes today are deep saline aquifers and basalt formations.
Such formations have the capacity to store hundreds of years of global
CO2 emissions without the apparent leakage and permeability problems
of other options.

Research is primarily centered on 5,000- to 8,000-foot-deep aquifers
in sandstone, Wildman says. Many DOE scientists consider sandstone
formations ideal because they are less likely than basalt to be
fractured, they are widely distributed across the U.S., and they are
close to numerous coal-fired power plants and industrial facilities.
"Saline aquifers will either make or break this technology," says
Herzog.

IPCC

The IPCC report explains how CO2 storage in a saline aquifer would
work. Supercritical CO2 would be injected through concrete-lined
wells, past multiple geologic strata and below drinking water
aquifers. There, deep in a sandstone saline aquifer, CO2 is relatively
buoyant compared with sandstone and formation brine. It would rise to
the capstone, an impermeable rock layer at the top of the reservoir.
The CO2 would dissolve into the aquifer's fluids, and over hundreds to
thousands of years, the CO2-laden water would become dense, sinking
into the formation and precipitating to a solid carbonate mineral.
IPCC says this could possibly take thousands, if not millions, of
years.

The largest scale sequestration projects are injecting CO2 at two
natural gas facilities: Statoil's Sleipner facility in the North Sea
off the coast of Norway and BP's In Salah gas field in Algeria. At
both sites, CO2 is being stripped from natural gas and injected into
saline aquifers at a rate of about 1 million tons per year. BP and
Statoil are collecting some data on the behavior of the CO2 in the
aquifers, but the commercial operations are not designed for research.

Starting in 2008, DOE researchers in partnership with universities and
industry will inject some 1 million tons of CO2 annually into saline
aquifers at as many as a half-dozen sites. They hope to determine how
quickly CO2 dissolves in brine, where it circulates within the
aquifer, and how much an aquifer can hold. They also hope to determine
monitoring needs and whether large plumes of supercritical CO2 can
trigger earthquakes.

"Anytime you inject fluids," Herzog says, "earthquakes are always a
concern. To understand the pressure issues, we need to be able to
measure pressure feedbacks. That is why we need to begin looking at
injections at a very large scale."

The first step in the growing research program will be to drill and
extract very deep 5,000- to 8,000-foot cores in the aquifers where
future injections are planned, says Wildman.

Drilling that deeply into aquifers is going into unknown territory,
notes Wildman. "We haven't done any characterization of these aquifers
in terms of their capacity, porosity, and permeability," he explains.
Samples of the cap rock and the brine will be brought back to NETL in
Pittsburgh, where NETL scientists will study how CO2 reacts by re-
creating the same temperatures and pressures found at the greater
depths.

"When we do experiments, we'll try to figure out what will happen as a
function of time with CO2 injected into saline reservoirs," Wildman
says. "We'll have to look at how fast those reactions take place and
try to project them out over thousands of years.

"The other concern we have is how to monitor the surface for CO2 leaks
as the carbon sequestration demonstrations get larger and larger,"
Wildman adds. "We need techniques that do not require a great deal of
manpower. One method being considered is helicopters equipped with
highly sensitive CO2 sensors to detect leaks over large portions of
the surface.

"We also are looking at developing small, inexpensive sensors that we
can put out in a large array. These would feed back to a computer
network," Wildman explains. "Then if we see a spike in CO2
concentrations at a particular sensor, we would want to go out and
investigate. One problem with CO2 is there are natural emissions from
vegetation and organic matter in the soil. So background studies of
CO2 emissions are necessary before injection begins."

Scientists have assumed that injected CO2 will not be immobilized
until it is mineralized into carbonates, taking many thousands of
years. But several other processes to immobilize CO2 on a much shorter
timescale are being examined.

Along with industrial partners, DOE is also examining sequestration in
depleted oil and gas wells, particularly when the process is combined
with enhanced oil recovery. One of the largest demonstration projects
is pumping CO2 205 miles from a North Dakota synfuels plant to an oil
field in Saskatchewan, where about 1 million tons of CO2 is injected
annually in oil recovery operations. About half that amount is
expected to remain sequestered.

Enhanced oil recovery has been held up as an option that could
generate energy and value through oil extraction, rather than one that
simply takes energy and money. However, the global storage capacity in
these reservoirs is far smaller than the potential capacity in deep
aquifers, Wildman says. What's more, Dooley adds, if CO2 capture is
successful, great amounts of CO2 will become a common commodity that
no one is likely to buy.

Although petroleum companies have had many years of experience
exploring and drilling for oil and gas, there are still unknowns
associated with storing large quantities of CO2 under high pressure in
these formations. Just the seemingly simple process of finding and
capping old gas and oil wells presents problems. Hundreds can be found
in many old fields, and all must be capped to prevent leaks of CO2 to
the surface and to maintain supercritical pressures required for
dissolving the oil that remains in the wells.

In the U.S., there are many depleted oil fields, some near towns and
settlements, where CO2 injections could enable the extraction of much
more oil. For example, Rick Hammack, research geochemist at NETL, is
helping a company find thousands of wells on a large depleted western
oil field, where drilling went on for 100 years. But many of the old
wells are hard to detect because they are unlined or lined with wood,
so the company was only able to locate about two-thirds of the wells.

However, Hammack found some 500 more by using a helicopter equipped
with methane and magnetic sensors. Over time, small settlements have
been built on the oil field, and some wells were found in unsafe
locations, such as under mobile homes. The company is now capping all
of the wells as it proceeds with enhanced oil recovery. Conventional
drilling has removed at most 35% of the oil. With enhanced oil
recovery, the take should reach 80%, Hammack says.

DOE is also looking at CO2 injection in basalt formations and is
beginning field tests in Wallula, Wash., along the Columbia River.
Pete McGrail, a geochemist with Pacific Northwest National Laboratory,
is leading the project, which is cosponsored by Edison Mission Energy,
a California energy provider.

Edison Mission hopes to locate an IGCC plant at the site if the
repository is adequate, McGrail says. The basalt formation, made up of
a pancake of lava flows laid down six million to 12 million years ago,
has the possibility of storing large amounts of CO2. Due to the
mineral makeup of formation liquids, McGrail says, carbonate
mineralization of CO2 in basalt can be sped up, taking place in
hundreds, rather than thousands of years.

Overall, Herzog estimates the DOE sequestration budget to be on the
order of $100 million. "It should be a billion-dollar program," he
says.

Considering the huge number of unknowns and with so much riding on
success and failure, Dooley, Keith, and Herzog all recommend a much
more aggressive research and development program, more in line with
the scale of the problem.

Herzog believes the government needs a decadelong demonstration
program injecting million-ton amounts of CO2 before the technology can
be used on a large scale to sequester coal emissions. "To the best of
our knowledge, it would work, but if you go through a 10-year
demonstration, there may be some surprises," Herzog says.

Keith adds that there must be a start-up of many commercial-scale CCS
projects. "We need to build some real plants," he says, with industry
leading the way and learning as it builds.

To encourage energy providers to explore options and take over
research, Keith says, the world needs a carbon tax or some other
driver. He'd like to see DOE's research role be absorbed by the
private sector, which has a bigger stake in success or failure.

"In a carbon-constrained world, CCS is needed to save coal," he says,
but adds that other technologies will also be on the table. He
believes wind and nuclear energy will increasingly be competitive with
coal as a baseload electricity provider when CCS is figured into the
price tag over the next two decades. Even solar power, which he says
is far too expensive today, may get a foothold.

The course of the future, he adds, is about to undergo a huge change
and will be determined by a new set of decisionmakers and under
conditions very different from those of today. "Today's discussion
about coal and carbon sequestration's role in the future of energy is
like talking about the future of petroleum in 1869," Keith says. "More
ideas and technological change are sure to come."

Copyright 2007 American Chemical Society

Return to Table of Contents

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From: Fraud Magazine, Oct. 1, 2007
[Printer-friendly version]

SENTINEL AT THE EPA: AN INTERVIEW WITH WILLIAM SANJOUR

The ACFE's [Association of Certified Fraud Examiners] 2007 Sentinel
Award recipient spent more than three decades confronting deception
and inequities in the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

By Dick Carozza

When William Sanjour is asked how he was able to stand up to
injustices at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for more than
30 years, he simply says, "It's in my genes. I come from a long line
of people who would not be cowed when they are right."

It's not easy being a sentinel anywhere, but it's often toughest in a
governmental regulatory agency. Employees, Sanjour says, often feel
pressure to obey unwritten rules of conformity. Sanjour didn't conform
and paid the price. But he also caused lasting change and left the EPA
with a clear conscience.

In the late 1960s, the EPA hired Sanjour as a consultant. Several
years later, as branch chief in the new Hazardous Waste Management
Division, he supervised studies of hazardous waste damages and
treatment technologies. His efforts led to the passage of the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976 (RCRA).

What began as an effort to do his job by developing regulations for
the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous waste became a long,
drawn-out battle with the EPA, multiple presidential administrations,
and several government agencies as he fought to make the RCRA work in
the true spirit of the legislation.

In 1995, Sanjour won a landmark suit against the U.S. federal
government, which established the First Amendment right of federal
employees to "blow the whistle" on their employers. (To this day,
Sanjour v EPA hasn't been overruled.)

Until his retirement in 2001, Sanjour faced retaliation,
reassignments, demotions, and legal showdowns -- all the while
stubbornly continuing his government service and assisting grassroots
environmentalists.

Sanjour spoke to Fraud Magazine from his home in Arlington, Va.

The ACFE's Cliff Robertson Sentinel Award is presented annually to
recognize the selfless act of coming forward for the sole purpose of
righting a wrong. The award carries the inscription, "For Choosing
Truth Over Self."

What are your thoughts about being chosen the 2007 recipient?

I am awed to be in the company of Bunnatine Greenhouse, David Graham,
Marta Andreasen, and Cliff Robertson.

You've written that the EPA -- regardless of who is in the White
House -- is simply more concerned with protecting the interests of the
people it's supposed to regulate than in protecting the public
interest. Has it always been this way in the EPA and what has caused
it? What are the deficiencies and the strengths of the EPA? Why do the
problems continue through both Republican and Democratic
administrations?

Regulatory agencies are created by Congress in order to control some
powerful forces in society (usually corporations), which benefit
society but which are also prone to abuse their power. The purpose of
a regulatory agency is to allow the flow of benefits while straining
out the abuse. In order to do this, Congress gives administrators of
regulatory agencies broad discretionary power to write regulations for
industries for which they are responsible.

The flaw in the system is that the administrator is appointed by the
president and, although confirmed by the Senate, he or she
nevertheless serves at the pleasure of the president. Thus any
discretionary authority given to a regulatory agency administrator is,
in fact, given to the president of the United States to be used as the
president sees fit, and the administrator is no more than a White
House staffer.

As I said, we are dealing with powerful forces. The Food and Drug
Administration, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the National
Highway Traffic Safety Administration [NHTSA], and EPA, among many
others, regulate giant corporations.

As you know, big corporations have big power, money, and influence.
Corporate money helps elect governors, congressmen, senators and
presidents. The threat of a corporation's withdrawal from a state
causes governors to hesitate to enforce the state's laws.

Congress has essentially given the authority to regulate these
powerful giants to a president. A president, however, regardless of
party, has an agenda of about a half dozen issues with which he and
his staff are most concerned. These are usually national security,
foreign affairs, the economy, the budget, and maybe one or two others;
call them Class A priorities. All others -- housing, education,
transportation, veterans' affairs, the environment -- are in Class B.

A president -- any president -- expects performance in Class A. He
will expect the military to be able to deploy forces anywhere in the
world when he chooses, and if it isn't, he will bang heads until it
is. If Congress doesn't support his budget, he will call the budget
director into his office and pound his fist on the table. But can you
picture a president bringing the secretary of transportation into the
Oval Office and yelling because of poor bus service in Sheboygan? Or
summoning the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in
and chewing him out for pollution in the Cuyahoga River? I can't. A
president expects performance in Class A; in Class B he expects only
peace and quiet.

But regulatory agencies, by their very nature, can do little that
doesn't adversely affect business, especially big and influential
business, and this disturbs a president's repose. The EPA, for
instance, cannot write regulations governing the petroleum industry
without the oil companies going to the White House screaming "energy
crisis!" As a result of energetic lobbying by the automobile industry,
the NHTSA cannot release the millions of automobile safety complaints
in its files. When the FDA wants to thoroughly evaluate a new drug,
the pharmaceutical company lets loose a public relations barrage about
how the bureaucratic delays are costing lives. Regulatory agency
employees soon learn that drafting and implementing rules for big
corporations means making enemies of powerful and influential people.
They learn to be "team players," an ethic that permeates the entire
agency without ever being transmitted through written or even oral
instructions. People who like to get things done, who need to see
concrete results for their efforts, don't last long. They don't
necessarily get fired, but they don't advance either; their
responsibilities are transferred to others, and they often leave the
agency in disgust. The people who get ahead are those clever ones with
a talent for procrastination, obfuscation, and coming up with
superficially plausible reasons for accomplishing nothing.

This is a long answer to a short question, but the bottom line is:
There are two systems that are not properly designed to work as they
are expected to work. The first is our whole system of corporate law,
which gives such power to corporations. But the solution to that is,
as they say in the military, above my pay grade. The second problem is
easier. Regulatory agencies write and enforce regulations. Regulations
are laws. The business of writing laws is the business of Congress and
not the president. The regulatory and enforcement parts of agencies
should be split, and the administrators of regulatory agencies should
be appointed by Congress for fixed terms and only removed before the
end of their terms only by impeachment or an act of Congress.
Enforcement should be separate and administered by the federal or
state governments.

This would not, of course, solve all problems, but it would improve
the framework for solving problems.

You've said that the people in the EPA who want to change things
and correct problems don't necessarily get fired but they don't
advance and often leave in disgust. Did you find many allies as you
fought to see concrete results? What sustained you during those years?
Why did you decide to speak up within the EPA rather than quit as so
many have done?

It's in my genes. I come from a long line of people who would not be
cowed when they are right. I followed the example of a great whistle-
blower sentinel -- Martin Luther. When faced with the wrath of his
superiors, rather than back down, Luther formed alliances with the
public and the powerful north German princes who shared his views and
defied the authority of the church. I did likewise by finding allies
in environmental and whistle-blower organizations, in Congress, and in
the press. They encouraged me to continue speaking out and helped
protect me from the backlash.

Thus, I became a conduit for others in the government industry and for
environmentalists, who had information about EPA waste, fraud, and
abuse. I would investigate these charges and, if I felt they had
merit, I would bring them to the attention of the administration or
the inspector general, making sure that copies went to Congress and
the press.

I recognized, just as Luther did, and what many whistle-blowers fail
to recognize, that after publicly confronting the powers that be head
on one can never return to the life one led before. Instead, with the
help of his allies, Luther carved out a new life for himself. In doing
so, he had to make many changes and develop many new skills but he
took command of his life and never allowed himself to become a victim.

However, my advice to people, in general, is don't be a public
whistle-blower. Avoid open challenge or defiance of authority or
power. Try to satisfy your conscience or your sense of duty without
getting personally involved. For example, you can leak stuff to a
known sentinel who is willing to take the heat, or to an activist
organization, or to a plaintiff's attorney, or anyone who will protect
the identity of the source.

Can you explain how you blew the whistle in 1978 when the Carter
Administration, concerned about inflation, took steps, as you've said,
"to protect industry by removing the teeth" of the Resource
Conservation and Recovery Act of 1976, which you helped bring
about?

In the early 1970s, as an EPA branch chief, I supervised studies of
hazardous waste damages and treatment technologies. These efforts
culminated in the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery
Act [RCRA] of 1976, after which, I was in charge of drafting
regulations for the treatment, storage, and disposal of hazardous
waste.

In the midst of this effort, on June 15, 1978, the staff was told that
we had received new orders from the politically appointed office
director. He said there were several recent developments including:
President Carter's directive to reduce the federal budget to fight
inflation, many new congressionally mandated programs in EPA with not
enough resources to fully implement them, and the so-called taxpayers'
revolt. As a result of these, the office director felt the hazardous
waste management regulations had to be reduced in scope. In
particular, the definition of what waste would be covered by the
regulations would have to be changed and could not be based on whether
the waste causes cancer, causes birth defects, is poisonous or
radioactive. The petroleum industry and several others were to be
excluded from the regulations. Furthermore, the staff was directed to
come up with reasonable-sounding rationales for these cutbacks and was
warned not to make any of this public.

At first I fought from within the EPA to make RCRA work in the true
spirit of the legislation. The agency responded by transferring me in
1979 to a position with no duties. I then became an outspoken EPA
whistle-blower. I alerted Congress, environmental groups, and the
press to this attack on RCRA.

Can you give other specific examples of how the EPA procrastinated,
obfuscated, or capitulated to outside powers to the detriment of the
health of citizens?

I could fill a book answering this question, but here are just a few
brief examples.

A 1985 government report said EPA has failed to enforce laws requiring
land disposal facilities to certify compliance with the RCRA or shut
down.

When EPA research found that EPA regulations were not preventing
poisonous dioxin emissions from hazardous waste incinerators, EPA
issued instructions to ignore the findings.

In 1993, EPA went to court to defend the right of a hazardous waste
incinerator operator in Arkansas to vent dioxin-contaminated gases
into a residential neighborhood.

The Clean Air Act required EPA to review and, if necessary, revise
standards for ozone and particulates every five years. EPA stopped
doing so in 1979. Only after it lost a lawsuit in 1991 and was under
court order to act did EPA write the minimal standards it thought it
could get away with.

Systemic state and U.S. EPA enforcement failures have resulted in
several decades of routine high air-pollution levels and episodes of
excess air emissions caused by repeated operating problems and upset
incidents at oil refineries.

Congress is now investigating EPA's recent proposed rule to revise the
national ozone standard but not to the extent recommended by its own
staff scientists and advisors. They are interested in possible White
House intervention. The White House Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs held three meetings on the rule, two of which were
packed with industry reps. The first meeting also featured a
representative from Vice President Cheney's office. Contrary to the
rules, EPA was not told of the meetings and did not attend.

In 1995, you won a landmark suit against the U.S. federal
government, which established the First Amendment rights of federal
employees to "blow the whistle" on their employers. Can you briefly
describe the circumstances that lead to that decision and whether it
still helps federal employees today?

I suppose I should be flattered that the mighty United States
government wrote a law just to silence only me and one other person.
The law was a result of years of frustration at EPA trying to silence
us from speaking out in public, on our own time, in opposition to
government policy and its embarrassment at having to answer complaints
from important people on why the agency had to tolerate this conduct.
For example, when Lois Gibbs and I were invited to speak in Alberta,
Canada, in opposition to a hazardous waste landfill, the landfill
operator wrote a scathing letter to the administrator wondering how a
government official could do that "without putting his continued
government employment in jeopardy." The Canadian government was also
up in arms. The EPA was humiliated at having to apologize not only to
the landfill operator but to the State Department as well.

I was asked to testify in Congress about the origins of the law
written by the Federal Office of Government Ethics (an oxymoron) and
the outright lies used to justify it. The lawsuit to overthrow it,
Sanjour v EPA, was brought, pro bono, by the National Whistleblower
Center and attorney Steve Kohn. After four years of litigation, the
U.S. Appellate Court for the D.C., Circuit, en banc, found the law
unconstitutional. The majority decision said:

Government employee speech is protected by the First Amendment, and
can only be infringed when the government demonstrates that the burden
on such speech is "outweighed by [its] necessary impact on the actual
operation of the government."

In spite of this decision, for years, EPA continued to threaten
employees against violating a law, which the courts had found
unconstitutional. While we eventually prevailed, one is nevertheless
left apprehensive at the Stalinist tactics the United States
government is willing to use to silence perfectly legal dissent.

In what other ways has the EPA violated whistle-blower statutes?
Have conditions improved in the agency?

Whistle-blower attorney Steve Kohn tells me that the EPA has committed
more violations of the environmental whistle-blower laws than any
other single employer including private industry. They have fired
whistle-blowers, bad-mouthed whistle-blowers, created hostile work
environments, etc. Worse, they still have not created any program to
encourage the private sector to implement the environmental whistle-
blower laws. Conditions have not improved in the agency. The EPA is
leading the charge in trying to get the Department of Labor to
narrowly interpret the laws, such as narrow definitions of who is an
employee, what is protected activity, and what is adverse action.

Does Sanjour v EPA still help federal employees today?

Yes, it does, and Steve Kohn tells me it has never been overruled or
even criticized by any other court.

Did you see outright fraud at the EPA or just waste and abuse? If by
fraud you mean deceiving people in order to take their money, then I
haven't seen that. But if by fraud you mean deceiving people in order
to deprive them of their legal rights, then that's what this is all
about. However, unlike much occupational fraud, in this case it is the
people at the very top who are committing the fraud.

How do you advise idealistic members of grassroots environmental
groups?

When I worked for EPA, I spent much of my spare time meeting with
grassroots environmental groups. Their members frequently ask me why
EPA does not seem particularly interested in protecting the
environment. The question usually comes from people who are dealing
directly with the EPA for the first time, ordinary citizens with
ordinary political views and lifestyles who suddenly find themselves
living close to a hazardous waste facility, incinerator, or nuclear
waste dump. These are people who started out with a strong faith in
their country and its institutions, who had always thought of the EPA
as the guys in white hats who put the bad polluters in jail. "If there
were anything wrong with it," they say, "the government wouldn't let
them do it."

To their surprise, these folks find that the EPA officials, rather
than being their allies, are at best indifferent and often
antagonistic. They find that the EPA views them, and not the
polluters, as the enemy. Citizens who thought that the resources of
the government would be at their disposal find instead that they have
to hire their own experts to gather data on the health and
environmental impacts of proposed facilities, while the government
sits on the same information, collected at public expense. And if
these folks want to go to court, they have to run bake sales to hire
attorneys to go up against government lawyers whose salaries are paid
by the taxpayer.

I advise them to organize. Learn the issues; educate their neighbors
and get them involved. There are strengths in numbers. (If I sound
like a labor organizer, that's what it's like.) With numbers, they can
exert pressure on local government and businesses. I tell them to get
organizing and technical support from environmental and other support
groups such as the Center for Health, Environment and Justice, and the
Southern Organizing Committee. I place litigation as a low priority
because the people they are up against are probably better at it. I
tell them that politicians need two things to get elected: money and
votes. Corporations can always provide the money, but an organized
community can provide the votes.

There's a whistle-blower protection section, "Protection for
employees of publicly traded companies who provide evidence of fraud"
[Sec. 806], in the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. What are your thoughts on
that?

SOX is a great law and it is wonderful that it extends whistle-blower
protection coverage to public company employees.

I have a beef about whistle-blower protection laws in general in that
they don't go far enough. Whistle-blowers, in almost every case,
became whistle-blowers because a moral dilemma, not of their own
seeking, was thrust upon them. They were asked to do something immoral
and they refused. They are the kind of people who are concerned that
things get done right. Each year taxpayers pay billions of dollars to
police and prosecute fraud, waste and abuse, yet one whistle-blower
can accomplish more than a room full of inspectors or policemen and
cost far less. Whistle-blowers know the system and speak out in a
spirit of public service. And for that, they pay a heavy price. They
deserve more than just the right to hold onto their jobs; after all,
it's not the whistle-blower who needs protection so much as it is the
public that needs the protection of the whistle-blower.

Do you still advise possible sentinels, for instance, at companies
that are dumping toxic waste into municipal landfills? If so, how do
you counsel them? What are sentinels' biggest misconceptions?

As I said earlier, I would never encourage anyone to be a public
sentinel. Better to do the "deep throat" thing. If you are thinking of
going public I suggest you first read "A Textbook for Whistle-
blowers" and "Introductory Remarks for Undeclared Whistleblowers" on
my Web site [http://pwp.lincs.net/sanjour]. Then go to the Web site
of The National Whistleblower Center [www.whistleblowers.org/].
There is help, but you must learn where it is before jumping. The
courts can be friendly or unfriendly, depending on how well you have
done your homework.

What were the costs of being a sentinel? What did you find
satisfying?

In my case, I guess I always suspected that sooner or later I would be
in a situation where I would have to chose between being cowed or
being right, because, as I said, it's in my genes. Maybe that's why I
chose government service, because of the protection. When the time
came, I was, at least partially, prepared for it. The cost was high,
but not as high as it could have been or as high as it was for many
others I knew who didn't do their homework. The satisfaction is having
confronted the beast and not only survived but having taken a bite out
of its tail.

==============

Dick Carozza is editor of Fraud Magazine. His e-mail address is:
dcarozza@ACFE.com.

Copyright 2004 Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

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  Rachel's Democracy & Health News (formerly Rachel's Environment &
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