“The contamination issues associated with the Koppers Superfund Site are very complex. They include the deep-soil groundwater threat, the widespread surface soils contamination, the contaminated stormwater runoff into Springstead Creek, and the contamination of off-site surface soils from fugitive dust…

The current situation is the result of gross environmental irresponsibility over a period of almost 100 years by a multibillion-dollar international conglomerate with little regard for consequences. I just can’t help but think that we deserve something better than the “cover up” solution that appears to be what we will be seeing in the EPA’s Final Proposed Plan soon to be released.”

Read More: The contamination issues associated with the Koppers Superfund Site are very complex | Gainesville.com.

The unfolding events in the Gulf of Mexico underscore the importance of journalists not falling for the industrial mantra that catastrophic events can’t happen today because of “robust” safety systems and “built in redundancy” that ensure environmentally safe operations.

Oil companies have been drilling in the Gulf for decades and their work has come a long way since the 1979 blowout of the Ixtoc 1 oil well in the Bay of Campeche. That disaster gushed for months and dumped at least 140 million gallons of crude into the waters on the Mexican side of the Gulf.

The technology has improved markedly since then, however, and the revenues flowing in to the coffers of Gulf state governments and political campaigns has grown even further.. Yet the script is an old one. The BP well which exploded, burned and sank with the bodies of 11 oil workers incorporated the latest safety technology, including a 450-ton, four-part, “fail safe” clamp on the ocean floor which was intended to be able to shut down the well at the interface between the water and the sea floor.

Each of its four clamps should have been able to do the job — a redundancy which the industry claimed guaranteed that blowouts could not happen again. And they haven’t had one for 20 years, though there are some 4,000 rigs out there.

It was this notion of technological infallibility which led President Obama to declare April 2 that: “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced. Even during Katrina, the spills didn’t come from the oil rigs; they came from the refineries onshore.”

But the notion that it was impossible to have a catastrophe was always arrogant and never defensible. To hold the belief in technological infallibility so strongly that disaster preparations are neither contemplated nor enacted is logically unjustifiable and reckless in the extreme. For journalists to parrot that line like paid stenographers rather than examining it thoroughly and questioning its premise is professionally indefensible.

Only weeks after the spill did federal officials or the mainstream media bother reading BP’s emergency environmental plan and find it was fiction, replete with statements from dead scientists and plans to save the habitats of walruses and other creatures never found in the Gulf. Even worse was the discovery that the other major oil drilling companies had each submitted the identical creative writing for federal approval – and got it since no one in authority or in the newsrooms bothered to read the documents.

It was pathetic to hear Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Dr. Lisa Jackson state in a May 24 press conference that there were no emergency plans and no adequate systems for coping with the spreading oil spill because “we were told over and over by the industry that it could not happen. So we have few tools out there.”

The same mantra is incorporated in President Obama’s energy legislation, which would allow the nuclear industry to tap the taxpayers for some $1.2 trillion to build “safe” nuclear power plants. In discussions of the next generation of nuclear power, all too often uncritical reporters have generated stories stating as fact that the new breed of reactors — which exist only on paper and, where they have progressed from the drawing boards, have failed all tests — are so safe that they can be placed in residential neighborhoods with no problems.

Such willful dispensation of critical thinking is understandable with politicians, who are paid by energy companies to win elections. But reporters are paid to represent the public interest.

There is no technology – from roller skates and clothes irons, to oil platforms to nuclear reactors – which can’t be screwed up by the humans that make it, operate it or, in the tragic case of the Deepwater Horizon, factor finances into decisions about how thin their critical safety margins need to be. And human decision makers playing the odds with public safety are not helped by the unforgiving real world – in BP’s case, the intense, ton-per-square-inch pressures generated by the weight of four miles of seawater and rock.

In writing about any technological development coming through a region of this ecologically diverse country – gas lines, high tension lines, reactors, airports, chemical plants, etc – journalists do readers a disservice if they quote officials touting how safe their operations are without giving equal emphasis to the possibility of calamity. The potential damage is always just as important as the potential boon to the local economy. The documents which are now being reported about were available long before the Deepwater Horizon blew up and sank.

That mindset on the part of regulators is not limited to the discredited Minerals Management Service.

Twenty years before 9/11/2001, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission had the foresight to order a study of the potential impact of commercial jets on nuclear reactor sites. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ analysis found that the damage from such a crash directly into a containment building or spent fuel pool, at speeds above 466 miles per hour, would be catastrophic. But the risk assessment prepared in the 1980s by Consolidated Edison of New York, which owned the Indian Point nuclear power plant found that the odds of a crash were so slight that it did not warrant much consideration. That conclusion came despite the presence of five major airports in the region and the fact that the Hudson River landing corridor was just 250 feet directly above the plants.

Con Edison did raise the issue of a hijacked aircraft ramming the reactors, but concluded “a commercial jet could cause extensive damage but the notion of a deliberate crash into the containment building is so out of the range of probability that we have not calculated odds for it in this risk analysis.”

It would be 20 years before a hijacked United Airlines jet flew directly over the twin containment buildings jutting into the midst of the Hudson River from the promontory at Indian Point en route to their destination at the World Trade Center. The federal 9/11 Commission would later conclude that Indian Point was the terrorists’ backup target.

In this case, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission belatedly recognized that terrorism cannot be dismissed. Unfortunately, there is no experience to factor such an event into the long-established formulas used for risk assessment. As a result, the NRC has decreed that preventing terrorism is a federal responsibility and the commercial nuclear operators do not have to plan for such an event.

Recognizing the possibility of a nuclear disaster represents progress, of sorts, from the discredited view of oil industry regulators that a disaster is impossible. But the outcome would be more disastrous for those living in the wide ranging path of meandering radioactive clouds than it is for the millions of citizens and businesses affected by the lakes of crude oil meandering a various depths throughout the Gulf of Mexico.

It would be unfortunate if the spreading calamity in the Gulf did not awaken to the mainstream media to the potential for catastrophes all around.

–Roger Witherspoon writes Energy Matters at www.RogerWitherspoon.com

“Fat cats hate restrictions they’d endure under Amendment 4, which would require voter approval before Florida cities or counties approve developments prohibited by comprehensive land-use plans.

The amendment would cripple Florida’s construction industry and stifle the state economy, they argue.

The catch phrase among the YOLO set was “job killer.”

Despite such foreboding, polls indicate 61 percent of Florida's likely voters are apt to vote yes. It hardly matters whether the amendment would actually improve governance. Just the fact that the YOLO gang opposes No. 4 inspires a yes — make that hell yes — vote.

It’s just too much to hear talk of good government from the same selfish interests who transformed South Florida into mindless sprawl, creating Ground Zero for a nightmare recession with a giant inventory of foreclosed houses, deserted shopping centers and unsold condos.

They invented this Ponzi-scheme economy based on perpetual growth that forces older residents to pay ever-escalating taxes to finance roads and other infrastructure in new developments.

Voters watched as representative democracies were supplanted by lootocracies, with city and county commissioners acting as wholly-owned subsidiaries of lobbyists, voting to approve whatever awful project could come up with the requisite campaign contributions. Or, as the unfolding scandal in Broward has revealed, outright bribes.”

via Fat cats hate slow-growth amendment – Fred Grimm – MiamiHerald.com.

“I am always amazed at where people put their trust. Currently, I have little trust in anything. It may have started back when Newsweek or some rag said “Greed is Good”

The theory was the more we want, the more we spend, the more we produce – good for sales and production. Bad for the soul and the Karma it was about to bring forward.

Now we are … living that Karma- let’s not regulate let’s stimulate was the battle cry.

Where did all that greedy stimulatin’ get us: Got us a big whopper of an oil spill, got us Bernie Madoff, got us a bunch of CEOs selling their country down the tubes, got us a war that was never about weapons of mass destruction, got us a bunch of empty houses that people could not afford.

sorry just have to get this off my chest.”

via Facebook | Roland Loog.

As I try to convey in my new video, “The Fix,” I am appalled by what this spill is doing to Gulf fishermen, families, communities and wildlife. But I am also disgusted by what it reveals about the oil industry’s role in American political life.

With their deep pockets, oil companies have purchased loose safety regulations, slack oversight and support from key lawmakers. Last year alone, the industry spent a $168 million on lobbying — $16 million of which came from BP. The blowout on the Deepwater Horizon is a symptom of this undue influence.

It is time for the collusion to stop. As long as it continues, Americans will pay the price in the form of devastated ecosystems and a fossil fuel addiction that benefits oil companies, not ordinary citizens.

I know what it’s like to have a job that depends on towing the line.

I worked in the oil fields when I was a teenager, and my dad worked in the accounting department of Standard Oil. I remember the uneasy feeling that resulted when I heard company representatives claim oil exploration was great for American society, yet that contrasted with what I was actually experiencing on the job. The truth was that oil exploration was great for the oil industry.

Long after I left the oil fields, I felt disgusted by the way oil companies advertised themselves as conservationists. BP plugged itself as “Beyond Petroleum,” yet oil still accounts for the vast majority of its business. BP claimed its technology was safe, yet 11 men are dead and oil still permeates the whole coast years after the “cleanup.” Furthermore, the company has a long history of safety violations that have resulted in other deaths and environmental destruction. BP also said in 2008 it could handle a spill 10 times the size of the current disaster, yet its attempts to end the gushing in the Gulf have failed.

We need to stop buying into these fictions, and the BP spill is our reality check — a reminder that the oil industry looks out for Number One in the Gulf, in the Arctic and in Washington.

Recently, President Obama announced several measures that will reign in Big Oil’s influence. He strengthened regulations governing offshore operations and called on the Justice Department to examine BP’s role in this fiasco. He also imposed a moratorium on new offshore drilling while a commission investigates the spill. And although I welcome the president’s initial steps, some of these measures need to be stronger.

Ultimately, the only way to break the industry’s hold on political decision making is for America to shift to more fuel efficient cars, more public transit and other technologies.

These are the solutions that will break America’s addiction to oil and put more money in consumers’ pockets. Right now, there is a clean energy and climate bill before Congress that could help unleash these solutions. The time for passage of this bill is NOW, not later.

I urge you to use your political influence — your right to contact your elected officials — and click here to tell your senators to vote for it. Citizen outrage and citizen action are some of our best tools for combating Big Oil’s dirty influence.”

via ‘The Fix:’ Dirty Energy’s Undue Influence on American Political Life – Huffington Post <= Watch the video here.

“Watching the life-changing environmental disaster in our Gulf makes me angry and in disbelief as a sense of helplessness and hopelessness overcomes me. How can such a catastrophic accident happen? Where were the safeguards? Why hasn’t our government taken control? It is obvious that no one expected anything like this would or could occur. They were wrong…”

via Healthy Living Interiors Blog » HealthyLiving Interiors uses healthy-n-green design: good for your health, good for our environment.

“I’m Ron Cunningham, and I’m BP.

And in case you’re wondering, I’m responsible.

So are you. Because you are BP.

The real scandal about this scandalous oil spill is that it’s not a scandal.

Minerals and Management Services is no rogue agency in secret service to Big Oil.

The blabbermouth news media have been reporting for years about the dirty business at MMS. Nobody blinked an eye.

Because, really, MMS was doing what the White House wanted it to do.

What Congress expected it to do.

And what we voters and consumers demanded it do.

Keep the cheap gas flowing…”

Read the full editorial by Ron Cunningham at I am BP – Gainesville Sun.

There’s more to Gainesville than meets the eye. For 93 years, a company known as Koppers, Inc. has operated a 90-acre industrial facility at 200 NW 23rd Ave. in Gainesville, Florida. The area is now ranked as one of the nation’s top-100 polluted sites. In 1983, it was declared by Environmental Protection Agency to be a Superfund site – a place so heavily polluted with toxic waste that it poses a threat to human health and the environment.

For decades, Koppers has released industrial toxins into Gainesville’s air, water and soil, including arsenic, hexavalent chromium, creosote and dioxins. Combined, these chemicals can cause cancer, rare diseases, changes in DNA and birth defects.

If you live in Gainesville and find these facts to be disconcerting, you’re not alone. As a reporter for The Fine Print, I’ve spent the last month interviewing activists, victimized families, government officials, engineers, lawyers, and company representatives. I can say the following with certainty: our water supply is in danger. Our neighborhoods are contaminated. Residents living nearby feel trapped and confused. Even if you live far away, you might be affected. Even if you’re not affected, Gainesville could use your help.

Read the full story and learn more at Gainesville’s Dirty Secret: Exposed. All photos and reporting on the site are (c) 2010 by Henry Taksier.

Environmental writer Trish Riley tours a green winery and discusses biodynamic farming.

via Subaru Drive Magazine: Winter 2010.

As 2009 draws to a close, I can’t help but reflect on this terrible year, and to be heartened by changes that have happened in just the past few weeks.

While many bemoan the scope of the Copenhagen agreement, I choose instead to take our president at his word – here is a clip from his speech at Copenhagen: “As the world’s largest economy and the world’s second largest emitter, America bears our share of responsibility in addressing climate change, and we intend to meet that responsibility. That is why we have renewed our leadership within international climate negotiations, and worked with other nations to phase out fossil fuel subsidies. And that is why we have taken bold action at home – by making historic investments in renewable energy; by putting our people to work increasing efficiency in our homes and buildings; and by pursuing comprehensive legislation to transform to a clean energy economy.

“There is no time to waste. America has made our choice. We have charted our course, we have made our commitments, and we will do what we say. Now, I believe that it’s time for the nations and people of the world to come together behind a common purpose.

“We must choose action over inaction; the future over the past – with courage and faith, let us meet our responsibility to our people, and to the future of our planet.”

This year I have grown particularly weary of Obama bashers who are coming at us from both sides, those whose obscene business practices are threatened by his more equitable policies (tea baggers, health care providers, insurance companies, chemical companies, big ag, power companies, etc.), and those who fought to elect him, then act as if he’s Benedict Arnold because he has not yet completely transformed our government and lives. Whoa, folks. The guy had a helluva lot of messes to clean up, remember? That’s why we welcomed him into the White House. He continues to need our help to be able to help us.

As I look back over my own life, I realize that nothing happened overnight. I did not simply decide to be an author, and become one the next day. Rather, I realized at the age of nine that I would always be a writer yet I didn’t get my first assignment until I was 32 years old. It paid $50. It took eight more long years of hard work for little pay before I nailed my first book contract. My career path has taken years, moving forward one step at a time. I had to keep my eye on the prize to keep from faltering, and I had to maintain my own momentum in the face of naysayers and rejection letters. But I didn’t give up, and now I have a handful of books under my byline. Now, I can see new vistas ahead, and will continue to climb.

There is no other means of achieving success. I read a poignant quote by William Arthur Ward when I was a child, and it has stuck with me ever since: “If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; if you can dream it, you can become it.” We don’t magically get whatever we dream of – we think about what we want and we figure out how to get it. Our thoughts create our reality. When we dwell on our problems, they loom ever larger in our lives. When we focus on our goals, we are putting our creative intelligence to work on achieving them.

One of my earliest mentors advised me to relax when a lone voice complained about a program I’d established to provide arts and educational support to children living in poverty. “The more you step up to make change, the more critics you’ll have,” Phil Tom told me. “Just continue to do what you think is right.”

I’ve just watched another excellent Bill Moyer’s Journal, and listened to two writers criticize the Obama administration and the health care legislation currently under consideration by Congress. Yet, in the end, both writers, Matt Taibi of the Rolling Stone and Robert Kuttner, author of Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency, admitted that they’re not ready to give up on Barack Obama. “My feeling is, if you vote on this bill and it passes, that’s your one shot at fixing a catastrophic and completely dysfunctional health care system for the next generation,” said Kuttner. “I would vote for it because the defeat would be absolutely crushing.”  Taibi said, “It takes a willingness to be radical confronting the elite that has a hammerlock on politics in this country. That’s radical. He’s nothing if not a work in progress…don’t’ speak too soon. I don’t want to totally give up. It’s too early to abandon hope.”

Sometimes politicians are verified boneheads – and we’ve certainly seen a lot of that in the past year. But now, we’ve got a genuine liberal intellectual president who makes no apologies for his positions. When pundits sit on the sidelines and criticize his efforts to move the huge political machine that is the 233-year-old United States Congress, I get a little annoyed. Let these assholes take the seat at the desk in the Oval office, instead of on the TV set of the Fox newsroom.

I have been writing about environmental issues for 18 years, and I can tell you that bringing this information to the public’s attention has been a long and difficult task. Until Al Gore won an Oscar for An Inconvenient Truth, it was nearly impossible to get newspapers or magazines to carry stories on environmental problems. No one wanted to know about environmental problems when developers, big businesses and governments were making so much money as they created them. But I found ways to help people protect our earth, by tucking important info into travel stories and school coverage and neighborhood association news. I wrote stories about healthy foods, better ways to garden and maintain lawns without sprays, waste water spills, kids’ science experiments that created compost from newspapers and energy from rabbit scat. My travel stories always included area parks and natural resources, and I made sure to let readers know about the challenges facing these and the people working to solve them. It has taken a long time to bring this important – essential – information to the public. But the people who understood, scientists, environmental journalists, and the rare politician, have finally broken through so that now nearly all the world is aware that we’ve allowed our air, soil, earth and water to be plundered, and if we don’t make changes, we will lose this foundation of life.

So while so many pundits and environmentalists are decrying the weak accord forged at Copenhagen last month, I am grateful that so many nations convened and agreed that we must address these problems. While so many are screaming that our Congress has failed us in its passage of health care legislation, I am grateful that we are making progress toward loosening the grip of greedy industries on our ability to access medical treatment. I am grateful that we have a leader who is pushing for these changes, instead of a leader who undercuts the work and values that American citizens bring to their lives. We may not wake up tomorrow living in Utopia, but we have laid the foundation for changes that can lead to a more sustainable future for all of us – environmentally, economically, and healthfully. We have taken the first steps. And we have a path to move forward.

We citizens of America have lived through an horrific year… really, an horrific decade. Yet this past year has brought us hope as we have never known in my adult life – and that’s 30 years. This past year has brought unprecedented changes that have been hard to ride, yet I believe they are pulling us toward a more sustainable future. We have adjusted, not by choice, but by force, to buying less because we’ve had less money and credit to spend. This is a damn good thing – our consumer economy has been exposed as an unsustainable, unhealthy hoax on the public to support a business bottom line that we have discovered is entirely unsustainable: it was built on a model that sacrificed our environment, health and safety in the name of profit, and coerced us into a mindless struggle to survive as we attempted to keep up with a spiraling economy that demanded evermore from workers while delivering ever less.  We watched this economy nearly topple, and stood by as our new government attempted to rescue the highest echelon of our golden ivory towers in a frame-up created as a last ditch gesture by the administration which created a top-heavy economy that paid dividends to the wealthy at the expense of citizens. But even as our last hope for change administration scrambled to stop gap the demise of federal funds, citizens pushed out of corporate chains realized that we can have happiness without those strings that bind us to the status quo. We have been freed of the ropes that we thought would save us from destruction – then unraveled. We realized that time is more valuable than the dollars we were earning. Now free, we have the opportunity to redraft our lives, and to re-vision what work means to us, and what we really need to pay for. A bunch of stuff has gone by the wayside. An economy based on Gross Domestic Product is no longer the goal of the average American citizen. We have learned that we can live on less, and that we don’t need to keep running on the endless rat wheels that the economy had pushed us into.

We can create a new paradigm, and the debacle of the 2000’s has provided us with the perfect framework to make it work. As nightmarish as this last year and decade have been, we can emerge in 2010 with a new approach to life and work, thanks to the disintegration of the systems of our past.

We have discovered that our lives can be richer when we spend less time working for “the man,” and living our lives instead. We don’t have to buy all the stuff we’d been led to believe would bring us happiness – they don’t. We can spend our time with our children instead, nurturing them rather than rueing the inconvenience they pose to lives dedicated to work. Love is what parenting is all about, and love is what parenting needs.

We can spend more time mulling the mysteries of the universe, and perhaps finding answers to the questions that science and religion have failed to solve: why are we here? Where did we come from? How was the universe created? Maybe everyone doesn’t wonder about such philosophical questions, but given time to think, and freed of the bonds that our society and economy previously bound us with, we might find the impetus to ponder these issues.

Without money for gas, we can find more sustainable ways to get around, and we might choose to spend less time and money traveling afar. We can choose not to support the mega-corporations that suck dry our resources to promote the financial health of their ivory towers…

Spending more time at home, we might cultivate our gardens to provide food for our families. Knowing now that synthetic petro-chemical fertilizers and pesticides are harmful to our health, we might take time to figure out how to grow our own food without these cheap enhancers, and in the process, we’ll be protecting our health and soil and water supplies.

We don’t need to support the gross domestic product to achieve the most satisfying lives. We need to support ourselves and our families. As we, and our businesses, embrace these tenets of sustainability, we are moving toward a healthier future. While 2009 has been a bitch of a year, it’s been a boon to our future. Three cheers to 2010!

–Trish Riley is editor and publisher of GoGreenNation.org, an award-winning environmental/investigative journalist and the author of The Complete Idiot’s Guides to Green Living and Greening Your Business (2007 and 2009, Penguin).

The Best Behind-The-Scenes White House Photos From Obama’s First Year.

http://www.gogreennation.org/2009/12/move-your-money-a-new-years-resolution/

http://www.gogreennation.org/2009/11/president-obam…the-nation-now

http://www.gogreennation.org/2009/07/the-writing-is…n-is-dangerous/

http://www.gogreennation.org/2009/07/house-of-cards-going-down/