Dow Jones Jumps on Jackson Confirmation
Significant new angles on Jackson’s record coming out
“Her commitment to developing cleanup standards based on science and not politics turned out to be empty… She’s exceeded even the irresponsibility of some of her predecessors” ~~~ Joe Morris, Interfaith Community Organization, Jersey City, the group that successfully sued Honeywell
In a money story that missed the money quote, today’s Dow Jones reports on the Lisa Jackson EPA confirmation story:
Faulted By Environmentalists, EPA Nominee Has Fans In US Senate
Dow Jones
January 13, 2009: 08:15 AM ET
WASHINGTON -(Dow Jones)-
[…]
New Jersey environmentalists are divided over Lisa Jackson, a chemical engineer and former EPA employee who went on to lead the state’s Department of Environmental Protection. New Jersey has more long-festering hazardous-waste sites than any other state. To some people, Jackson failed to rise to that challenge, by delaying and through steps that favored companies.
http://money.cnn.com/news/newsfeeds/articles/djf500/200901130815DOWJONESDJONLINE000273_FORTUNE5.htm
There are at least three significant new angles in the Dow Jones story, but surprisingly, Dow missed the real money behind the chromium controversy they reported on:
First, one of Jackson’s “friends” in the Senate is Republican Senator Inhofe, who is known as one of the worst globbal warming deniers. Here’s just one of many Inhofe attacks:
“Yesterday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) attacked Al Gore and global warming science, claiming that Gore was “full of crap” on global warming.”
http://thinkprogress.org/2006/07/21/inhofe-gore/
Second, Senate Democrats now defend Jackson as merely an improvement on the Bush EPA hack, Stephen Johnson, who has presided over some of the worst times in EPA’s history. This is a pathetically low performance benchmark and a far cry from all the hyper spun praise Jackson has won from some NJ environmental lobbyists.
“Democrats say that she will surely be an improvement on the Bush administration’s top environmental regulator, Stephen Johnson.”
Third, to their credit, Dow is the first national media outlet to cover Jackson’s record on toxic chromium, but the they missed the huge money and scientific fraud story that Jackson has swept under the rug. Dow correctly reported:
“One controversy involves Jackson’s handling of chromium, a carcinogen that built up in the state as factories began to give away the waste to use as construction fill. By the time Jackson became the top environmental regulator in 2006, a community group had successfully sued Honeywell International Inc. (HON) over one such contaminated site. The company was forced to do a thorough cleanup of the soil rather than simply capping it.“
Toughening, then Loosening a Standard
Jackson in early 2007 responded in two ways. She reinstated a practice of giving final approval to cleanups, the type of certainty that polluters seek. But she also issued a tough new standard for removing chromium from sites to be developed for homes or schools. Under the new standard, hexavalent chromium could make up no more than 20 parts per million of soil. That cheered environmentalists — temporarily.
In September 2008, as she was leaving the agency, Jackson reversed course and reaffirmed the old standard of 240 parts per million of hexavalent chromium. She acted even after a long-awaited National Toxicology Program report found that the waste was more damaging than previously thought.
“Her commitment to developing cleanup standards based on science and not politics turned out to be empty,” said Joe Morris, an organizer with the Interfaith Community Organization, the group that sued Honeywell. “She’s exceeded even the irresponsibility of some of her predecessors here.“
What the Dow left out of the chromium story was how the chromium standard was relaxed and who benefitted economically from that.
The Wall Street Journal broke the story of scientific fraud in the science of chromium. The WSJ article appeared on page 1 and was titled:
- “Study tied pollutant to cancer; then consultant got a hold of it” (December 23, 2005, page 1) by P. Waldman. (sorry, no link, subscription service)
Scientific fraud on chromium had been covered in NJ by the Star Ledger:
- “Weakened rules a boon to 3 polluters: Work of scientists paid by the firms viewed skeptically by other experts” (March 7, 2004) by Alex Lane. (sorry link is stale).
The chromium fraud story is discussed in the recent outstanding book:
- “Doubt is their Product – How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens Your Health” by David Michaels, a scientists, current professor at George Washington University and a former Assistant Administrator in the Clinton Department of Energy.
The perpetrator of the scientific fraud, a Dr. Paustenbach and his colleagues at a firm called ChemRisk, openly bragged in the WSJ article about saving polluters hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup costs in NJ.
All this was craftily swept under the rug – worse, Jackson has proposed to privatize the DEP cleanup program, allowing such fraud and corporate consultants to drive the NJ toxic site cleanup program.
Now that is a record that should be probed in a Senate confirmation hearing.
Let’s hope that some bold Senator steps up to the plate. But don’t count on it.
