This post originally appeared at Facing South.

3 — Number of weeks straight last month that Republicans used their weekly radio address to attack government regulations for killing jobs

0.3 — Percent of people who lost their jobs in 2010 because of government regulation

25 — Percent who lost their jobs because of a drop in business demand

More than 1,000 — Number of temporary workers hired by energy giant AEP to build a pollution scrubber for one of its coal-fired power plants in order to meet Clean Air Act regulations

40 — Number of full-time employees the plant then hired to monitor the scrubber

1,600 — Number of temporary jobs created by installing scrubbers at two PSE&G coal plants

24 — Number of permanent jobs the installation created

35 — Percent increase in boilermaker jobs from 1999 to 2001 alone due to Clean Air Act regulations

200,000 — Number of person-years of labor occupied over the past seven years to comply with just one Clean Air Act standard

1 — Rank of environmental spending among the most labor-intensive of all business expenditures

1.7 million — Number of U.S. jobs directly supported by the environmental technologies industry, which has grown dramatically because of the Clean Air Act

$11 billion — Trade surplus generated by U.S. environmental technology exports in 2008

1 — Rank of the U.S. among world leaders in the environmental technology industry

This week, in a courtroom in Prince William County, Va., a hearing will take place that could have implications for the privacy rights of scientists at colleges and universities across the country.

It’s part of a lawsuit brought by the American Tradition Institute, a free-market think tank that wants the public to believe human-caused global warming is a scientific fraud. Filed against the University of Virginia (U.Va.), the suit seeks emails and other documents related to former professor Michael Mann, an award-winning climate scientist who has become a focus of the climate-denial movement because of his research documenting the recent spike in Earth’s temperature.

By suing the university, the American Tradition Institute wants to make public Mann’s correspondence in an effort to find out whether he manipulated data to receive government grants, a violation of the state’s Fraud Against Taxpayers Act.

But a Facing South investigation has found that the Colorado-based American Tradition Institute (ATI) is part of a broader network of groups with close ties to energy interests that have long fought greenhouse-gas regulation. Our investigation also finds that ATI has connections with the Koch brothers, Art Pope, and other conservative donors seeking to expand their political influence.

‘A hostile environment’

The controversy involving ATI began in January, when the group submitted a FOIA request to U.Va. seeking documents connected to Mann, who now directs the Earth System Science Center at Penn State. After the school was slow to produce the materials, ATI, along with Virginia Del. Robert Marshall (R), another global-warming skeptic, filed a lawsuit in May seeking to expedite the documents’ release. This week’s hearing will consider Mann’s motion to intervene in the case in order to protect privacy interests he does not think will be adequately protected by the other parties.

A physicist and climatologist with advanced degrees from Berkeley and Yale, Mann is known for research that contributed to the “hockey stick graph,” which shows a sharp rise in the Earth’s temperature in recent years. He was also among those caught up in the so-called “Climategate” controversy, involving emails hacked from a British university that climate skeptics claimed showed global warming was a fraud. Multiple investigations by Penn State, the National Science Foundation’s Inspector General, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and British parliament have cleared Mann and others of misconduct and determined that the content of the emails in no way changed the scientific consensus that global warming is occurring as a result of human activity.

Despite those exonerations, however, Mann became the target of a separate, ongoing investigation launched last year by Republican Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, a global-warming skeptic who issued civil subpoenas for Mann’s emails and other documents. A Virginia judge dismissed the investigation, but Cuccinelli — who previously challenged the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse-gas pollution endangers public health — is now appealing that decision to the Supreme Court of Virginia. ATI is seeking the same documents as Cuccinelli.

ATI’s lawsuit has been widely condemned by science, academic, and civil liberties groups, who describe it as a politically motivated intrusion into academic freedom. The board of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that such legal challenges “have created a hostile environment that inhibits the free exchange of scientific findings and ideas.” Earlier this year, public-interest groups, including the American Association of University Professors, sent a letter to the U.Va. president noting that the Virginia public documents statute expressly exempts scholarly data of a proprietary nature that has not yet been publicly released, published, copyrighted, or patented.

“While we need freedom of information laws to hold public officials accountable, the law has exemptions for good reason,” said Francesca Grifo, director of the Scientific Integrity Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, one of the letter’s signatories. “Scientists should be able to challenge other scientists’ ideas and discuss their preliminary thinking before their analyses are complete and published.”

But ATI has fired back against the scientists and academics, accusing them of taking part in a conspiracy to mislead and defraud the public.

“Once again, these self-interested groups — who hope to protect their billions of dollars in government funding of dubious, unsupportable research — accuse ATI of ‘harassment and intimidation’ of scientists,” ATI Executive Director Paul Chesser said in a statement. “It shows how blind they are to the fact that ATI has acted in the interest of sound, verifiable science and for the protection of the hard-earned money that taxpayers are forced to relinquish for such research.”

ATI’s western roots

ATI’s foray into the Virginia case marks the expansion of a controversial group already known for its fierce advocacy on behalf of oil, gas, and coal interests in Western states.

ATI was launched in Colorado in February 2009 as the nonprofit Western Tradition Institute (WTI), changing its name to ATI last year. WTI, in turn, was a spinoff of the Western Tradition Partnership (WTP) — a 501(c)(4) political advocacy group backed by energy interests.

“They are offshoots from the same poisoned roots,” said Peter Fontaine, the attorney representing Michael Mann in the ATI lawsuit.

WTP, which has since changed its name to American Tradition Partnership (ATP), describes itself as a “no-compromise grassroots organization dedicated to fighting the radical environmentalist agenda.” It was first registered as a Colorado nonprofit in 2008 by Scott Shires, a Republican operative with a checkered past: He was fined over $7,000 for campaign finance violations in Colorado, pleaded guilty in a scheme to fraudulently obtain federal grants for developing alternative fuels, and was tied to an illegal gambling ring. WTP was active on behalf of oil and gas industry interests in the 2008 commissioners race in Garfield County, a center of Colorado’s energy industry.

Last year, the then-WTP also backed a Colorado ballot initiative that would have allowed voters to opt out of the state’s renewable energy standard, which requires 30 percent of the electricity produced by investor-owned utilities to come from renewable sources by 2030. WTP missed the filing deadline to put the measure on the ballot, but ATI is picking up the slack: The group has sued Colorado over the standard, and is targeting similar renewable energy promotion programs in Delaware, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, and Ohio.

The groups have not only been fighting on behalf of the energy industry: They’ve also been targeting laws that restrict corporate money in elections and that require disclosure of contributions. In 2009, WTP sued the city of Longmont, Colo., over their local Fair Campaign Practices Act. The city eventually settled the suit and agreed to drop requirements that political donors have their identities disclosed on campaign advertisements.

And in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision, WTP successfully challenged the constitutionality of the Montana Corrupt Practices Act of 1912, which prohibited independent expenditures by corporations to influence political campaigns — a law originally aimed at powerful mining and railroad interests in the state.

But even while it has fought to weaken election laws, WTP has at times run afoul of them. A decision issued last year by the Montana Commission of Political Practices found that the organization had broken state campaign laws by failing to register as a political committee or properly report its donors and spending. The investigation discovered that the group had solicited unlimited contributions to support pro-mining, pro-logging, and pro-development candidates in Montana, and avoided disclosing the contributions by passing them along to a sham political action committee that in turn ran attack ads against Democrats.

As Commissioner Dennis Unsworth said in his decision, the group’s wrongdoing “raises the specter of corruption of the electoral process.”

A window into the climate-denial industry

In the WTP’s Winter 2010 newsletter, the group announced that it changed its name to the American Tradition Partnership. It also reported in an article datelined North Carolina that it had launched the American Tradition Institute, a think tank that would be “battling radical environmentalist junk science head on.”

The group would be led by Paul Chesser, who they described as a “noted climate scholar.” In fact, Chesser is not a scientist, but has long worked in what environmental advocates call the “climate denial machine“: a network of organizations, many backed by energy interests, that work to create doubt about the science of human-caused global warming.

According to his bio, Chesser grew up in Rhode Island and worked as an accountant in Los Angeles. He launched his reporting career in North Carolina, where he edited two weekly conservative Christian newspapers, The Raleigh World and The Triad World. Now defunct, the papers were owned by World Newspaper Publishing, whose stated purpose is to “bring journalism informed by a distinctly Christian worldview to major cities across America.”

From there, Chesser moved to the John Locke Foundation (JLF), a free-market think tank based in Raleigh, N.C., that has been a leading voice of climate denial in North Carolina. The Locke Foundation decries what it calls “global warming alarmism” and promotes the views of global warming skeptics like Patrick Michaels, who left the climatologist’s office at U.Va. in 2007 over controversy about his funding sources and fringe views.

The Locke Foundation was founded and is largely funded by Art Pope, a North Carolina millionaire and leading conservative benefactor. As a national director of the free-market advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, Pope has close ties to the Koch brothers, the billionaire owners of the Kansas-based Koch Industries oil and chemical conglomerate and leading funders of global warming denial efforts. The Koch Family Foundations have also contributed at least $70,000 to the Locke Foundation.

It was at the Locke Foundation that Chesser began his crusade against the growing scientific consensus about climate change. He served as an editor of Carolina Journal, the group’s monthly newspaper that relentlessly attacks the science of global warming in its climate coverage. While there, he also began working with Climate Strategies Watch, an initiative that sought to discredit the Center for Climate Strategies, a nonprofit group that helps states figure out ways to reduce greenhouse-gas pollution.

Climate Strategies Watch was a joint project of the Locke Foundation and the Heartland Institute, a corporate-backed think tank in Chicago where Chesser also served as a special correspondent. Heartland has received at least $676,000 from ExxonMobil since 1998. Between 1997 and 2008, they also received $30,000 from foundations connected to the Kochs, and another $50,000 from Pope’s family foundation. One of Heartland’s government-relations advisors also served as Exxon’s senior environmental advisor.

Chesser was soon fully immersed in the climate-denial network. He became an associate fellow for the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative think tank heavily funded by the Scaife Foundations, which are controlled by the family that owns Gulf Oil. He blogged for the Cooler Heads Coalition, an industry front group led by the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) — a fierce opponent of greenhouse-gas regulation that has taken over $2 million from ExxonMobil as well as funding from ATI, Texaco, and the Koch, Scaife, and Pope foundations. (ATI’s director of litigation, Christopher Horner, is a CEI fellow.)

Now at ATI, Chesser again finds himself speaking for a group largely bankrolled by fossil fuel interests. According to its most recent filing with the IRS, ATI last year received $40,000 from its sister group ATP, which in turn is supported by oil, gas and coal interests. It received another $5,000 from the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, a Virginia-based think tank that since 1998 has received over $1 million in funding from Exxon Mobil; between 1997 and 2008, Atlas also received $122,300 from the Koch foundations and $735,000 from the Pope foundation.

But ATI’s biggest funder is Montana businessman Doug Lair and his Lair Family Foundation; they contributed $5,000 and $135,000 respectively to the group last year — over 75 percent of its total income.

Lair’s fortune comes from Lair Petroleum, the family business that was sold in 1989 to William Koch, the lesser-known brother of Charles and David Koch. As recently as 2010, Lair Petroleum was listed as Lair’s employer in state campaign finance reports, although now he’s also an investor in commercial and agricultural real estate.

Along with ATP, Lair and another Montana resident recently filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of Montana campaign finance laws, arguing that limits on donation amounts and corporate contributions are impermissible under the First Amendment — a suit similar to others filed by the group. The plaintiffs are represented by James Bopp Jr., a prominent conservative attorney who worked as a legal adviser to the group behind the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision that successfully challenged strictures on corporate money in elections.

“The Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political speech is protected by the First Amendment, and you cannot ban political speech just because the speaker is a corporation,” said Bopp.

A chilling trend for academic freedom

The hearing on ATI’s FOIA lawsuit against U.Va. seeking Michael Mann’s records is set for Tuesday, Nov. 1, before Judge Gaylord Finch in Prince William County Court. The hearing was postponed from September after Finch said he wanted to allow more time for arguments because of the case’s significance.

“If it wasn’t clear before, it should now be clear to everybody,” David Schnare, pro bono director of ATI’s Environmental Law Center, said at the time. “This is an extremely important case, and we appreciate Judge Finch’s careful attention to detail as we proceed.”

Critics say the case not only symbolizes the industry attack on climate science, but is part of a growing trend of using public information requests to target academics for political reasons.

Earlier this year, the Republican Party of Wisconsin filed a records request seeking materials from University of Wisconsin history professor William Cronon after he criticized Republican Gov. Scott Walker’s push for legislation to weaken public-sector unions. Soon after, the Mackinac Center for Public Policy — a free-market think tank based in Michigan — submitted FOIA requests seeking materials related to the Wisconsin union battle from labor studies faculty at the University of Michigan, Michigan State, and Wayne State.

In the Cronon case, the University of Wisconsin’s faculty senate passed a resolution arguing that open records laws are abused when they become partisan tools. “What was begun as a classic notion of sunshine being the best disinfectant has turned into a law that’s used as a weapon to target not government officials and offices but individual public employees,” said professor Howard Schweber, one of the political scientists who helped craft the resolution.

In the end, the university released some Cronon emails but withheld others, including exchanges with students protected under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, and what it considered private exchanges among scholars. In the Wayne State case, the think tank’s action led the university to take down some pages of its Labor Studies Center’s website and investigate whether they had violated state campaign finance laws.

ATI is also using open records law to target another prominent and award-winning climate scientist: James Hansen, director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. In January, ATI filed a federal FOIA request with NASA seeking information on how Hansen “has complied with applicable federal ethics and financial disclosure laws and regulations, and NASA Rules of Behavior.” An outspoken advocate for limiting greenhouse-gas pollution, Hansen has long been a target of global-warming skeptics for his research and activism. ATI has sued NASA for withholding documents over concerns about Hansen’s privacy rights.

In the upcoming hearing on the U.Va. case, Mann’s attorney, Peter Fontaine, told Facing South that he will argue his client should be permitted to intervene in the ATI lawsuit because of his personal interest in protecting his private email correspondence with other scientists — what Fontaine calls the “raw materials of scholarship” that lead to finished science.

“If this information is disclosed and allowed to be cherry-picked, distorted, and mischaracterized, it will result in a terrible chilling of the rights of scientists to exchange their ideas,” said Fontaine, co-chair of Cozen O’Connor’s energy and climate change programs, and an EPA air pollution enforcer in the early 1990s. “It would be a blatant violation of my client’s copyrights to his private emails, as well as his First Amendment rights and the right to academic freedom.”

Fontaine faces a formidable adversary in ATI’s Schnare, who holds advanced science degrees from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and worked as an attorney with the Department of Justice and Virginia Attorney General before serving in the same EPA air-pollution enforcement job as Fontaine from 1999 until his retirement four weeks ago. Schnare dismissed the idea that the lawsuit is targeting Mann or his scholarly position on climate science, and said he plans to argue that the professor should not be allowed to intervene.

“This case is about FOIA, not Mike Mann,” Schnare said. “If he had wanted to protect himself from embarrassing emails, he should not have pressed ‘send’ to begin with.”

Correction: This story originally stated that David Schnare retired from his EPA job four months ago. It was, in fact, only four weeks ago.

It also shows how the mainstream media turned a relatively obscure climatologist into a star — despite the fact that he’s often wrong on the science.

This week Media Matters for America released its analysis of television news guests who have discussed the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. It studied guests who appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, MSNBC, CNBC and CNN, and on the nightly and/or Sunday news programs of ABC, CBS, NBC or Fox Broadcasting Co. between December 2009 and April 2011.

The analysis found that guests opposed EPA regulations 76 percent of the time, with only 18 percent in favor of stricter rules. It also found that in 17 months of coverage, only one guest who appeared to discuss the issue was an actual climate scientist — and that was Patrick Michaels, a Virginia-based climatologist who has come under fire from his mainstream colleagues for spreading misinformation and for being heavily funded by fossil fuel interests.

Michaels, who holds a doctorate in ecological climatology from the University of Wisconsin, left his position at the University of Virginia in 2007 amid controversy over his climate science skepticism and industry funding. He currently serves as senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., and holds the post of distinguished senior fellow in public policy at George Mason University in Virginia.

Cato was co-founded by conservative activist Charles Koch, the billionaire co-owner of Koch Industries, one of the largest privately held companies in the United States and one with extensive oil holdings. Cato is heavily funded by Charles Koch and his brother David, who sits on the organization’s board of directors. George Mason University in northern Virginia’s Fairfax County also receives significant funding from the Kochs — over $29 million since 1985.

In addition, Michaels is the principal behind New Hope Environmental Services, a consulting firm he founded in 1994. In an affidavit [pdf] filed in a Vermont court case, Michaels described the firm’s role as to “publicize findings on climate change and scientific and social perspectives that may not otherwise appear in the popular literature or media.” Hired in the Vermont case by General Motors, DaimlerChrysler, and other auto industry interests to challenge state regulation of greenhouse gases, Michaels eventually decided against testifying in order to protect his clients’ confidentiality.

However, various leaks and investigations have revealed his funders have included the Edison Electric Institute, the Western Fuels Association, Intermountain Rural Electric Association, and the former Center for Energy and Economic Development, now known as the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity. In a 2010 CNN interview, Michaels estimated that about 40 percent of his funding came from the oil industry alone.

While Michaels doesn’t dispute the basic scientific principles behind the greenhouse effect on climate, he promotes the ideas that global warming will be minor and may even be beneficial, and that there is little humans can do to address the problem. But many of his claims have come under criticism from leading climate scientists:

* Last November, Michaels testified before Congress that human emissions of greenhouse gases were responsible for less than half of the warming that’s occurred since 1950. However, climate researcher Benjamin Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory deemed Michaels’ assertions “not credible” because he ignored key data.

* In 2009, Michaels in his role with Cato circulated a draft advertisement [pdf] that claimed surface temperature changes over the previous century were “episodic and modest” and that there was “no net global warming for over a decade now.” The scientist-written blog RealClimate debunked Michaels’ claims as “nonsense.”

* In 2004, Michaels co-published a paper with Canadian climate scientist and global warming skeptic Ross McKitrick that purported to show a significant portion of warming could be explained by economic factors. But it turned out that all of their numbers were wrong because they confused degrees and radians.

* Michaels has even come under criticism from industry scientists. An internal 1995 document of the Global Climate Coalition, a now-defunct industry front group, examined the case made by Michaels and other climate skeptics and found that “they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change.”

John Holdren, a Harvard University physicist whose work has focused on global environmental change, told [pdf] the U.S. Senate Republican Policy Committee back in 2003 that Michaels “has published little if anything of distinction in the professional literature, being noted rather for his shrill op-ed pieces and indiscriminate denunciations of virtually every finding of mainstream climate science.” Tom Wigley, one of the world’s leading climate scientists, has observed that “many of the supposedly factual statements made in Michaels’ testimony are either inaccurate or are seriously misleading.”

What does it say about the state of U.S. TV news that such a person has been elevated to the status of star expert?

(This story was cross-posted from Facing South, the online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.)

Communities imperiled by poorly managed coal ash won’t be getting help from the federal government any time soon.

The Obama administration announced last week that it would not issue long-awaited federal regulations this year after all. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lisa Jackson shared the news in a March 3 hearing of a House Appropriations subcommittee.

Jackson blamed the delay on the large number of public comments — over 450,000 — that the agency received on the issue.

“It will take quite a bit of time to sort through,” Jackson said, according to a report by the Bureau of National Affairs.

Last May, EPA proposed two options for regulating coal ash, the toxic waste left over after coal is burned to generate electricity. One option would oversee coal as a special waste under Subtitle C of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, which applies to hazardous waste. The other would treat it as a nonhazardous waste under RCRA Subtitle D, offering federal guidelines for its handling but leaving oversight to the states.

Jackson told the subcommittee that the comments did not appear to favor one option over the other.

Environmental advocates blasted the decision to delay.

“Because 400,000 people cared enough to demand swift and effective action, EPA now has a reason to stall?” said Lisa Evans, an attorney with the environmental law firm Earthjustice. “It’s patently wrong and absolutely backwards.”

The impetus for federal regulations came from the catastrophic December 2008 collapse of a coal ash impoundment at the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Kingston plant in eastern Tennessee. The disaster spilled more than a billion gallons of coal ash laden with heavy metals, radioactive elements and other pollutants on a nearby community and into the Emory and Clinch rivers.

To date, the federal government and environmental advocacy groups have documented 137 cases of environmental damages caused by coal ash in 34 states, with many of those involving pollution of water supplies.

A recent EPA risk assessment [pdf] found that people who live near coal ash impoundments and drink from wells have as much as a 1 in 50 chance from getting cancer due to contamination with arsenic, one of the most common and dangerous pollutants in coal ash. The assessment also found an increased risk of damage to the liver, lungs, kidneys and other organs.

A study by environmental advocacy groups found that contamination from improper coal ash waste disposal is concentrated in communities with family poverty rates above the national median.

The utility industry and companies that recycle coal ash into products have fought the effort to designate coal ash as hazardous waste. They argue that such a move would increase energy costs and discourage recycling.

Activists in the Kentucky governor’s office.Photo: Chad Berry

This post originally appeared at Facing South.

This Valentine’s Day marks the fourth day of a historic sit-in at the Kentucky governor’s office calling for an end to mountaintop removal. Meanwhile, thousands of Kentuckians are gathering outside in the state capital of Frankfort for the “I Love Mountains” march calling for an end to the environmentally destructive coal mining practice.

Among those who have been taking part in the Kentucky Rising sit-in at the office of Gov. Steve Beshear (D) since Friday are the acclaimed writer and environmental activist Wendell Berry (second from left in photo); Mickey McCoy (at left), a retired teacher and former mayor from Martin County, Ky., where more than 300 gallons of toxic mining sludge were released into the water supply in 2001; and Stanley Sturgill (at right), a former underground coal miner and federal mine inspector.

“We call upon Gov. Beshear to lead by ending mountaintop removal, by beginning a sincere public dialogue about creating sustainable jobs for our hard-working miners, by putting the vital interests of ordinary Kentuckians above the special interests of an abusive industry,” the protesters said in a joint statement.

This is the first sit-in of its kind in Kentucky history. It was sparked by Beshear’s decision to partner with the coal industry and file a lawsuit against the Environmental Protection Agency for cracking down on permits for mountaintop-removal operations. In his recent State of Kentucky address, Beshear called for the EPA to “get off our backs.”

The governor met with the protesters for about 40 minutes, but said he planned to continue his lawsuit against the EPA. However, he did agree to visit Eastern Kentucky to witness the impact of mountaintop removal, and he also invited the protesters to stay in his office as long as they’d like.

To date, over 290 mountains have been destroyed by mountaintop-removal mining operations in Kentucky alone.

The people’s movement against destructive coal mining practices is gaining momentum in that state, where a judge recently granted environmental groups’ request to intervene in a settlement the state offered coal companies that engaged in widespread violations of the Clean Water Act. The groups believe the settlement doesn’t sufficiently address the companies’ violations.

This is the first time that a third-party intervention has been allowed between a potential Clean Water Act violator and a Kentucky state agency.

Now the same dangerous heavy metal, usually associated with steel manufacturing and metal plating, has been discovered seeping from coal ash disposal sites nationwide — and at levels that far surpass what Brockovich encountered.

“Communities near coal ash sites must add hexavalent chromium to the list of toxic chemicals that threaten their health and families,” says Lisa Evans, an attorney with the public interest law firm Earthjustice.

Evans is the author of a report released this week titled “EPA’s Blind Spot: Hexavalent Chromium in Coal Ash” [pdf] that was produced with Physicians for Social Responsibility and the Environmental Integrity Project. The federal government does not currently regulate the disposal of coal ash, the toxic waste created by coal-fired power plants that’s known to contain potentially dangerous levels of heavy metals, combustion byproducts and radioactive elements. But in the wake of the catastrophic 2008 coal ash spill from a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant in east Tennessee, the Environmental Protection Agency began crafting rules expected to be released this year.

The report identifies 28 coal ash dump sites from Massachusetts to Nevada where hexavalent chromium has been detected in the groundwater at levels exceeding federal or state standards. Most of the sites are at power plants, though the list also includes landfills and a golf course in Chesapeake, Va. that was built on coal ash fill. Given the lack of comprehensive federal monitoring requirements for coal ash disposal facilities, the report says that these 28 sites are likely just “the tip of the iceberg.”

Twelve of the sites are in the South, with North Carolina and Tennessee tied with Pennsylvania for the most with three each.

The report also cites a December 2009 agency study [pdf] on coal ash composition documenting five power plants that produce ash with an especially high potential to release dangerous levels of hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium-6 or Cr(VI). Those plants are DTE Energy’s St. Clair plant in East China, Mich.; Progress Energy’s Roxboro plant in Semora, N.C.; Southern Co.’s Crist plant in Pensacola, Fla.; TVA’s Widows Creek plant in Stevenson, Ala.; and WE Energies Pleasant Prairie plant in Kenosha, Wis.

The very highest level of hexavalent chromium — 7,370 parts per billion — leached from the coal ash produced at TVA’s Widows Creek facility, where a 2009 spill released some 10,000 gallons of coal ash waste into the Tennessee River. That level is more than 73 times the federal drinking water standard of 100 ppb for total chromium.

To put that in perspective, the average levels of hexavalent chromium contamination Brockovich was dealing with in Hinkley, Calif. were 1.19 ppb, with a peak of about 3 ppb.

Don’t drink the chromium

While it’s long been known that inhaling hexavalent chromium causes lung cancer and other health problems, new information is emerging about the dangers of drinking the chemical — and just how ubiquitous it is in water supplies:

* Last September, EPA released a draft toxicological review that found hexavalent chromium in tap water is “likely to be carcinogenic to humans.”

* In December 2010, after completing an in-depth, peer-reviewed study on hexavalent chromium’s oral toxicity, California environmental health officials proposed establishing a public health goal for the chemical’s presence in drinking water of just 0.02 parts per billion — 5,000 times lower than the current federal drinking water standard for total chromium.

* That same month, the nonprofit Environmental Working Group released a report documenting the presence of hexavalent chromium in tap water in 31 of 35 U.S. cities where it conducted tests (click on map above for a larger version). In 25 of those cities — including Atlanta, Louisville, Ky. and Tallahassee, Fla. — the levels of the chemical in tap water exceeded the California recommendations.

Two days after the release of the EWG report, the EPA announced that it would work with local and state officials to better understand how widespread the chromium contamination problem is. It also pledged to issue guidance to help water systems develop monitoring and sampling programs for hexavalent chromium.

“EPA takes this matter seriously and we will continue to do all that we can, using good science and the law, to protect people’s health and our environment,” Administrator Lisa Jackson said at the time.

But as the new report from Earthjustice et al. points out, the agency’s coal ash rulemaking has so far ignored the documented cancer threat from hexavalent chromium seeping into groundwater. In calculating the health risks of coal ash, EPA treated chromium as a carcinogen by inhalation only, classifying it as a non-carcinogen when it came to ingestion. In fact, EPA did not mention the cancer risk of ingested hexavalent chromium once in its recent 400-page human and ecological risk assessment [pdf] for coal ash.

The report calls on EPA officials to open their eyes to the full risk of hexavalent chromium — and to adopt the stricter of the two regulatory approaches it’s considering in order to adequately protect people from coal ash pollution.

“The cancer risk from hexavalent chromium is one more serious threat to health from coal ash,” says Barbara Gottlieb with Physicians for Social Responsibility. “To protect the public from carcinogens and other dangerous substances, the EPA needs to regulate coal ash as a hazardous waste.”

(A version of this story originally appeared at Facing South.)

Dwight Brown’s mug shot.

Dwight Brown, president and CEO of Cobb Electric Membership Corp., faces 16 counts of theft, three counts of racketeering, 10 counts of making false statements, and one count each of conspiracy to defraud the Cobb County government and the Cobb County school district, according to the Marietta Daily Journal. Brown’s attorney says his client is innocent.

The indictment charges Brown with using Cobb EMC’s revenues to fund operations of Cobb Energy, a private, for-profit spin-off of the EMC run by Brown. Brown allegedly did so without getting approval of the co-op’s members as required under the EMC’s by-laws. As the paper reports:

Without revenues from these various business dealings by Cobb Energy, funded by the co-op’s members, Cobb Energy could not have paid Brown millions of dollars in salary and compensations, dividends in preferred stock, and forgiven a $3 million loan Brown used to purchase the stock, according to the indictment.

The charges stem from a police raid of the homes of top Cobb EMC officials back in April 2009. The criminal investigation followed a civil lawsuit brought by EMC customers over the relationship between the co-op and Cobb Energy.

As the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy points out, Cobb EMC is the lead organizer of Power4Georgians, a consortium of electric co-ops planning to build coal-fired Plant Washington and Plant Ben Hill. The indictment supports SACE’s May 2009 analysis that the construction effort is compromised by mismanagement at Cobb EMC.

That analysis notes that Allied Energy Services — the company contracted by Power4Georgians to construct Plant Washington — is a fully-owned subsidiary of Brown’s Cobb Energy and has no experience building coal-fired power plants. SACE also reports that there’s no evidence of a competitive bidding process for the construction contract.

Following the 2009 police raid on Cobb EMC officials’ homes, a number of electric co-ops that were involved in the plant project dropped out. Besides Cobb, the other EMCs still invested in Power4Georgians are Snapping Shoals, Central Georgia, Washington, and Upson.

SACE says that the indictment underscores the need for more transparency around the power plant project. It called on Power4Georgians to disclose:

• The updated cost of Plant Washington, which hasn’t been revised since 2008 despite rapidly increasing costs for similar plants nationwide.
• Fresh data on the need for Plant Washington, which also hasn’t been revised since 2008 despite significant drops in electric usage in the last three years.
• How the $27 million that the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports the EMC has already invested in Plant Washington has been spent.
• Why Power4Georgians wants to build a new coal plant when Oglethorpe Power Co., which currently provides most of the EMCs’ electricity, sees existing natural gas plants as the most cost-effective option.

“Investing in a coal plant is already a bad idea,” says Ulla Reeves of SACE. “Investing money where corruption has been alleged at the helm is a boondoggle and simply irresponsible.”

Brown’s indictment is not the only problem facing the Plant Washington project: Last month, the Georgia courts ruled that the state-issued air pollution permits for the facility failed to protect public health and the environment. The Georgia Environmental Protection Division is now faced with revamping the permits to limit health-damaging air pollution.

A river downstream of a privately-owned nuclear fuel processing plant in East Tennessee is contaminated with enriched uranium, according to an interim report [PDF] by a university scientist that was released last week.

The contamination was found in the Nolichucky River and Davy Crockett Lake near Nuclear Fuel Services (NFS) plant in Erwin, Tenn. The plant, which produces nuclear fuel for the U.S. Navy and also processes weapons-grade uranium into fuel for nuclear power plants, has a history of serious safety problems.

The Nolichucky drains the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee and provides drinking water for Tennessee communities including Greeneville. There are no known sources of enriched uranium in the area other than NFS.

The research was conducted without compensation by Michael Ketterer, a chemistry professor at Northern Arizona University who specializes in uranium contamination, at the request of the Sierra Club Christian Peacemakers Teams. While uranium can occur naturally, Ketterer found ratios of various forms or isotopes of uranium downstream of NFS that indicate enriched uranium has escaped from the plant into the environment, most likely via groundwater.

“We do see ratios systematically higher than occur in nature far downstream from the Nuclear Fuel Services facility,” he said.

For example, the typical ratio of Uranium-235 to Uranium-238 found in nature is 0.00725, but the ratio in Nolichucky sediment and water is 0.015. Ketterer’s team also found that mollusks in Davy Crockett Lake, a popular fishing spot on the Nolichucky, show uranium signatures that matched those in the water.

The concentrations of enriched uranium that Ketterer found are low and do not exceed federal drinking water standards. But as Ketterer pointed out during a press conference last week, the federal water discharge permit for NFS says the facility is not supposed to be releasing any enriched uranium.

Ketterer presented his findings to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) last week during a public hearing about a proposed 40-year license renewal for the NFS facility, the Greeneville Sun reported.

Hartwell Carson, the French Broad Riverkeeper with the Western North Carolina Alliance, assisted Ketterer with his research. During last week’s press conference, Carson said the study “only scratched the surface of what’s out there and found widely dispersed enriched uranium in the environment,” which wasn’t previously known. Carson also raised concerns that there could be contamination hot spots that have not yet been discovered.

Ketterer agreed that the findings point to the need for further research. He said he was struck by the lack of information in the public record about environmental contamination from the NFS facility.

In 2006, there was a leak of highly enriched uranium from the NFS plant. In response, the NRC issued an order modifying the company’s special nuclear materials license that cited a “deficient safety culture” at the facility, the Knoxville News-Sentinel reported in 2007.

The order detailed six instances in 2005 and 2006 in which NFS personnel violated NRC regulations. The spill itself resulted in eight separate violations, including failure to notify NRC in a timely manner, and failure to meet safety requirements for a critical accident, which could lead to the release of a deadly amount of radiation.

In 2006, the NFS facility also failed to meet performance requirements in an exercise designed to test a plant’s response to an attack, and there were three instances in 2005 and 2006 where the company failed to secure special nuclear material.

NFS is a subsidiary of the Charlotte, N.C.-based Babcock and Wilcox Co., which provides design, engineering, construction, and management services for nuclear power plants.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

Art Pope.

For example, a survey [PDF] by university researchers published last year in Eos, the journal of the American Geophysical Union, found that 90 percent of earth scientists agree that mean global temperatures have generally risen since the 1800s, and 82 percent think human activity contributes significantly. As respondents’ level of specialization in climate science increased, so did their confidence in human-caused global warming, with climatologists who actively work on climate change agreeing most strongly. That broad agreement is why prestigious scientific organizations including the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Meteorological Society, and the National Academy of Sciences all refer to a climate science “consensus.”

But earlier this month, Rasmussen Reports released a poll that asked likely U.S. voters their thoughts on various energy issues including global warming. While the majority of voters — 59 percent — think climate change is a serious issue, the number has dropped since last year. At the same time, the survey found that only 39 percent of voters think human activity is the main contributor to the earth’s warming.

So why all the confusion among the public? A big reason is a long-lived and generously funded public relations campaign by corporations, business leaders, and others — many with a financial interest in fossil-fuel industries — to make it seem like there’s less of a consensus about human-caused climate change than there really is.

Two key players in this well-funded campaign have been David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers behind Koch Industries, a Kansas-based oil conglomerate and the second-largest privately held company in the United States. The Kochs have landed in the public spotlight lately thanks to a New Yorker profile that detailed their efforts to sow doubt about global warming as well as reports by The New York Times and Think Progress about the brothers’ efforts to coordinate conservative political initiatives, including an assault on what they call “climate change alarmism.”

But the Kochs aren’t the only ones attacking prevailing climate science. An investigation by Facing South finds that they have a valuable ally in North Carolina: the lesser-known but influential conservative benefactor Art Pope.

Pope has close ties to the Kochs as one of four national directors of the Koch-founded political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity; he is also the second-largest institutional funder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

In addition, Pope is a director and board chair of a family foundation that has steered millions to conservative thinks tanks both in North Carolina and nationwide, which have worked closely with the Koch network to manufacture doubt about global warming.

In North Carolina, the climate skeptics that benefit from Pope’s fortune haven’t gained much traction in the state legislature. But that could change if Pope’s strategy pays off this election year: He has begun funneling money to ostensibly nonpartisan nonprofits that use it to run attack ads, and among the targeted politicians are two long-time legislative leaders who’ve played a key role in addressing climate change in the state.

Keeping up with the Kochs

For over a decade, the Koch brothers have spent a considerable chunk of their $21.5 billion fortunes financing doubt about climate science.

A report released earlier this year by Greenpeace documented how the Kochs have contributed more than $48.5 million from 1997 to 2008 toward funding what the environmental group refers to as the “climate denial machine” — a network of several dozen think tanks dedicated to sowing doubt about global warming. The Kochs’ money has flowed largely through the brothers’ charitable family foundations: the Charles G. Koch Foundation, the David H. Koch Foundation, and the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation.

Facing South’s analysis of tax return data finds that Art Pope’s family foundation has also made very generous contributions to this same network of climate denial groups over that same period — more than $24.1 million in all.

The generosity of the Pope Foundation is especially remarkable when you consider that his fortune is presumably nowhere near as large as the Kochs’. While the Koch brothers landed in fifth place on Forbes’ list of the 400 richest Americans released last month, Pope — who made his millions after inheriting his father’s discount retail chain — did not make the list at all.

The largest chunk of money that Pope contributed to the climate denial network went to the John Locke Foundation, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank based in Raleigh, N.C. that was created in 1990 to promote the idea of limited government. Not only does Pope provide 80 percent of the organization’s funding — a striking $16.9 million from 1997 to 2008 alone — he also sits on its board of directors, which gives him considerable power in managing the organization’s operations and policies.

The John Locke Foundation, in turn, has been one of the most outspoken voices of climate denial in North Carolina — working in concert with other groups funded by Koch and Pope to creation the illusion of disagreement about the fundamentals of climate science:

• In 2005, shortly after legislation addressing climate change was first introduced in the General Assembly, the foundation released a public policy statement titled “Global Warming Policy: N.C. Should Do Nothing,” which claimed that climate science remains “unsettled.”
• That same year, the Locke Fo
  undation distributed to all members of the state legislature the Michael Crichton novel State of Fear, a work of fiction that promoted the views of Dr. S. Fred Singer, a prominent climate skeptic. Singer has held positions with the Cato Institute, which was co-founded in 1977 by Charles Koch and is generously funded by the Kochs, and with other Koch-financed outfits including the American Council on Science and Health, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Frontiers of Freedom, Heritage Foundation, Institute for Humane Studies, and the National Center for Policy Analysis.
• In 2007, as North Carolina began working on ways to reduce the state’s greenhouse gas emissions, it turned for technical assistance to the Center for Climate Strategies, a nonprofit group of scientists, engineers, business strategists, and policy experts that has worked with governments in the U.S., Mexico, and Canada on tackling climate change issues. In response, the Locke Foundation launched a series of attacks on the Center, charging that it was founded by an “environmental advocacy group known to take alarmist positions on global warming” — when in truth it was founded by the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, a business-friendly group whose directors have included representatives of Reliant Energy, Dow, and the Academy of Natural Sciences. At one point Locke teamed up with the Heartland Institute — a climate-skeptic group that’s been financed by the Kochs — to hold a conference call during which Locke’s research director accused the Center of peddling false assumptions like the idea that “CO2 emission reduction is the solution to global warming.”
• Also in 2007, the Locke Foundation released a policy report titled “A North Carolina Citizen’s Guide to Global Warming,” assuring readers that the “alarming view” of global warming does not represent the scientific consensus. It went on to assert that “most of the greenhouse effect is natural and is due to water vapor naturally in the atmosphere, as well as natural levels of carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, and a few other greenhouse gases.” The report was written by Joel Schwartz, who at the time was a visiting scholar at the Koch-funded American Enterprise Institute.
• In addition, Locke has questioned mainstream climate science through a series in the Carolina Journal, the foundation’s monthly newspaper, and opinion pieces published by its staff in other outlets, like the 2006 American Spectator article in which Locke editor Paul Chesser accused Christian climate activists of “Biblical illiteracy” and warned that “God has some serious global warming of His own planned.” The foundation has also spread its message of doubt through speaking engagements by climate science skeptic Pat Michaels, a climatologist who left the University of Virginia under a cloud of controversy over his industry funding and contrarian views to become a fellow at the Koch-founded and -funded Cato Institute, as well as through its Carolina Journal radio show, which has discussed topics like “the biases that help convince global warming alarmists that their cause deserves so much attention.”

The John Locke Foundation’s misrepresentations of climate science continue today. Earlier this month, for example, one of the organization’s half-dozen blogs featured a post that declared global warming a “pseudoscientific fraud” that has been “terribly discredited.”

Changing the political climate

So far, this network of groups has not succeeded in blocking North Carolina’s efforts to curb global warming pollution. In fact, the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, a nonprofit that promotes clean energy policy, calls North Carolina “one of the region’s leaders, with a state commission on climate change and a budding policy roadmap that points the state in the right direction.”

That roadmap was drawn by Senate Bill 3, legislation passed in 2007 that made North Carolina the 29th state in the nation — and the first in the Southeast — to adopt a minimum requirement for the use of renewable energy sources by investor-owned electric utilities. The bill requires that 12.5 percent of all electricity sold in the state by 2020 must come from renewable sources or improved efficiency. It’s a modest goal compared to other states’ — like New York’s 29 percent by 2015 or California’s 33 percent by 2020 — and some environmental advocates have called for raising it.

But the John Locke Foundation would like to do away with it altogether, according to the group’s 2010 climate agenda. Here’s that agenda in its entirety:

1. Abandon all state attempts to fight global warming

2. Repeal already adopted legislation such as SB3, which is raising energy costs and reducing employment opportunities in the state, which is already suffering from one of the highet unemployment rates in the nation.

This election year, Art Pope is also spending money on political advocacy to make this vision a reality. As Facing South has reported, Pope’s foundation is also a crucial backer of the Civitas Institute, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and its 501(c)(4) sister group, Civitas Action. Between 2005 and 2009, the Pope Foundation has accounted for about 99 percent of the Civitas Institute’s foundation income. Pope was also a founder of Civitas Action, which has raised nearly $265,000 since August — more than 70 percent of that directly from Pope’s company.

This month, Civitas Action took its first step into election-year politics, spending $5,750 on mailers targeting North Carolina House Speaker Joe Hackney and Senate leader Marc Basn
ight, Democrats who have been supportive of efforts to address global warming. Hackney led the state’s climate change commission for a time before appointing in his place Rep. Pricey Harrison (D), one of the legislature’s strongest environmental advocates. Basnight, who represents the Outer Banks, has talked about his concern that global warming and associated sea rise could inundate the region, and he supports a move to cleaner energy sources. Francis De Luca, president of the Civitas Institute and the former state director of the North Carolina chapter of Americans for Prosperity, has said more mailers are planned.

So who are Hackney’s and Basnight’s challengers, and where do they stand on global warming?

Running against the 15-term Hackney is Cathy Wright, a nursing instructor who’s also worked as a lobbyist for medical groups. She doesn’t address climate change in her platform or talk about it on the campaign trail, and her campaign manager did not respond to Facing South’s request for information about her position. But Wright does say she’s a member of the Conservative Women’s Forum, which promotes a book calling global warming a “scam” and is uniformly critical of clean energy solutions from cap-and-trade legislation to wind power to the promotion of compact-fluorescent light bulbs. Additionally, her campaign website links directly to both the John Locke Foundation and the Civitas Institute.

Meanwhile, Basnight’s opponent is Hood Richardson, a retired minerals geologist and commissioner for Beaufort County, N.C. Unlike Wright, Richardson is not at all shy about telling voters what he thinks about global warming: He calls it a “problem that has since been debunked as based on faulty science.” He also criticizes Basnight for helping create the state climate change commission, saying it will “severely harm businesses.”

Who does Richardson cite as the source for his claims?

The John Locke Foundation.

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)

Appalachia Rising protesting Clean Water Act violations.Photo: Rana Xavier

The companies targeted are ICG Hazard and ICG Knott, subsidiaries of West Virginia-based International Coal Group, and Frasure Creek Mining, a subsidiary of West Virginia-based Trinity Coal, which was recently purchased by India’s Essar Group. These are the largest producers of coal from mountaintop removal mining in Kentucky.

The companies have been sent intent-to-sue letters charging that they exceeded pollution discharge limits set by their state-issued operating permits, consistently failed to conduct the required monitoring of their discharges, and submitted false monitoring data to state agencies. Among the pollutants allegedly discharged at excessive levels include iron, total suspended solids, pH, and manganese. Ingestion of manganese can cause neurological problems resembling Parkinson’s disease; some of the manganese exceedances are over 40 times the maximum allowable levels. The violations could bring federal fines totaling over $740 million.

“The sheer number of violations we found while looking over these companies’ monitoring reports is astounding,” said Donna Lisenby, the Upper Watauga riverkeeper with North Carolina’s Appalachian Voices, one of the groups involved in bringing suit. “These companies are making a mockery of their legal responsibility under the Clean Water Act and, more troubling, their moral obligation to the people of the state of Kentucky.”

Among the environmental advocates’ allegations is that the companies’ discharge monitoring reports filed with state environmental regulators show exactly the same effluent data over time, indicating that the companies merely re-filed previously submitted reports under a different signature and date. Such fraudulent submissions — criminal acts that can bring jail time — comprise the majority of the alleged violations.

“In some cases, they just scratched out the date and wrote in another — they didn’t even bother to white it out,” said Robert F. Kennedy Jr., president of the Waterkeeper Alliance, which is also involved in the legal action along with Kentuckians for the Commonwealth (KFTC) and Kentucky Riverkeeper. “That’s the contempt this industry has for the law.”

Under the Clean Water Act, the companies have 60 days to respond to the allegations made in the notice letter. If violations have not been corrected by then, the groups plan to file suit in federal court for the Eastern District of Kentucky. Representing the plaintiffs are attorneys with the Appalachian Citizens’ Law Center, the Capua Law Firm, and the Pace Environmental Litigation Clinic.

The environmental advocates say their findings may represent only the tip of the iceberg of companies’ irresponsible mining practices — and the state’s monitoring failures.

On a recent trip to Kentucky’s Division of Mine Reclamation and Enforcement regional offices, Appalachian Voices’ Waterkeeper staff found on secretaries’ desks stack after stack of discharge monitoring reports from more than 60 mines and coal processing facilities. Covered in dust, the documents did not appear to have been evaluated for compliance for more than three years. A sampling of the reports showed hundreds of repeated violations by mine operators.

“Our state officials have closed their eyes to an obviously serious problem,” said Ted Withrow, a retired official with the Kentucky Division of Water and a KFTC member.

This is not the first time these companies have been in trouble for breaking the law. Earlier this year, KFTC and the Sierra Club documented how Frasure Creek was starting mining operations before getting needed approvals from the Environmental Protection Agency and the Army Corps of Engineers. The company was also accused of destroying streams at three mountaintop removal coal mines in eastern Kentucky without the proper permits.

And last month, federal investigators concluded that a 28-year-old coal miner in Raleigh County, W.Va., died in April because ICG did not have effective policies to keep workers out of dangerous areas in the company’s Beckley Pocahontas Mine. The U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration cited ICG’s Beckley subsidiary for failing to comply with safety plans.

Today’s legal action comes as Kentucky is under increasing scrutiny for its environmental permitting system: Just this week, the EPA objected to 11 water discharge pollution permits granted by the state of Kentucky, saying they failed to protect waterways. The Courier-Journal reports that this is the first time in about 20 years that the EPA has made such a move in the state, and it could lead to the federal government taking over the issuing of permits.

“The coal industry has proven time and again that it can’t be trusted. It continually downplays its severe environmental impacts, places profit over worker safety, and offers false economic analysis to try to keep its inherently destructive practices alive,” said Scott Edwards, director of advocacy for Waterkeeper Alliance. “And now we know they’re not honest in reporting on matters that impact the health of communities where they operate.”

(This story originally appeared at Facing South.)