Editor’s Note for August 2024 Networker
Many of us are feeling increasing distress at where our tax dollars are going: directly to war, to industries that manufacture weapons, to the fossil fuel industry and other polluting industries. A New York Times article in March 2024 called corporate fossil fuel subsidies the “zombies of the U.S. tax code… impossible to kill.” Some of the fossil fuel tax breaks go back a century, others have been created in recent years. In May of this year, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) introduced the End Polluter Welfare Act, which remains at early stages in the legislative process in both chambers.
Our new report, “The False Promise and Potential Health Harms of Carbon Dioxide Enhanced Oil Recovery (CO2 EOR) as a Tool of Climate Mitigation,” that I introduce in this newsletter and from which Dr. Sandra Steingraber provides an excerpt, sounds the alarm on the federal subsidization of this extreme form of fossil fuel extraction. “Morally sound public policy would not pay the polluter to pollute,” SEHN executive director Carolyn Raffensperger writes in the report’s conclusion. “It would penalize the polluter for damaging the commons.” We’re far from morally sound policy when it comes to CO2 EOR and the tax credits that artificially inflate its economic viability and ignore its impacts to health and environment.
There are other kinds of corporate-government relationships that also do not represent the general public’s interests, let alone that of future generations. On a state level, we see continued coziness between government and polluting industries. Below are two examples that intersect with our work.
In 2021, the Ohio River Valley Institute reported that a majority of Pennsylvania voters want to end fracking altogether (and by a 29-point margin, believed “that fracking companies should not receive financial incentives such as tax breaks or subsidies from the state government”). But last year in Pennsylvania, the governor and the Department of Environmental Protection entered into what the state called an “historic collaboration” with CNX Resources Corporation, “a major natural gas producer,” allowing the company to monitor its own fracking sites. Earlier this month, CNX released a report outlining their findings and issuing a blanket dismissal of all research on the health and environmental impacts of fracking to date (the latter served up with a sizeable helping of snark). As co-author of nine editions of the fracking science Compendium, along with colleagues at Physicians for Social Responsibility Pennsylvania and the Fractracker Alliance, I had some thoughts about that, which we were fortunately able to share with Inside Climate News.
Orenstein said that peer-reviewed scientific studies on fracking document an “unfolding public health crisis.”
“It is deeply alarming that the governor of Pennsylvania aligns himself with a company that denies this fact,” she said.
Meanwhile, we continue to monitor an unacceptable situation in California, where there is still no comprehensive cleanup underway of the long- and heavily-contaminated Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL). There, the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), a sub-agency of California's EPA and the regulating agency for the state’s toxic sites, has engaged in backroom, confidential deals with the responsible party (Boeing), disregarding previously signed agreements. Boeing, incidentally, is the United States’ largest corporate recipient of federal funding according to “Subsidy Tracker,” having received a total of at least $15 billion (based on extensive though incomplete data on awards primarily granted since fiscal year 2000). Melissa Bumstead, founder and co-director of the frontline organization Parents vs. SSFL, told me recently:
Boeing’s influence is seen at every level of government regarding the SSFL, but especially within the DTSC. The DTSC's cleanup decisions are made in favor of Boeing's finances, despite concerns and protests of the public and elected officials. The DTSC accepts Boeing’s data; any independent studies are rejected out of hand. Boeing’s influence has been eating away at democracy within California, and residents living near the toxic SSFL are paying for it with their lives.
We can’t act if we don’t know. We are grateful as always for our readers taking in and making use of the information in this month’s Networker. You will find organizations and elected representatives that are challenging this state of affairs. With full participation, we look to the next election cycle to launch new momentum.
Carmi Orenstein, MPH