Reply author: Drafters
Replied on: 03/25/2006 12:41:18 PM
Message:

.....Some readers may recall the sight of flames leaping from the Cuyahoga River in Cleveland in 1969. An oil slick on the river caught fire, which lit wooden train trusses. There had been fires in the river before; the Cuyahoga, an industrial sewer, was biologically dead. A few years before the fire, a real estate company had sued the city for allowing the river to deteriorate to such a condition. The trial court ordered the city to investigate the causes of the pollution and ordered “such nuisances . . . to be abated.” The supreme court of Ohio reversed, holding that the river was under the control of state authorities. Common-law protection had been erased by the Ohio Water Pollution Control Board, which had granted permission for various industries to discharge wastes into the Cuyahoga and, thereby, Lake Erie. When regulation takes precedence over common-law rights, the result can be destructive to the environment.......

The granddaddy of all Superfund sites is Love Canal. In 1980 it generated horror stories of chemicals seeping from an abandoned toxic dump site run by Hooker Chemical Company (Occidental Petroleum). Publicity about the site helped spur public support for quick passage of the Superfund toxic-cleanup law, the Carter administration’s final major “gift” to citizens before leaving office.

Love Canal was a failed entrepreneurial canal built in the 1800s. In 1941, Hooker Chemical bought the 3,000-foot long trough, which was 8 to 16 feet deep and 60 to 80 feet wide, to use to dump toxic waste from its plant on the outskirts of the City of Niagara Falls, New York. The canal soil was hard clay, so it made an excellent disposal site that did not appear to cause water contamination. In the 1950s, the city, which had been fully informed of what was under the soil, essentially condemned the Love Canal property and, over company objections, later built a public school on the grounds and allowed housing to be constructed there. Eventually, Hooker had to pay to clean up the site under the Superfund law.

Hooker was also sued in tort by citizens and various governments. The federal court judge in 1994 provided exhaustive findings in the case U.S. v. Hooker Chemical. The government requested punitive damages from Hooker, but the court rejected the request. Nevertheless, Hooker was held negligent, primarily for not coming forward with more information about the dangers of various chemicals in later years. “While the Company should have made greater efforts to keep local residents off the property,” the judge ruled, “it violated . . . no legal obligation in failing to do so. It responded to complaints about odors, fires, and exposures to chemicals whenever notified, and there was no evidence of injury during the disposal operations that would have signaled a compelling need to provide more protection.”

Love Canal is notorious. One environmental law textbook asserts that hundreds of people suffered terrible injuries there. No doubt the hysteria caused by EPA workers in space suits hustling people from their homes may have caused distress. Yet the court’s review of injuries from chemical exposure shows only “relatively minor noticeable injury.” That is, the Love Canal Superfund site, the stuff of environmental legends, was found, on careful examination, to be associated with little harm to human beings at the time and no lasting harm. But the company was liable for what minor harms it negligently inflicted on residents. No harm at all would have likely ever occurred had the city not demanded the property from the company and built on it, tampering with the soil cover on the chemicals.

These horror stories, the stuff of the Green Scare, have achieved the status of Official Truth. But each is grossly distorted in the service of interventionist environmentalism. Here’s yet another example of the old saying that it’s not what we don’t know that hurts us. It’s what we know that isn’t so.
http://www.fee.org/publications/the-freeman/article.asp?aid=4171

Escalating a campaign questioning Vice President Al Gore's environmental commitment, environmental organizations today placed a full-page ad in the west coast edition of the New York Times. The ad, whose headline reads "Who is Al Gore? Environmental Champion or Petroleum Politician? The U'wa people need to know" substantiates Gore's connections to Occidental Petroleum and argues that the Vice President has a specific responsibility to act on behalf of the U'wa people.......

Gore has enjoyed the corporate sponsorship of Oxy throughout his political career. He controls up to $500,000 in Oxy stocks and has received $20,000 a year for almost 30 years from mining rights to his land that Oxy never mined. Gore's father made a great deal of his wealth while working for Oxy and its ex-chairman, Armand Hammer. Gore Sr. sat on the Board of Oxy for twenty-eight years. Since Gore was elected Vice President, Oxy Chairman Ray Irani has given more than $400,000 to the Democratic Party.

Furthermore, a Gore initiative,"Reinventing Government" resulted in the sale of the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve to Occidental in 1998. The unprecedented closed bidding process was the largest privatization of federal property in U.S. history, one that tripled Occidental's U.S. oil reserves overnight......

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=259

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