BP to dump tons in additional toxins in Lake Michigan

The Great Lakes are the largest surface freshwater system on the planet, and they provide drinking water for more than 30 million Americans per year.

UPI/ July 14, 2007

WHITING, Ind.– An enormous BP oil refinery in Indiana is planning to pour significantly more ammonia and industrial sludge into Lake Michigan, it was reported.

The move by the British Petroleum oil refinery of Whiting, Ind., runs counter to years of efforts to clean up the U.S. Great Lakes, The Chicago Tribune reported Saturday.

State regulators exempted BP from environmental laws to pave the way for a $3.8 billion expansion to let BP refine heavier Canadian crude oil. Regulators justified the move, in part, by noting the project will create 80 new jobs.

BP, which aggressively markets itself as environmentally friendly, already is one of the largest polluters along the Great Lakes.

Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Ian Sample, science correspondent/February 2, 2007/Guardian

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.

Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Top corporate air polluters

Contact: Prof. Michael Ash +1 (413) 545-6329

AMHERST, MA, May 11, 2006 – Researchers at the Political Economy Research Institute (PERI) at the University of Massachusetts today released the Toxic 100, an updated list of the top corporate air polluters.

White House edited reports on global warming

by Andrew C. Revkin and Matthew L Wald/Int’l Herald Tribune-America/March 20, 2007

WASHINGTON: A House committee released documents Monday that showed hundreds of instances in which a White House official who was previously an oil industry lobbyist edited government climate reports to play up uncertainty of a human role in global warming or play down evidence of such a role. In a hearing of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, the official, Philip Cooney, who left government in 2005, defended the changes he had made in government reports over several years. Cooney said the editing was part of the normal White House review process and reflected findings in a climate report written for President George W. Bush by the National Academy of Sciences in 2001.

They were the first public statements on the issue by Cooney, the former chief of staff of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Before joining the White House, he was the “climate team leader” for the American Petroleum Institute, the main industry lobby.

Exploiting Immigrant Labor

The farmed-animal industry deliberately recruits immigrants because they will accept low wages and can be easily manipulated for fear of losing their jobs. Some meatpacking giants have even been charged with smuggling undocumented workers into the States. Far away from their homes with no support network, many of these migrant workers are treated like slaves by the farmed-animal industry. In some slaughterhouses, two-thirds of the workers are immigrants who cannot speak English.

Chevron Increasingly Desperate in $6 Billion Environmental Lawsuit in Amazon rainforest

www.chevrontoxico.com/July 3, 2007

Chevron Seeks to Avoid Judgment It Requested in 2002

New York – Having lost critical legal motions in recent weeks in two countries over its multi-billion dollar liability in the Amazon rainforest, Chevron’s prospects in the long-running case are dimming with a final judgment expected within months despite frantic efforts by company lawyers to delay the process.

The plaintiffs’ legal team believes the monetary judgment could break all records for civil cases. Chevron has admitted it dumped 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into Ecuador’s rainforest over a 25-year period, threatening the existence of four indigenous groups and causing a regional cancer epidemic that the plaintiffs believe has claimed hundreds of lives.

“We are talking about a possible damages award in the many billions of dollars,” said Pablo Fajardo, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. “The environmental clean-up alone is likely to surpass $6 billion, and that does not include health and personal damages for tens of thousands of people who live in the area. This could dwarf any other damages claim in environmental law, as well as in any civil case that resulted in an actual judgment”.

In a last-ditch effort, Chevron’s local attorneys are now suggesting the company might not abide by the judgment. Chevron executive Ricardo Reis Veiga, who himself has been the subject of a fraud investigation in Ecuador for his role in a botched remediation attempt in the1990s, this week also personally attacked the presiding judge and the current court-appointed expert responsible for calculating the damages.

Canada lowers standards on pesticide use on fruits, vegetables to match U.S. limits

by Kelly Petterson/Ottawa Citizen/May 9, 2007

Think those grapes look suspiciously dusty?

Better break out the veggie-scrubbers: Canada is set to raise its limits on pesticide residues on fruit and vegetables for hundreds of products.

The move is part of an effort to harmonize Canadian pesticide rules with those of the United States, which tends to allow higher residue levels on its food: Canada’s limits are stricter than those south of the border for 40 per cent of the residues it regulates.

Monsanto’s Roundup and other claims to fame

Monsanto Roundup
(Glyphosate)
Roundup is a pesticide as defined by the EPA. Roundup is a highly toxic and persistent pesticide. For numerous articles on Monsanto and Roundup, follow link below, while at the same time remembering the other contributions that Monsanto has made to society such as:

Saccharin, Astroturf, agent orange, dioxin, sulphuric acid, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), plastics and synthetic fabrics, research on uranium for the Manhattan Project that led to the construction of nuclear bombs, styrene monomer, an endless line of pesticides and herbicides (Roundup), rBGH (recombinant bovine growth hormone that makes cows ill), genetically engineered crops (corn, potatoes, tomatoes, soy beans, cotton).

Take a look at what Monsanto has done to Canadian canola farmer Percy Schmeiser, http://www.percyschmeiser.com. And he’s far from being the sole recipient of Monsanto’s vengeful wrath. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of farmers around the world are being sued after Monsanto’s police “find” their patented crops on the farmers’ lands without paying for use of the technology. See the Monsanto Technology Agreement, http://www.farmsource.com/images/pdf/2006%20EMTA%20Rev3.pdf, in which farmers must sign away all rights in order to sow Monsanto seed.

For more info on Monsanto go to:

http://www.organicconsumers.org/index.htm

http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Monsanto-Roundup-Glyphosate.htm

Europe vs. Bush on Global Warming

Andrew Purvis/TIME/Jun. 04, 2007

When it comes to addressing climate change, the U.S. and Europe are like two cars racing toward each other in a game of chicken, according to Hans Joachim Schnellhuber, an adviser on climate issues to German Chancellor Angela Merkel. That may be overstating the case. But there’s little chance that this week’s G8 summit at the German seaside resort of Heiligendamm will resolve fundamental differences between the Bush Administration and E.U. countries led by Germany over how to combat global warming.

NASA scientist rips Bush on global warming

Renowned expert says data ’screened and controlled’

The Associated Press /Oct 27, 2004

IOWA CITY, Iowa - The Bush administration is trying to stifle scientific evidence of the dangers of global warming in an effort to keep the public uninformed, a NASA scientist said Tuesday night.

“In my more than three decades in government, I have never seen anything approaching the degree to which information flow from scientists to the public has been screened and controlled as it is now,” James Hansen told a University of Iowa audience.