Authors: Mickey Huff
What the public did not know as the Obama administration doled out billions in economic stimulus packages to corporations is that known big polluters were categorically freed from EPA oversight as they received those funds.
Passed by Congress in 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) provides one of the few proactive protections in an environmental enforcement system that typically relies on penalties after harm has already afflicted the environment and human health. NEPA requires companies to study possible benefits and threats to landscape, wildlife, or human health before proceeding with a major federal project, giving officials one last chance to intervene if the work imposes a “significant impact.” Ultimately, the federal law is meant to ensure that environmental factors weigh as much as economic ones.
Because industry groups complained that NEPA compliance could delay projects by months or years, tying up companies with public notices and scientific studies costing millions of dollars, the Obama administration was thus influenced to ignore federal law and grant NEPA exemptions—more than 179,000 “categorical exclusions”—to streamline the environmental review process for “shovel-ready” stimulus projects that could create jobs quickly in a recession and yield “green energy” benefits down the road. Among the firms that won blanket NEPA exemptions were coal-burning utilities like Westar Energy and Duke Energy, chemical manufacturer DuPont, and ethanol maker Didion Milling—all despite histories of serious environmental violations. A project at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, secured a waiver for a carbon capture experiment, even with its poor safety record and deadly 2005 explosion.
The so-called “stimulus” funding came from the $787 billion legislation officially known as the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, passed in February 2009. Documents show that the administration devised a speedy review process that relied on voluntary
disclosures by companies to determine whether stimulus projects posed environmental harm. Corporate polluters often omitted mention of health, safety, and environmental violations from their applications and were able to do so because administration officials chose to ignore companies’ environmental compliance records in making grant decisions and issuing NEPA exemptions, saying they considered such information irrelevant. In the words of Energy Secretary Steven Chu, the Obama administration’s main goal was to “get the money out and spent as quickly as possible.”
Lyme disease is growing, with new cases appearing faster than AIDS and West Nile virus combined. Lyme—one of the most political and controversial diseases of our times—is ostensibly transmitted through the bite of an infected tick. Insurance companies maintain that while Lyme disease is hard to catch, it is easy and fast to cure. Yet, Lyme is difficult to diagnose because it can lie dormant in the body. When it does produce symptoms, it can mimic a bevy of mental and physiological conditions: neurodegenerative disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson’s, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, or mental disorders such as schizophrenia and bipolar. Patients may be misdiagnosed with lupus, Crohn’s disease, chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, or rheumatoid arthritis. The bacteria have been found in the brain tissue of Alzheimer’s victims. Current diagnostic tools are inadequate to identify whether or not a patient is infected. Even if a diagnosis is obtained, arbitrary standards of treatment apply. Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) designed these guidelines.
Since Lyme is onerous enough to diagnose and treat, the IDSA’s guidelines simply reinforce this enigma by punishing physicians who diagnose and treat Lyme. Physicians who treat chronic Lyme patients recognize scientific research showing that, even with the two- to four-week course of treatment, some Lyme bacteria can survive in persistent infections. Despite physicians’ understandings that Lyme disease patients may need longer-term care, insurance companies, along with “lockstep” medical panels such as the IDSA, have taken strong actions to limit treatment to short-term antibiotic therapy.
Indeed, most treating physicians understand that IDSA guidelines were written not with patient health in mind but for profit. Thus the IDSA’s guidelines are meant to restrict treatment, penalize doctors who recognize and treat chronic Lyme, and deny coverage for treatment. Physicians risk having their licenses suspended by state medical boards and being sued by insurance companies.
For Massachusetts’s 2011 budget, Governor Deval Patrick signed into law language on doctor protection for Lyme disease-treating physicians. The law permits doctors to clinically diagnose and treat patients long term. The state medical board in Massachusetts cannot bring charges against a doctor solely for prescribing long-term antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease. However, Lyme still remains a controversial disease—spirochete bacteria, of the same phylum as syphilis, leave room for speculation about the route of transmission. Scientists predict that Lyme disease will increase with global warming. The lack of attention to this lethal and debilitating disease is another “dot” the corporate media have dismissed in their dissemination of information.
In samples taken from drinking water and puddles on the streets of New Delhi, a gene that could turn many types of bacteria into deadly superbugs was discovered, according to a new study. First identified in 2008, the bacteria armed with this gene, known as New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase 1 (NDM-1), is now widely circulating in the environment and could spread to the rest of the world. Superbugs such as NDM-1 are resistant to car-bapenem antibiotics, which is of major concern to experts because they are used for persistent infections that evade other drugs. Guenael Rodier, director of communicable diseases at the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Copenhagen office, said, “It’s like asking in the 1980s if a few HIV cases should be a big worry … the fact that NDM-1 has emerged is worrisome, but forecasting what it will do is very difficult.”
Emerging in India, the superbug has made some appearances in North America. London-based pharmaceutical company Glaxo-SmithKline currently holds the patent on a chemical compound, which, if processed, could treat NDM-1. Yet the super drug for the superbug remains in chemical form with no human trials underway.
There is no profit in the generation and testing of new antibiotics; profit is measured in sales volume, therefore a market must exist independent of the need. Thus, pushing current drugs that contribute to antibiotic resistance takes precedence over clinical trials for new drugs that might cure diseases.
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Each year in the European Union (EU), over twenty-five thousand people die of bacterial infections that are able to outsmart even the newest antibiotics. That figure will increase unless more powerful antibiotics are developed. According to the WHO, the situation has reached a critical point and a united push to make new drugs is urgently needed because there are now a number of bacteria resistant to all existing drugs.
While doctors and patients are blamed for overuse of antibiotics, the real cause for urgent action is the lack of development of new drugs, an issue largely unknown outside relevant medical communities. Corporate media portrays superbugs and climate change similarly, as isolated events, invisible to the eye and therefore a deceptively distant threat. The reality is that with the planet heating up from carbon emissions, there is a clear association between climatic conditions and infectious diseases. The link between malaria and climate change has long been studied in India. Excessive monsoon rainfall and humidity are factors, contributing to mosquito breeding and survival. If the NDM-1 gene can turn bacteria into superbugs, then vectors of transmission influenced by climate change will contribute to their spread.
While mainstream medicine denies the connection between human health and the environment, 50 percent of newly elected GOP congressmen deny the impact of human-made emissions on the health of the Earth, ThinkProgress discovered. Eighty-six percent reject climate change legislation that would increase government revenue. These Congress members have gone on record rejecting the decades of sound evidence compiled by scientists, which shows human-made emissions are warming the atmosphere, and they have done so in a year slated to become the hottest ever recorded.
In summary, GOP congressmen’s environmental myopia mirrors the corporate media view that environmental issues, if acknowledged, are framed as isolated events, with a beginning and isolated cause, an estimated cost, maybe a bit of passing human interest, and an end. The real and ongoing stories, the remaining and growing damage, and especially the cumulative effects on health and wellbeing of people and the planet, seldom hit corporate controlled headlines and stories. Americans have a right to, and in many studies say they want to, connect the dots and to react reasonably to environmental calamities. But without transparency and accurate information, society cannot adequately meet the clearly escalating environmental challenges today.
Rarely, if ever, is accountability included in stories and analyses. Despite responsibility for the worst environmental disaster in American history, government and the media lets BP off the hook, with continued drilling in the Gulf throughout the disaster, new rigs going up within a year, and, in the face of studies to the contrary, continued assurances to Americans that everything is safe. At perhaps even greater magnitudes, the levels and effects of radiation contamination in Japan, the US, and elsewhere by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant and by US reactors, are largely ignored, denying as well citizens’ rights to know both the extent of dangers and ways to protect themselves and the environment.
The most basic of accepted ecological principles, that everything is interrelated so that any event has impacts and inevitable implications in the interconnected web of life, is most often ignored or unheeded by corporate media in America. This is a lesson with terminal consequences and there may not be more opportunities to learn from our misguided energy policies. While Switzerland and Germany phase out of nuclear energy, and China, Germany, and Japan move forward with research and deployment for renewables, the Obama administration invests in a losing game throwing billions in subsidies toward the oil, coal, gas, and nuclear industries.
In between media coverage of New York Congressman Anthony Weiner’s sexual peccadilloes, Sarah Palin’s flubbing about Paul Revere, and TV commercials greenwashing “clean” energy contributing to climate change are the stories of extreme weather events—tornadoes in the Midwest, fires in Texas and Arizona. Bill McKibben asks why we
didn’t see pictures of disasters in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, or the Philippines, or of the megafloods in Brazil. Amy Goodman wonders why TV meteorologists don’t connect the dots—“by following the words extreme weather with another two—climate change.” As she astutely points out, “we need modern day eco-Paul (or Paula) Reveres to rouse the populace to this imminent threat.”
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. Matthew Daly, “NRC: Nuke Plants Need More Training on Emergencies,” Associated Press, June 6, 2011,
http://hosted2.ap.org/APDEFAULT/Article_2011-06-06-Nuclear%20Plants-Safety/id-p874d5a0dbc094a95b127e79d43791eb2
.
2
. Cindy Sheehan, “Cindy Sheehan Takes on TSA,”
Daily Censored
, December 4, 2010,
http://dailycensored.com/2010/12/04/cindy-sheehan-takes-on-tsa/
.
3
. Chris Martenson, “Exclusive Arnie Gundersen Interview: The Dangers of Fukushima Are Worse and Longer-lived Than We Think,”
ChrisMartenson.com
, June 3, 2011,
http://www.chrismartenson.com/blog/exclusive-arnie-gundersen-interview-dangers-fukushima-are-worse-and-longer-lived-we-think/58689
.
4
. These corporate media articles touch on the subject by revealing the existence of the plastic garbage patch but do little to question the underlying causes and efforts to fix the problem: Shelby Lin Erdman, “Scientists Study ‘Garbage Patch’ in Pacific Ocean,” CNN, August 4, 2009,
http://articles.cnn.com/2009-08-04/tech/pacific.garbage.patch_1_plastic-bits-and-pieces-pacific-ocean
; Lindsey Hoshaw, “Afloat in the Ocean, Expanding Islands of Trash,”
New York Times
, November 9, 2009,
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/10/science/10patch.html
.
5
. Jake Tapper, “BP Turns to Political Shop for $50 Million Ad Buy to Convince You the Company ‘Will Get This Done’ and ‘Make It Right,’ ” ABC News, June 4, 2010,
http://blogs.abcnews.com/politicalpunch/2010/06/bp-turns-to-political-shop-for-50-million-ad-buy-to-convince-you-the-company-will-get-this-done-and-.html
.
6
. Richard Harris, “Gulf Spill May Far Exceed Official Estimates,” National Public Radio, May 14, 2010,
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126809525
.
7
. Jon Swaine and Robert Winnett, “BP Chief Tony Hayward Sold Shares Weeks Before Oil Spill,”
Telegraph
(UK), June 5, 2010,
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/oilandgas/7804922/BP-chief-Tony-Hayward-sold-shares-weeks-before-oil-spill.html
.
8
. “Media Ignores Goldman Sachs’ ties to Corexit Dispersant,” War on You, May 20, 2010,
http://waronyou.com/topics/media-ignores-goldman-sachs-ties-to-corexit-dispersant/
.
9. “Statement of the Lyme Disease Association, Inc. on the IDSA Guidelines Panel Decision 4-22-10,” Lyme Disease Association, April 22, 2010,
http://www.lymedis-ease.org/news/lyme_disease_views/400.html
.
10
. Steve Sternberg, “Drug-resistant ‘Superbugs’ Hit 35 States, Spread Worldwide,”
USA Today
, September 17, 2010,
http://www.usatoday.com/yourlife/health/medical/2010-09-17-1Asuperbug17_ST_N.htm
.