(MintPress) – Recently leaked documents reveal the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) is secretly working with big coal and faux environmental organizations to delay and rollback regulations, creating a loophole for coal companies to emit unregulated amounts of pollutants into the air.
In November, oil industry leaders and faux environmental leaders gathered in Washington D.C. for its annual States and Nations Policy Summit. Its sponsors for the event? Fourteen companies and organizations, five of which have direct ties to the coal industry. The mission? To eliminate environmental obstacles to monetary success for the represented parties.
Since 2007, sponsors for the summit spent a collective $194 million in lobbying efforts alone to do just that, according to the Center for Responsive Politics — a statistic highlighted by Greenpeace in its Polluter Watch site.
Documents, linked to Greenpeace and provided to MintPress, detail the agenda of the ALEC energy task force meeting, including a presentation given at the summit by Tom Easterly, Indiana Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Management, in which he provides details to legislators and big coal representatives on methods to delay Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) rules.
The documents obtained by Greenpeace allowed the organization — and the world — to view the energy task force agenda for the first time. While able to receive other committee agendas through petitions for information, Greenpeace Researcher Connor Gibson said the nature of the energy task force, along with the international relations task force, are always especially secretive, marking the importance of the documents and information obtained.
“What it tells the American public is that decisions are made by a select few people that affect them, and it’s not in their interest,” Gibson told MintPress. “The coal angle is just one example, but all of ALEC’s other work falls into that pattern.”
Now, it’s at it again. This time, in relation to the coal industry and in stark contrast to environmental regulations that seek to protect Americans from harmful pollution and rollback the impact of a warming climate.
Environmental fronts, corporations effective in crafting laws
“Easterly’s presentation, which is posted on his Indiana Dept. of Environmental Mgmt commissioner webpage, even offered a template state resolution that would burden EPA with conducting a number of unnecessary cost benefit analyses (which the federal government has done through the Special Cost of Carbon Analysis) in the process of controlling GHG emissions,” Gibson wrote on the Polluter Watch site.
The delay game is nothing new for the environmental industry, as it’s become a mainstay practice to halt EPA regulations, created initially to protect Americans from harmful health hazards.
Easterly, who in his position is an avid denyer of climate change, is anything but an environmental guru. In fact, his position puts him directly in service for coal industries, not the constituents of the state of Indiana. The front for arguments by coal companies and their environmental front organizations always comes down to one thing: cost — for the consumer and the company.
“These coal companies talk cost a lot but they’re not willing to talk external cost, the cost of our air, water quality; the things that are truly priceless,” Gibson told MintPress.
Easterly’s presentation at the summit included a powerpoint presentation sponsored by the Environmental Council of States (ECOS), an organization comprised of state regulators working in favor of big coal. One document obtained by Greenpeace shows the organization’s argument that EPA standards would increase household spending. This, however, does not take into account the health-related impact the elimination of such regulations will diminish.
Together, they work to create model legislation, beneficial to the industry. Their sponsors include the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), another organization with an environmental title, but a business-minded attitude.
Robert Mike Duncan, president and CEO of the company, previously served as the Chairman for Karl Rove’s American Crossroads, a right-wing super political action committee (PAC). In fact, according to Greenpeace, ACCCE spent $12 million during the 2012 election to promote the coal industry.
It’s no surprise, then, that at the forefront of ACCCE’s agenda is the rollback of EPA regulations intended to combat climate change and limit hazardous pollutants.
“These coal front groups, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, they might as well be called the coal pollution lobby,” Gibson said. “That’s a playbook straight out of what the tobacco industry did — delay industry on cigarettes. Coal companies did the exact same thing.”
On Jan. 1, 27 power plants would have been subject to the Cross-State Air Pollution rule, an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulation that sought to limit pollutants from being transferred from one state to another.
Easterly adamantly lobbied against the rule, which was overturned by a court ruling after more than a year of delays and litigation, proving the effectiveness his industry has in anti-environmental regulations. The rule, according to the EPA, would have prevented widespread illness and death.
“The Cross-State Air Pollution Rule will protect communities that are home to 240 million Americans from smog and soot pollution, preventing up to 34,000 premature deaths, 15,000 nonfatal heart attacks, 19,000 cases of acute bronchitis, 400,000 cases of aggravated asthma, and 1.8 million sick days a year beginning in 2014 – achieving up to $280 billion in annual health benefits. Twenty seven states in the eastern half of the country will work with power plants to cut air pollution under the rule, which leverages widely available, proven and cost-effective control technologies,” the EPA indicated in a press release in 2011, before the court’s decision was handed down.
While touting itself as a non-partisan organization aimed at bringing the private and public sector together to work toward a system of smaller government, ALEC has become notorious for its right-wind model legislation, particularly relating to anti-gun laws, anti-labor measures and anti-environmental regulation standards.
It’s created a way for the private sector, through the pockets of big business, to mold legislation in their favor. The summit’s secretive Energy Task Force meeting is an example of just that.
Click here to go to the document “ALEC meeting COAL sponsors. From Connor Gibson, Greenpeace”