With former Governor Jennifer Granholm’s election to Dow Chemical’s board, I’ve revisited an article I wrote several years back on a shocking, and previously confidential, EPA memo criticizing Dow’s close access to the Granholm administration.
Here, in part and reworked somewhat, is that article:
Just months after leaving office, former Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm has been elected to Dow Chemical's board of directors. During Granholm's tenure as governor Dow Chemical received hundreds of millions in state tax subsidies for development of “clean energy” technologies.
In November 2007, Dow Chemical reported a dioxin concentration of 1.6 million parts per trillion (ppt) in river-bottom sediment next to Wickes Park, in Saginaw, the highest level of dioxin reported in the Saginaw River since testing began in 1978 and the single highest level of dioxin ever reported to the EPA.
Dioxin is a dangerous toxin that affects the nervous and reproductive systems, causes numerous cancers, and impairs childhood and fetal development. Dioxin, found in contaminated soils, river-bottom sediments and fish, is so dangerous that it is recorded in parts per trillion, as opposed to parts per million or billion. To get an idea just how hazardous the Wickes Parke concentration was, Michigan formerly required cleanup at as low as 90 ppt; the EPA at 1,000 ppt.
Dow began dumping dioxins from its Midland plant into the Tittabawassee River before World War I and continued dumping until around 1970. Discussions to clean-up 50 miles of contaminated riverways that feed into Saginaw Bay dragged on for almost 30 years. According to a recently-released EPA memo, these delays and public misunderstandings regarding the dangers of dioxins have occurred with state complicity.
An August 2007 confidential memo the Lone Tree Council obtained from the EPA contains a scathing criticism regarding the improper handling of the dioxin remediation process by both Governor Granholm’s office and the DEQ. The memo notes that Dow Chemical gained unprecedented access to the Governor and DEQ Director, Steven Chester:
“Dow has often elevated regulatory matters (normally resolved at a staff level) to upper level management at MDEQ … Dow used this approach in negotiating the 1/20/05 Framework Agreement (FA) between Dow and the State of Michigan which contains conditions that have limited the ability of MDEQ to require timely and comprehensive corrective action in the Saginaw Bay watershed. The FA was negotiated between the Governor’s office, senior management at MDEQ, and Dow … Dow has used the alternative dispute resolution (ADR) process, initiated in this matter in 2005, to keep non-confidential information from the public.”
The EPA memo criticizes the DEQ and some Michigan legislators for helping Dow to soften environmental standards and delay major clean-up activities, reducing potential liability damages for the company:
“Dow’s hazardous waste operating license (RCRA License) was re-issued to Dow by MDEQ on June 12, 2003. Prior to the re-issuance, Dow spent approximately a decade negotiating the terms and conditions of its expired RCRA License (expired 1993) with MDEQ, including off-site corrective action requirements. Off site corrective action issues came to a head in approximately 2002 when it was proposed that the corrective action requirements of Dow’s RCRA License be removed from the license and placed in a separate consent order with terms and conditions more favorable to Dow. EPA vigorously objected to this proposal via public comments on the draft consent order. The proposal was determined by Michigan’s Attorney General to be illegal. Dow, nevertheless, continued its efforts to prevent any specific off-site corrective action requirements from being included in Dow’s RCRA License. EPA finally had to require MDEQ, pursuant to 40 CFR 271.19, to include these off-site corrective action provisions in Dow’s permit.”
The memo also criticizes Dow for supplying the DEQ with false laboratory results.
One of Michigan's biggest polluters, Dow Chemical is master at corporate "green washing". This rendering of how Dow's website looked recently shows its collaboration with environmental group The Nature Conservancy.
In November 2006, Priscilla Denney, an environmental engineer with Dow, notified her superiors that Dow’s contracted sediment sampling work was found by a laboratory conducting validation tests to be so compromised that the lab rejected the results, on December 5, and ended its contract with the company several days later. In response, Denney was demoted. Despite the lab’s rejection, Dow submitted the results to DEQ in February. Astoundingly, as of December 5, 2007, DEQ director Chester still insisted that, “Right now, we have no reason to believe the data is wrong … We want to double check and to see that the data we’ve based decisions on was right.”
The DEQ has a history of covering-up the full extent of Dow’s dioxin contamination and assisting the company in lessening the extent of potential liabilities by requiring less comprehensive remedial operations.
In 2001, tipped off by a DEQ insider, the Lone Tree Council and Michigan Environmental Council filed an open records request regarding DEQ testing of dioxin levels south of Saginaw.
In April 2000, while conducting a wetland mitigation project, General Motors found elevated levels of dioxin in a farm field near the confluence of the Tittawbawassee and Saginaw rivers. The samples contained concentrations of dioxin as high as 2,199 ppt. From December 2000 to June, 2001, in the interest of public safety, the DEQ collected soil samples from five locations in the Tittawbawassee River flood plain, south of Saginaw. The thirty-four samples collected showed dioxin concentrations ranging from 39 to 7,261 ppt with only five samples containing concentrations that didn’t violate Michigan’s recommended residential criteria of 90 ppt or less.
The open records request revealed that agency director Russ Harding, who now works for the Dow Chemical-funded Mackinaw Center for Public Policy, had suppressed information regarding the soil tests and refused to give approval for any further soil testing of the Tittawbawassee floodplain. Harding also suppressed an internal state health assessment that recommended immediate government action. Harding went so far as to blacken out sections and redact certain public documents that referred to Dow Chemical’s involvement in the dioxin contamination.
The director attempted to alter Part 201 of Michigan’s environmental policy act to increase the amount of allowable dioxin in residential and industrial areas, in order to better accommodate Dow Chemical’s operations. This created a “dioxin zone” in the Midland and the Tittawbawassee floodplain that would allow permissible levels of dioxins more than ten times above the state’s health standards. A State law, signed in December 2006, allowed the DEQ to recalculate dioxin cleanup criteria based upon the EPA standards of 1,000 ppt, as opposed to the state’s more stringent requirements of 90 ppt. This had the effect of eliminating Dow’s legal responsibility for contaminating thousands of homes that otherwise would have been illegal under state law.
Also included in DEQ-Dow discussions was a relaxation over Dow’s accountability in possible future litigation regarding the dioxin’s effect on public health. Then Michigan Attorney General, Granholm informed the DEQ that because the deal did not follow proper administrative procedure and was performed without public knowledge the action would be considered illegal. The EPA memo notes that the former Attorney General, as Governor, continues to allow Dow control over certain DEQ decision-making processes:
“Dow frequently…requests that issues be resolved using day-long working sessions. The working session approach has had the effect of limiting the administrative record, and places significant resource requirements on the MDEQ. EPA knows of no other facility in the State of Michigan where this type of approach to corrective action has been allowed by MDEQ … Dow often requests MDEQ to make decisions on the spot at meetings.”
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Greedy Granholm and Snidely Synder are also in the big Rio Tinto/Kennecott pocket.
If EPA says Michigan’s elected, appointed, and salaried officials have been too cozy with Dow over the last three decades, that’s like the pot calling the kettle black. Neither agency has acquitted itself admirably in encouraging, then requiring Dow to clean up its act and its facilities, the City of Midland, and the downstream sediments and floodplain soils that are contaminated with PCDD and PCDF byproducts of polychlorophenol and polychlorophenoxy herbicide manufacture and disposal since Dow began manufacturing chlorine and chlorinated organic compounds a century ago.
Instead, Dow’s 30-years war of disinformation, diversion, and delay with the public and the county, state, and federal public health and environmental agencies has worked beyond Dow’s wildest dreams. If the trace chemistries of fire smoke screen didn’t work, Dow could always fall back on the tried-and-true threat of reducing the work force in or closing one or more of its Michigan production plants or building new facilities elsewhere. Although the trade-off was never made explicit, apparently the state was willing to trade hundreds of jobs for tens of innocent lives lost prematurely from exposure to PCDDs and PCDFs in the workplace and/or the environment, even though it claimed to set its pollutant clean-up and emissions limits based on an acceptable lifetime increased cancer risk of one-in-one hundred thousand.
Once the federal government approved Michigan permits with effluent limits allowing the discharge of carcinogens, teratogens, and mutagens from Dow’s flagship facility above natural background levels based on an acceptable lifetime increased cancer risk of one-in-100,000 for each carcinogen, it effectively abandoned the zero discharge goal of the Clean Water Act. Following that watershed event, which went uncontested by any of the national environmental non-profits, there was no stopping the polluters, because it was OK to trade off people’s lives for jobs and profits rather than force the development and implementation of progressively improving treatment technologies toward the goal of zero discharge.
But Baal has an insatiable appetite, and a corporation has no heart or soul, so it was a Faustian bargain. If Dow had spent on cleanup what it did on its Dow Let’s You Do Great Things PR campaign and the Human Element campaign that followed, it would have done more for its image and the people of Midland and those living in the downstream floodplains.
But of course, with Dow, it is not the money but the principle involved. What is the principle that allows Dow to sacrifice its workers, the citizens of Midland, and the people living on the downstream floodplains for decades until it gets its way? It is that bottom-up, self-regulation is always and everywhere more efficient and effective at limiting pollution in the pursuit of profit than top-down regulation by governments, because companies always known themselves better than government agencies and can find the most flexible, least onerous way to accomplish the same environmental objective.
Of course, EPA has had a substantial equivalency program in effect for decades that allows companies to regulate themselves more efficiently than the EPA regulation, as long as the resulting emissions are no greater than what they would have been under the EPA regulation. The reality is that Dow cannot allow itself to be regulated in this instance or any other instance, because each is a slippery slope to being regulated in every instance, and this Dow cannot abide. So, for example, in the 1970s Dow fought the Agent Orange Vietnam Veterans on the issue of TCDD’s toxicities in hearings before Congress and subsequent lawsuits, fought every clean-up mandate in its own back yard since it filed its first TSCA Section 8(e) report in June 1978, and then worked to suppress the publication of the National Dioxin Study Final Report since the late 1980s. That report still has not been published. Dow did this because it knew that if it did not hold the line wherever PCDDs and PCDFs toxic effects were at issue, it would be forced to clean up the Tittabawassee River sediments and floodplain to safe levels based on those toxicities, and that would cut into its profit margins and Michigan jobs, and that Governor’s Milliken, Blanchard, Engler, and Granholm could not abide.
So Dow remains the undefeated champion in its fights with state and federal government public health and environmental agencies, and Granholm is now on Dow’s Board of Directors. Maybe she will have more of a positive impact on Dow pollution policy in that role than she did as Michigan Governor. In the meantime, remember that Dow lets you do great things, and don’t you forget it, you ungrateful whiners, lest you feel Dow’s mighty wrath.