Cover Story: The Dirty Dozen

Southern Co.

We played with the idea of giving Southern Co. some sort of lifetime achievement award as the dirtiest of the Dirty Dozen. The parent company of Georgia Power might even be the nation’s biggest air polluter.

Among its many prized possessions, the company owns and operates coal-fired Plant Bowen, which is 50 miles from downtown Atlanta and is the dirtiest power plant in North America. Southern — and particularly its Georgia Power subsidiary — is either No. 1 or right up there in particulate matter emissions, nitrous oxides, sulfur dioxide and carbon dioxide. In 2000 in fact, Southern released more “respiratory toxics” than did any other company in the country, emitting 91,964,317 pounds of chemicals that the EPA keeps track of through its Toxic Release Inventory — a full 16 million pounds more than the runner-up.

Epidemiological studies indicate that hundreds if not thousands of children, senior citizens and other Atlantans die prematurely because of Southern Co. emissions.

The company’s politics are just as toxic. Southern gives more money to congressional campaigns and spends more money on lobbying than does any other electric utility. And no other utility has been as blatant and underhanded (at the same time — go figure) at undermining the fed’s half-hearted attempts to reduce Southern’s deadly emissions.

Avanti Motors

Villa Rica-based Avanti’s new XUV (Extreme Utility Vehicle) is a monstrosity on wheels. It makes conventional gas-guzzlers look green.

It’s 6 feet, 8 inches wide and 18 feet long (two full feet longer than the Hummer H2). It weighs 5,900 pounds. Avanti claims the XUV consumes 17 miles of gas per gallon in the city. We’re skeptical: That number hasn’t been verified by the U.S. EPA, and the smaller and lighter H2 gets only eight to 12 miles per gallon.

We’re sure the privately owned carmaker will rumble all the way to the bank with its “in” new vehicle (that’s if the company survives an infringement lawsuit brought by GM, the makers of the Hummer).

At a time when soldiers are dying to protect U.S. oil interests, Avanti’s glorification of gasoline consumption in the same breath that it exploits military imagery is obscene. Every dime that went to the Sept. 11 terrorists — to pay for their rent, their flight school classes, even their airline tickets — came from the sale of oil. In this age, making cars and trucks that revel in bad gas mileage isn’t just anti-environmental — it’s anti-American.

General Electric Co.

Just two weeks ago, GE had to send a crew to retrieve and dispose of a 55-gallon drum of PCBs that turned up next to a Rome family’s barn. It had been sitting there for at least 30 years.

America’s fifth-largest corporation ran a Rome transformer plant for decades, and the company flung PCBs, a highly toxic group of chemicals, around the Northwest Georgia city like birdseed. Some homes have 24,000 times the concentration of PCBs that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says should trigger a cleanup. The chemicals made fish caught in the Coosa River inedible downstream to the Alabama line. There are 12 lawsuits against the company for property damage caused by PCBs leaking from GE’s property. And now, the company is refusing to fund blood testing to answer local folks’ questions about whether they’ve been exposed.

GE’s mess may prove as difficult to undo as is a similar swath of the company’s PCB pollution along New York’s Hudson River. The EPA says the Rome situation “poses a significant threat to public health and the environment.” In a letter to the EPA, state Environmental Protection Division Director Harold Reheis confessed that, “Despite all the efforts of EPD, contamination on and off the plant site remains largely unaddressed.”

In Rome at least, maybe America’s fifth-largest corporation needs a new slogan: We bring good things back to life.

Jim Wooten

Once upon a time, Wooten was a journalist. But he’s tossed aside any regard for truth in favor of spreading the kind of demagoguery more often found among talk-radio hosts. Just one example: Ever-mounting evidence shows that car and power plant emissions trigger asthma attacks, and even cause people to develop the disease. Yet Wooten uses his column in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution to huff-and-puff cynical impersonations of a Southern Co. PR agent.

This passage is preciously ironic (our comments in italics): “More politically skewed misinformation exists in the public domain on children’s asthma than probably any other health or environmental issue (particularly from you, Jim). The most common misinformation ties the dramatic increase — reported incidences almost tripled between 1980 and 1999 — to outdoor air pollution. Yet it has occurred as outdoor air became cleaner. (not exactly: In some ways, it’s cleaner; in other ways, it’s worse) It’s a serious problem that deserves more scientific research and fewer interest group agendas. (precisely, Jim: fewer agendas)

We think Wooten’s smart enough to understand that he cynically misrepresents facts every time he writes about the environment. But, actually, he’s serving an even more cynical purpose: His employer needs a Flat Earth Society nutcase on its editorial pages to hang onto hard-right readers. Wooten fits the bill.

The Hercules Resins Plant

This Brunswick, Ga., glue factory exceeded its clean water permit for discharges of toxaphene, a recognized human carcinogen, by just a wee bit in a three-year period ending in 2001 — if a wee bit equals 66,575 percent.

The toxaphene was discharged into Dupree Creek, which mingles its waters with both the Satilla and Altamaha basins. Now, because of Hercules’ toxaphene, EPD recommends that fishermen eat only one meal caught from Dupree Creek a month for blue crab, shrimp, striped mullet, Atlantic croaker, southern Kingfish and spotted sea trout.

Thanks, Hercules! You’ve got a pretty strong product!

Nathan Deal

Long known as a proponent of clear cutting and corporate welfare in the Chattahoochee National Forest, U.S. Rep. Deal won more dirty stripes this year on a separate issue. He snuck in a loophole that allows farmers (or, really, farm corporations) to claim their product is organic, even if they don’t feed their cows and chickens organic feed.

If Deal had his way, consumers wouldn’t have known whether that “organic” sticker stood for anything, which would have the added effect of discouraging authentic organic farming.

Fieldale Farms, a poultry giant in Northeast Georgia, asked the U.S. Department of Agriculture for a similar exemption. Their political action committee also gives loads of campaign money to Deal (gee ... wonder if there’s a connection). Deal’s loophole was so brazen that even the most conservative Congress in our lifetime undid it April 12.

Serving industry at the expense of taxpayers is a tradition for the Gainesville Republican. He’s among lawmakers wholeheartedly backing President Bush’s irresponsible proposal to turn public lands into a private trough for loggers and miners.

No wonder the League of Conservation Voters’ congressional scorecard gives Deal a miserable 5 percent rating.

Tom Coleman

For the last three months, Transportation Commissioner Coleman has been pecking away at one of the finest accomplishments of the man who put him in office.

Gov. Roy Barnes did a great favor for taxpayers, commuters and people who breathe by decentralizing the enormous power that the state Department of Transportation used for one purpose: to build roads. Now, with Sonny Perdue in office, there’s no director at the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority, the only state agency with the inclination and authority to push mass transit. And without Barnes around, Coleman is trying to get back to business-as-usual. He’s asked Perdue to limit GRTA’s powers and return all road-building authority to DOT.

Although he denies it, Coleman also appears to be working to build the discredited Northern Arc highway piece by piece, even though the current governor opposes it. And he’s shown no inclination to address a glaring problem related to both the environment and taxpayer inequity: Because gas tax money may only go to roads, and because most of the transportation projects in the metro area have to be non-roads (on account of the pollution), metro taxpayers are being ripped off big time.

Georgia has a longstanding tradition of rural good ol’ boys running things down at “the Highway Department.” It’s oddly familiar that a former state senator from downstate is presiding over that old you-scratch-my-back-I’ll-screw-the-taxpayers-style politics. But it’s not very comforting.

Barbara Gallo

An attorney at McKenna, Long and Aldridge, Gallo represents industry in disputes over environmental regulation. Lots of corporate attorneys do that. For example, Gallo is suing the state on behalf of the coastal city of Richmond Hill, which wants to drill into the Lower Floridian Aquifer despite geological tests saying that would cause saltwater to jeopardize coastal Georgia’s main water source.

But Gallo took things a step further during a fight over a natural-gas power plant in Murray County. Three environmental groups had appealed a permit that Duke Energy got from the state to build the plant. A state rule says that once a permit is contested, construction is supposed to stop until the appeal is settled.

But Duke didn’t stop construction. And when the environmental groups sent notice (as is commonly done) that they were about to sue Duke to get the company to stop construction, Gallo turned around and sued the environmental groups and their attorneys.

The practice is known in environmental circles as a SLAPP (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation) suit: Deep-pocketed industries use the courts to intimidate citizens’ groups and to tie them up with legal expenses.

In a settlement, Gallo’s SLAPP suit against the enviro groups became irrelevant and Duke agreed to cut its planned emissions by as much as 71 percent.

But it really does pay for a big polluter to hire a hotshot lawyer: Because of Gallo’s lawsuit, the state requirement that companies stop construction when their permits are challenged is open to question. Chalk up a small victory in the never-ending battle to make Georgia a more hospitable place for polluters.

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce

Unlike the Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce (which actually is pushing new ideas to clean up Atlanta’s water and air), the statewide group has wasted a real opportunity to be a progressive force in Georgia politics.

Its leadership continues to throw its lot in with a medley of narrow interests that, as a whole, are encouraging policies that rape Georgia’s environment. The weird thing is that, in the long run, such policies as gobbling up the state’s water, dirtying up the air and paving over its greenspace are bad for economic growth.

The chamber has three full-time lobbyists at the Capitol pushing for regional reservoirs that would submerge hundreds of thousands of acres of sensitive wetlands. They’re also pushing fellow Dirty Dozen member Bob Hanner’s water legislation, which would turn Georgia’s waterways into a commodity, sellable to the highest bidder.

Thanks to the chamber’s last president, Lindsay Thomas, companies are exempt from posting anything but their discharge permit number and an Environmental Protection Division emergency hotline number. Thomas complained last year that having company names posted near discharge pipes would stigmatize those companies.

The new president, George Israel, expresses willful ignorance when it comes to the environment. In the March edition of Georgia Trend, he said, “I don’t know that the earth, or we, are quite that fragile. We can sit here with our clean laws — our clean air and water stuff — to the extent that we cannot compete in the world.”

Zell Miller

Until a few weeks ago, we thought Georgia’s Republican Senator in Democratic Clothing finally had stopped pretending to be an environmentalist. Zig-Zag Zell has made it pretty clear he’s the oil and auto industries’ little bitch in Congress. His League of Conservation Voters scorecard stands at 16 out of 100 — about the bottom rung for his party.

Then, in February, Miller bragged about co-sponsoring legislation that would give tax credits to those who buy alternative-fuel cars. His press machine released this statement: “Miller seeks to reduce air pollution, make America less dependent on oil. ... Our nation cannot continue on its present course of importing 57 percent of the energy we consume every day from foreign countries.”

Funny. It hadn’t been six months since Miller and the rest of Congress had rejected tougher fuel standards for cars. And shortly before that, Miller himself pushed through a measure to exempt pickups from higher fuel-efficiency standards.

More recently, Miller was the only Democrat to vote against an amendment that, for the time being, warded off President Bush’s plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. How unsurprising! After all, this is the one-time governor who presided for eight years over the blacktopping of North Georgia — and who paraded around the whole time as if he were a mountain man in love with his hillbilly heritage.

Bob Hanner

It’s always been a joke that this Parrot Democrat chairs the state House Natural Resources Committee.

Long known as a toady for industry (his campaign disclosure forms look like a who’s who of polluters), Hanner authored this year’s most environmentally devastating piece of legislation, House Bill 237. The bill, which was working its way through the General Assembly at press time, creates a top-down approach to water planning and basically serves as the conduit for the most extreme wish list big business could come up with. His legislation even lets Atlanta grab water from other river basins.

It wasn’t just happenstance. At an August meeting in Columbus of the Joint Comprehensive Water Plan Study Committee, Albany farmer George McIntosh and Hanner led an anti-environmental blitz by axing the seven environmental protections in the committee’s final recommendations. It was a sweeping rejection of even the most basic environmental concerns.

Why aren’t we surprised? For years, Hanner has been a poster boy for the cozy relationship between lawmakers and industry.

Wayne Hill

Gwinnett County Commission Chairman Hill has begun to sound green, or at least a tad chartreuse. In the last couple of years, he’s backed a successful greenspace initiative in his county and, finally, didn’t block Gwinnett from establishing its own bus service.

But Hill continues to be the darling of unenlightened developers — the Sultan of Sprawl for the metro area. In 10 years as commission chairman, he’s pressed for — and largely achieved — his vision of an auto-fuming, asphalt expanse from Snellville to Buford, from Norcross to Lawrenceville. It’s a selfish vision that essentially says: “The region be damned. It’s my county, and I’ll do what I want with it.”

In the late ’90s, he pushed for construction of the Mall of Georgia, and then — surprise, surprise — whined that the boondoggle Northern Arc was needed to serve the mall.

Despite those modest positive steps, Hill’s press for more sprawl continues. Although the new governor opposes the Northern Arc, Hill is pushing hard to have a 13-mile stretch of it built with county money. And when the Atlanta Regional Commission took up a wise plan to fund regional transit, he joined other suburban retrogrades in crushing it.

When it comes to water, Hill sings his familiar selfish tune. Despite a court order that upholds a 15-year-old policy of not discharging into Lake Lanier, he’s pressing ahead with construction of a sewage plant that will shoot 60 million gallons of highly treated sewage into Lake Lanier each day. Screw the boaters. Screw the vacation-home owners. Screw neighboring counties.

The results:
?The Green Team
?Earth Day related events