Wednesday, December 01, 2010
(graphic: despair.com)
As part of its economic stimulus plan, the Obama administration awarded federal contracts to known polluters and exempted them from environmental laws, says The Center for Public Integrity.
The watchdog organization uncovered nearly 180,000 instances in which federal officials granted “categorical exclusions” to stimulus projects, removing them from the purview of the National Environmental Policy Act.
This decision allowed oil giant BP to be involved in a carbon capture and sequestration experiment funded by stimulus money, even though the company has a poor safety record and was operating the Deepwater Horizon oil platform when it exploded and sunk earlier this year. Also, the experiment is being conducted at BP’s refinery in Texas City, Texas, site of a deadly 2005 explosion that killed 15 workers.
Other recipients of stimulus funds with environmental waivers include coal-burning utilities Westar Energy and Duke Energy, chemical manufacturer DuPont and ethanol maker Didion Milling. Westar, the nation’s largest coal-burning utility, received its stimulus contract on the same day that it settled a federal air pollution complaint by spending $500 million to upgrade a plant in Kansas.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
Big Polluters Freed from Environmental Oversight by Stimulus (by Kristen Lombardi and John Solomon, Center for Public Integrity)
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