Crossposted from our toxic-fighting parent organization, the Center for Environmental Health. 

Yesterday, for the first time since 1996, no players were chosen for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Many first-time nominees, including Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and several others were considered reputation-damaged, steroid-tainted players. In the run-up to the vote, the New York Times noted that this years’ scurrilous Hall of Shame nominees would hardly be exceptional additions in Cooperstown, which is already stocked with racists, gamblers, and drug users, among other miscreants.

But another Hall of Shame deserves some new (and some returning) inductees this year. Below, our choices (some current and some lifetime achievement nominees) for the corporate Hall of Shame.

Flame retardant chemical companies: The flame retardant industry deserves a lifetime achievement spot, based on their decades-long campaign (in concert with the tobacco industry, as the Chicago Tribune exposed in 2012) to mislead the public about their harmful products. The industry’s now defunct front group Citizens for Fire Safety and their lead “expert” witness Dr. David Heimbach deserve special mention for their dirty tricks campaigns and lying to public officials.

Alpha Natural Resources: The largest mountaintop removal mining company, Alpha took over the notorious Massey Energy company, after that corporate criminal’s deadly Upper Big Branch Mine Disaster nearly sunk the company. According to the Appalachian Community Health Emergency, mountaintop removal mining sites are responsible for “shockingly disproportionate levels of cancer, heart disease, pulmonary disease, birth defects and other physical and mental illnesses. More than four thousand people die in West Virginia communities every year because they live near such sites.” Local residents and environmental groups have sued Alpha repeatedly for its polluting operations, but the company remains unabashed. After another mining company recently acknowledged the damage from mountaintop removal and reached a legal agreement to phase-out such operations, Alpha told reporters, “(T)his does not affect our mining plans.”

Monsanto: A shoe-in for lifetime achievement in creating polluting products (among other crimes and lies), Monsanto makes it this year for serving as the chief funder of the lie-filled campaign against California’s GMO labeling ballot initiative. With upcoming GMO labeling votes in New Mexico, Washington and other states, expect Monsanto to be a perennial Hall of Shame inductee.

Apple: Apple appeared to dodge the shameful bullet early last year, when reports on the company’s labor practices focused on the embellishments in a one-man show about the company and not on the documented abuses. In the fall, further reports of misdeeds by the company’s Foxxconn i-Phone contractor showed it was business as usual at Apple. Also in 2012, Apple quietly withdrew from the environmental standards group EPEAT, then returned to the group and won questionable approval for their environmentally-questionable MacBook Pro.

Bayer: Bayer makes the list this year for their neonicotinoid pesticides, chemicals that scientists have linked to bee colony collapse. The EPA gets an assist for this nomination: in 2003 the agency granted a “conditional” approval for clothianidin, the company’s widely sold neonicotinoid. Despite failing to meet the registration’s conditions, and despite the latest science about potentially devastating loss of bee populations, EPA ten years later still allows the company to sell the nasty pesticide. The problem is so bad that even the financial journal Forbes posted a plea last year for signatures on a petition to Bayer to stop production of the product.

Dennis Paustenbach: A Hall of Shame award for worst individual in service to dirty industries goes to Paustenbach, who has a long track record of shameful behavior. CEH first exposed Paustenbach in 2003, when he served on a state science panel convened to investigate massive water pollution by PG&E (including the revelations uncovered by Erin Brockovich in Hinckley, CA). Turns out Paustenbach had received large payments during his career for work with PG&E, but he claimed he had not worked for the company in years. In fact, at the time the panel was convened Paustembach’s company had a contract to work for PG&E on hexchrome. Given this history, we were not surprised when the Chicago Tribune outed Paustenbach for his contributions to the flame retardant industry’s dirty public relations campaign (see above).

Shell Oil: According to a UN report, the gas company (known formally as Royal Dutch Shell) holds primary responsibility for 50 years of oil pollution that devastated the Ogoniland region of Nigeria, part of the Niger Delta, home to 31 million people and one of the world’s most important wetland and coastal marine ecosystems. Yet the company has evaded responsibility for the damage caused by its hugely profitable oil operations. Last year, four Nigerian villagers again took Shell to court, this time to Dutch civil court in The Hague, the first such suit in the company’s home country. Shell denied responsibility, blaming Nigerian saboteurs for decades of the company’s pollution.

Aqua Bounty: The GMO salmon company is bemoaning the lengthy government review of their Frankenfish, which if approved would be the first lab-created animal food species allowed, unlabeled, into the food supply. This may not sound like something you’d want to rush to the dinner table, but if you complain, company CEO Ron Stotish thinks you’re just being “disingenuous.” This from a company that claims that releases of its GMO fish into the wild would be virtually impossible – unless you count the previous accidental release of their entire 2008 commercial-sized batch. Surely we should trust a company that’s always been open to the public – except when it came to light last year that in 2009 Aqua Bounty’s GMO fish were hit with a new form of a common salmon disease, a problem the company failed to report to the FDA in its lengthy approval documents.

The nuclear power industry: The industry gets a lifetime achievement nod for their hilarious yet tragic “too cheap to meter” promises, given the failure of virtually all nuclear plants to be financially (let alone environmentally) sustainable without massive taxpayer subsidies (as outlined in this brief list of nuclear boondoggles). Fukushima was mostly reported as a “natural disaster,” but was actually the result of decades of mismanagement, lies, and “missed” inspections by Tepco. Similar problems at U.S. nuclear plants at San Onofre, Indian Point, and other plants came to light in 2012. (Looking for a fun party game? Everyone picks the name of a nuclear plant and googles it with the word “mismanagement.” Whoever gets the most results wins!)

The nuclear weapons complex: Another lifetime achievement shoe-in, for 2012 the nukers win a special award for the industry most likely to be toppled by your grandmother. Last year, one of our nation’s most guarded nuclear facilities was breached by an 82-year-old nun, Sister Megan Rice, who with her colleagues passed through four fences and walked around for two hours inside the Oak Ridge, Tennessee nuclear weapons facility. As Sister Megan told the New York Times, the group breached the plant to demonstrate against “(T)he criminality of this 70-year industry. We spend more on nuclear arms than on the departments of education, health, transportation, disaster relief and a number of other government agencies that I can’t remember.” This is hardly the first successful action by an octogenarian against the nuke weapons industry, and not even the first at Oak Ridge: in 2011, Father Bill Bichsel, an 86 year-old priest from Tacoma, Washington and 12 others were arrested for breaching the fences at Oak Ridge

Paul Hawken spoke at the Center for Environmental Health’s gala last month. For readers who haven’t heard of him before, I’ll just say that Paul’s many environmentally-focused businesses, writings, and countless other forms of activism have changed the courses of multiple industries and many people’s lives. On September 10th, he told us how it all started with the smallest possible arena for activism: one person’s body. Paul described how he was born with asthma, medicated every day of his life for twenty years because of it, and then suddenly found a way to make it disappear: Read the rest of this entry →

My younger sister Olivia is 13 years old, nearly six years younger than me. She’s kind, hilarious, bold, hyper, silly, and wonderful. She loves rap music (2 Chainz, anyone?), dying her hair a different color every week (it’s magenta right now), our black lab Jasper, dancing with me in the street, and spending all the time she can with her friends.

For longer than I can remember, Olivia has had asthma. Asthma, for the very small number of readers who aren’t familiar with the disorder, is a chronic airway disorder. People with asthma suffer from periods of irreversible airflow obstruction caused when their airway is inflamed and the small muscles surrounding it contract. My mom Audrey is very active, and always encouraged me and Olivia to get into sports when we were growing up. I played soccer, but Olivia didn’t find a sport she liked. As things turned out, due to her asthma, sports weren’t really her thing. She tried basketball for a season, and despite being the tallest girl on the court (a trait that runs in the family), she would find herself out of breath before the second quarter had even begun. While Olivia’s asthma has been manageable, she has, and will, struggle with it all of her life. Just like millions of others with the disease.

Asthma rates in the US are at an all-time high. In 2010, an estimated 18.7 million adults and 7 million children had the disease. That makes 1 in every 12 Americans with asthma. Asthma’s symptoms can be controlled with various drugs, but the disorder is currently incurable. Read the rest of this entry →

The next time you tighten your safety belt en route to see your in-laws, you might want to hold your breath. The National Geographic recently reported that you’re ten times more likely to die from pollution caused by airplanes than you are to die in an actual airplane crash. According to the article, airplane exhaust kills 10,000 people per year, compared with airplane crashes, which kill an estimated 1,000 people. While I’m sure these statistics are comforting to some, as a mom of two living a few miles from a major airport, in a major metropolitan area, I find them deeply disturbing.

And it’s that deep disturbance that is the issue here. The culprit is the particulate matter found in the fuel exhaust—super small particles of pollutants like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides—which can become trapped deep in the lungs when inhaled, and could, potentially, enter the bloodstream and contribute to cancer and a host of other health problems. [Recent studies also found lead in aviation fuel to be a health problem]

Eight years ago, when my husband and I were looking for a home, I don’t recall “proximity to deadly carcinogens” on our list of house-hunting criteria. Maybe it should have been.

After having lost out on our 10th straight bid to a buyer willing to pay $100K over the asking price for a house that needed a new roof, a new foundation, and which was located across the street from a known crack house, we were feeling a bit dejected. Our landlord was selling our rental home and we had less than two months to find a new place to live, so things were looking desperate. Read the rest of this entry →