The International Business Times reports that Greenpeace says Dow worked with others to thwart their environmental campaigns around dioxin and genetically modified organisms.

The group claims that from 1998-2000, investigative security teams hired by Dow’s PR company stole information.

The alleged methods of data collection, at some points, read like a James Bond sequence: Greenpeace dumpsters were foraged by subcontractors, including a D.C. cop using his badge to access trash otherwise locked away; one BBI employee’s girlfriend played lookout while he, dressed in all-black, disappeared with others, returning an hour later with two full trash bags; possibly using a computer program called Data Interception by Remote Transmission (“DIRT”) to monitor and intercept PC data remotely; and the wiretapping of phones and hacking emails, among other methods.

Greenpeace says the company BBI improperly obtained more than 1,000 documents from the organization, and is seeking punitive damages.

In September a federal judge dismissed a racketeering case brought by Greenpeace in this matter.

Republican presidential hopeful and Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachmann was named by the environmental activist group Greenpeace as one of 15 politicians “who are among those in the House of Representatives working for America’s dirty and decrepit coal-fired power industry.”

The report, released last week, details each representative’s contributions to coal pollution.

According to the report’s introduction:

These 15 members have tried to stop EPA from modernizing standards for pollutants that come predominantly from coal-fired power plants, including mercury, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide, greenhouse gases, and coal ash. Except for the one freshman, these members of Congress are in the top 25% of those receiving money from the fossil fuel industry. Many are in leadership positions within Congress. The actions reviewed for these 15 politicians were opposed to the health of people in their own districts.

The report said two coal plants pollute Bachmann’s congressional district — the Sherburne County and Allen S. King plants. The report claimed the two coal plants caused 102 deaths, 165 heart attacks and 76 admissions annually in the district and cost more than $787 million each year.

The fossil fuel industry has given Bachmann nearly $132,000 in campaign donations, and her coal donors include Xcel Energy.

Among other congressmen on the list are Reps. Eric Cantor, R-Va., Jerry Costello, D-Ill., and Mike Rogers, R-Mich. No one from Colorado made the list.

Tea Party and Koch-funded libertarian organizations took to the Capitol steps Friday in an attempt to call on Colorado legislators and politicians to fight against union rights in Wisconsin and voice their commitment to Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan.

Tea Party rally in Denver hosts anti-tax minded individuals.

“You saw the president of the United States embarrass Paul Ryan who put forward a very courageous budget that revolutionizes and transforms our system,” Jeff Crank, a conservative talk show host and state director for Americans for Prosperity, said. “And the president of the United States tried to humiliate him by saying that his budget would throw people, especially children, under the bus.”

Americans for Prosperity, according to Source Watch, is a group that was started by Richard Koch, and has been helping to fuel the tea-party effort. The organization, along with the Independence Institute, which reportedly has also received Koch brother funds, has been supporting Tea Party rallies over the last few years in Colorado, and more recently was present to help provide a counter rally to a union unity rally that supported Wisconsin public employees.

“This is our moment, God put us on this earth to stand and fight for the liberty that God provided us and we cannot fail. We have to stand and fight,” Crank said.

Republican legislators mingled with the crowd of a few hundred Tea Party advocates who raised signs and banners attacking the Obama administration for its federal health care program and spending proposals.

Signs reading “Abort D.C. to save freedom,” “Freedom Taxes, Government don’t mix,” and “I love Paul Ryan” were intermixed with others that voiced fear of the creation of a U.S. dictatorship.

Jimmy Lakey, another talk show host, was the master of ceremonies of the event and brought the crowd to cheers more than a few times.

Jimmy Lakey speaks at Tea Party rally.

“If someone tries to call themselves a Republican and tries to pass big nanny state regulation and tries to stick the big nipple of government in your mouth, you call him up and say, ‘I’m still here,’” Lakey screamed. “To the politicians and lobbyists behind me, hello, we’re still here.”

Why has none of the legislation passed? Good Samaritan groups say the most stringent opponents include major environmental groups with Washington lobbyists.

Arkansas River (CC photo, Kahunapulej, Flickr)

“The environmental groups in Washington, D.C, surprisingly enough, are the biggest impediment to passing this legislation,” explained Jeff Crane, executive director of the Colorado Watershed Assembly. “It completely baffles my mind. I just don’t get it.”

For their part, environmental groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Clean Water Network and Oakland, Calif.-based Earthjustice, argue that waiving compliance with the Clean Water Act, for any reason, is a dangerous precedent.

“Waiving environmental laws that are meant to protect people’s health defeats the purpose of having environmental laws to begin with,” said Jessica Ennis, spokeswoman for Earthjustice, a prior opponent.

10 bills in 15 years

Although previous legislation has varied in the details, most bills would have amended the Clean Water Act to develop a special permit exempting Good Samaritans from the very strict requirements of the Clean Water Act.

Lacking the funds to build and maintain million-dollar treatment plants, most Good Samaritan remediation projects employ lower-cost, lower-maintenance methods that succeed in stopping the lion’s share of toxic flows. But they fail to prevent relatively small amounts of acid drainage into the watershed, enough to be considered “a discharge of pollutants” under the Clean Water Act. That “discharge” opens up the groups to citizen lawsuits under the Clean Water Act, according to a precedent set by the 1994 case Committee to Save the Mokelumne River v. East Bay Municipal Utility District.

Since the 1994 case, fear of litigation has stopped entities including nonprofit Animas River Stakeholders, the Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety and private landowners from cleaning up acid mine drainage in Colorado.

Proponents of Good Samaritan legislation, like Crane, argue it would correct “a glitch in the Clean Water Act” that has halted Colorado acid mine drainage clean-ups in their tracks. But opponents see a dangerous weakening of the Clean Water Act.

“What’s happened, it’s been a very interesting and frustrating process because it’s one of those things where when you first talk about [Good Samaritan legislation] pretty much everybody says, ‘yeah, sounds like a great idea,’” explained Paul Frohardt, who has worked on the problem for 15 years, and currently deals with it as the administrator of the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission and director of Colorado’s Office of Environmental Integration and Sustainability. “But when you get down to the details it has become a real challenge.”

Frustration on the ground

But many of those trying to clean up abandoned mine sites say they’re frustrated with environmentalist opposition — particularly since it often comes from groups who aren’t involved in on-site clean-up.

“We need to go back and look at what is happening on the ground,” said Crane. “There are citizen groups all over Colorado who want to work on cleaning up the bad legacy of mining… These are not the Earthjustices and the Sierra clubs who are talking about it in D.C. These are people in these communities.”

But environmental groups are equally frustrated with a plan that they say creates loopholes instead of assigning responsibility and funding.

“We really need to address this problem from the beginning. So responsible parties — that is, the mining companies — need to be held responsible for their sites,” said Earthjustice’s Ennis.

But Good Samaritans point out that their work is on historically mined sites, where the responsible party is long gone.

In those cases, said Natalie Roy, at the Clean Water Network, her group believes clean-up should be a government responsibility.

“Sites causing water contamination need to be cleaned up and CWA [Clean Water Act] standards, which protect public health and the environment, need to be met” wrote Roy in an email.

“A key ingredient to making this happen is adequate funding as well as promulgating new regulations requiring that these sites be cleaned up. The issues about being sued under the CWA because Good Samaritans (whether it is the state, a mining company or the boy scouts) are fearful they cannot clean the site up to the levels required in the CWA is disingenuous. Getting sued isn’t the issue, money is. The government is not allocating the funds necessary to clean up the sites and is hoping to have other people (who could be new mining companies interested in re-mining or other organizations) pay for the cleanup — cleanup not up to CWA standards.”

But Elizabeth Russell at nonprofit Trout Unlimited, which is currently working on several acid mine drainage clean-up projects in Colorado, worries that expecting government to clean up the countless draining mines on private property isn’t feasible.

“The government is just not going to do it,” she said. “They don’t want the liability either.”

Going forward

Asked what solution might bring the two sides together, Frohardt said he doesn’t know.

“If I had a good idea of a magic solution we would have suggested that a few years ago.”

Meantime, he said those working on new legislation — which Democratic U.S. Sen. Mark Udall of Colorado, is expected to introduce this fall—have tried very hard to narrow the law so it can’t be abused. He cites examples like a 2006 Good Samaritan bill introduced by then-U.S. Sen. Ken Salazar that would have waived compliance not only with the Clean Water Act but also Superfund, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Solid Waste Disposal Act, as well as state, Tribal and local environmental laws. The bill earned an angry letter of opposition from the American Bird Conservancy, Clean Water Action, Earthjustice, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, the National Environmental Trust, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

“A narrower approach, I think would develop more consensus,” Frohardt said.

For their part, environmental groups say they’re open to compromise but have few specifics about what kind of Good Samaritan legislation they might support.

We’re very open to talking to other stakeholders to come up with a solution,” said Ennis. “[But] I don’t have any specific examples of possible compromises.”

Natalie Roy, executive director of the nonprofit Clean Water Network, also agreed that a compromise was possible: “We did not support legislation in 2006—that’s not to say there isn’t some sort of legislation that could come down the road,” she explained.

But she added that the nonprofit couldn’t support what is basically the foundation of Good Samaritan law — waiving environmental protection for non-responsible parties voluntarily cleaning up contaminated sites.

“You can’t have exemptions for major environmental laws,” she said.

Crane, though is hopeful that compromise is out there, and he has vowed to travel to Washington in order to talk to opponents in advance of legislation.

“We need to pull together a meeting at the Clean Water Network and go to Washington and sit down and talk about this before they come up and misrepresent the facts of what is happening,” he said. “What I think the problem has been is that I don’t think the pros have met with the cons.”

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