The Profits in Pollution

...Four—Corporate investment in research and development of pollution controls is no longer a luxury to be left to the decision or initiative of a few company officers...

...A new corporate constitutionalism is needed, guaranteeing employes' due process rights against arbitrary reprisals, but its precise forms require the collection of data and extensive study...

...it should also reveal the social costs of pollution by composition and tonnage...

...They must so order their consumption and disposal habits that they can, in good conscience, preach what they actually practice...

...Three—The existing requirements for disclosure of the extent of corporate pollution are weak and flagrantly flouted...

...The automobile moguls, whose products, according to Department of Health, Education and Welfare data, account for fifty-five to sixty per cent of the nation's air pollution, remained silent as the city's obsolete and inadequate sewage facilities dumped the wastes of millions into the Detroit River...

...Constitution providing citizens with basic rights to a clean environment has been proposed...

...In New Jersey, New York, and Illinois, a seventy-one year old Federal anti-water pollution law was violated with total impunity by industry until the Justice Department moved against a few of the violators in recent months...

...Environmental pollution is environmental violence—to human beings and to property...

...The mighty automobile industry, centered around and in Detroit, never thought it part of its role to press the city of Detroit to construct a modern sewage treatment plant...

...In brief, they must exercise a personal discipline as they advocate the discipline of governments and corporations...

...Once again the trade secret rationale was employed...

...Here we must take our stand...

...The costs of pollution control technology should come from corporate profits which have been enhanced by the use of the public's environment as industry's private sewer...

...The common law has long recognized such violence against the person as actionable or enjoinable...

...The toilet training of industry to keep it from further rupturing the ecosystem requires an overhaul of the internal and external levers which control corporations...

...The planet earth is a seamless structure with a thin slice of sustaining air, water, and soil that supports almost four billion people...

...This spring Grossman will publish the reports of "Nader's Raiders" on pesticides and on air and water pollution...

...The overall aggregate pollution from ever greater numbers of vehicles in more congested traffic patterns also escaped Heinen's company-indentured perceptions...

...What has been lacking is sufficient evidence of harm and avoidability to persuade judges that such hitherto invisible long-range harm outweighed the economic benefits of the particular plant activity in the community...

...Insurance companies could become advocates for loss prevention in the environmental field when confronted with policyholder, shareholder, and citizen demonstrative action...

...A formula proportional to the size of a company and its pollution could be devised as law, with required periodic reporting of the progress of the company's research and its uses...

...Louis, publicly spoke out in 1966 on inadequate welding that exposed Chevrolet passengers to exhaust leakage, the company ignored him for a few years, but eventually recalled more than two million cars for correction...

...Imaginative and bold legal advocacy is needed here...

...When Edward Gregory, a Fisher Body plant inspector for General Motors in St...

...Massive and meticulous "fish bowl" disclosure requirements are imperative if citizens are to be alerted, at the earliest possible moment, to the flow of silent violence assaulting their health and safety, and that of unborn generations as well...

...Perhaps the most egregious example of willing corporate servility was a paper entitled "We've Done the Job—What's Next...

...Professional employes—scientists, engineers, physicians— have fewer due process safeguards than the blue collar workers in the same company protected by their union contract...

...GM knew better than to fire Gregory, a member of the United Auto Workers...

...the union hopes to secure for workers the right not to work in polluting activities, or in a polluted environment...

...The battle of the environmentalists is to preserve the physiological integrity of people by preserving the natural integrity of land, air, and water...

...For example, the United Auto Workers have announced that pollution will be an issue in the collective bargaining process with automobile company management this year...

...The major controversy in Santa Barbara was For See the Back Cover whether the company—Union Oil—or the Government or the residents would bear the costs of cleaning up the mess...

...Demotion, ostracism, dismissal are some of the corporate sanctions against which there is little or no recourse by the professional employe...

...California state agencies have refused to disclose pesticide application data to representatives of orchard workers being gradually poisoned by the chemicals...

...It is expressive of the anemic and nondeterrent quality of existing sanctions that offshore oil leaks contaminating beaches for months, as in Santa Barbara, brought no penalty to any official of any offending company...

...Pollution control must not become another lever to lift up excess profits and fuel the fires of inflation...

...Such information is of crucial importance to the effective administration of the water pollution law and the allocation of legal responsibility for violations...

...The Profits in Pollution by RALPH NADER The modern corporation's structure, impact, and public accountability are the central issues in any program designed to curb or forestall the contamination of air, water, and soil by industrial activity...

...An amendment to the U.S...

...The forced consumption of industrial pollutants by 200 million Americans must lead to a recognition of legal rights in environmental control such as that which developed with civil rights for racial minorities over the last two decades...

...He also failed to point out that the emissions control performance of new cars degrades after a few thousand miles, and that even when new they do not perform under traffic conditions as they do when finely tuned at a company test facility...

...For example, the Federal air quality act has no criminal penalties no matter how willful and enduring the violations...

...Sanctions, consequently, should be tailored to the seriousness and duration of the violation...

...Led by the steel, paper, and petroleum industries, corporate polluters have prevented the FWPCA from collecting specific information on what each company is putting into the water...

...While there are other sources of pollution, such as municipalities dumping untreated or inadequately treated sewage, industrial processes and products are the chief contributors to the long-term destruction of natural resources that each year increases the risks to human health and safety...

...Whether they do or not will first depend on citizen groups to whip them into action...

...The law and the lawyers have rigged the legal system to muffle the voice of shareholders, particularly those concerned with the broader social costs of corporate enterprise...

...To be effective, sanctions should come in various forms, such as non-reimbursable fines, suspensions, dechartering of corporations, required disclosure of violations in company promotional materials, and more severe criminal penalties...

...Heinen, whose paper bordered on technical pornography, said the auto industry had solved the vehicle pollution problem with an eighty per cent reduction of hydrocarbons and a seventy per cent reduction of carbon monoxide between the 1960 and 1970 model years...

...Such generic provisions can only further the judicial acceptance of environmental lawsuits...

...Six—The corporate shareholder can act, as he rarely does, as a prod and lever for jolting corporate leaders out of their lethargy...

...Here is a major challenge to which college faculty and students can respond on the campus and in field work...

...In contrast, scientists and engineers employed by corporations privately tell me of their reluctance to speak out—within their companies or outside them—about hazardous products...

...The scientific-engineering-legal community has a key independent role to play in this vital and complex administrative-political process...

...Two—Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and, in any case, are rarely invoked...

...Eight—Environmental lawsuits, long blocked by a conservative judiciary and an inflexible judicial system, now seem to be coming into their own—a classic example of how heightened public expectations, demands, and the availability of facts shape broader applications of ancient legal principles...

...There are eight areas in which policies must be changed to create the pressures needed to make corporate entities and the people who run them cease their destruction of the environment: One—The conventional way of giving the public a share in private decisions that involve health and safety hazards is to establish mandatory standards through a public agency...

...Other violators in other states are yet to be subjected to the law's enforcement...

...Moreover, through active corporate citizenship, industry could soon overcome many of the obstacles in the way of curbing non-corporate pollution...

...similar amendments to state constitutions are being offered...

...Three additional points deserve the attention of concerned citizens: First, a major corporate strategy in combating antipollution measures is to engage workers on the company side by leading them to believe that such measures would threaten their livelihood...

...Behind the adoption of such standards, there is a long administrative process, tied to a political infrastructure...

...For three years, the National Industrial Waste Inventory has been held up by the Budget Bureau and its industry "advisers," who have a decisive policy role...

...These delegations will be in a position to expose company officers to public judgment, something from which executives now seem so insulated in their daily corporate activities...

...delivered by Charles M. Heinen, Chrysler's vehicle emissions specialist, at a meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers last spring...

...While this point of view may be an unintended manifestation of the economy's administered price structure, it cannot go unchallenged...

...Five—Attention must be paid to the internal climate for free expression and due process within the corporate structure...

...Second, both industry spokesmen and their governmental allies (such as the President's Science Adviser, Lee DuBridge) insist that consumers will have to pay the price of pollution control...

...Counties in California have been concealing from their citizens the identity of polluters and the amounts of pollution, using such weak, incredible arguments to support their cover-up as the companies' fear of revealing "trade secrets...

...A good place to start with such company-by-company disclosure is in the corporation's annual report, which now reveals only financial profits or losses...

...Finally, those who believe deeply in a humane ecology must act in accordance with their beliefs...

...This thin slice belongs to all of us, and we use it and hold it in trust for future earthlings...

...Shareholders must learn to take full advantage of such corporate practices as cumulative voting, which permits the "single-shot" casting of all of a shareholder's ballots for one member of the board of directors...

...What must be made clear to both corporate and public officials is that no one has the right to a trade secret in lethality...

...Whether in Washington or in state capitals around the country, the experts demonstrate greater loyalty to their employers than to their professional commitments in the public interest...

...Delegations of stockholders can give visibility to the issues by lobbying against their company's ill-advised policies in many forums apart from the annual meeting—legislative hearings, agency proceedings, town meetings, and the news media, for example...

...However, for socially conscious and determined stockholders there are many functions that can be performed to help protect the public (including themselves) from industrial pollution...

...But pollution control standards set by governmental agencies can fall far short of their purported objectives unless they are adequately drafted, kept up to date, vigorously enforced, and supported by sanctions when violated...

...It now appears that such lawsuits will gain greater acceptance, especially as more evidence and more willing lawyers combine to breathe contemporary reality into long-standing legal principles...

...And even if the company bore the costs initially, the fax laws would permit a considerable shifting of this cost onto the general taxpayer...

...Again and again, the internal discipline of the corporate autocracy represses the civic and professional spirit of employes who have every right to speak out or blow the whistle on their company after they have tried in vain, working from the inside, to bring about changes that will end pollution practices...

...The sooner industry realizes that it must bear the costs of cleanups, the more likely it will be to employ the quickest and most efficient techniques...

...Seven—Natural, though perhaps unexercised, countervailing forces in the private sector can be highly influential incentives for change...

...Through their political influence, their rating function in evaluating risks and setting premium charges, and their research and development capability, insurance companies could exert a key countervailing stress on polluters...

...He avoided mentioning at least four other vehicle pollutants—nitrogen oxides, lead, asbestos, and rubber tire pollutants...

...Almost invariably, however, its talents have been retained on behalf of those to be regulated...

...The real reason for secrecy is that disclosure of such information would raise public questions about why government agencies have not been doing their jobs—and would facilitate legal action by injured persons against the polluters...

...A parallel governmental research and development program aimed at developing pollution-free product prototypes suitable for mass production, and a Federal procurement policy favoring the purchase of less-polluting products, are essential external impacts...

...This explains why the technical elites are rarely in the vanguard of public concern over corporate contamination...

...This has been the regular practice of specialists testifying in behalf of coal and uranium mining companies on the latters' environmental contamination in Appa-lachia and the Rocky Mountain regions...

...Obviously, local booster-ism does not include such elementary acts of corporate citizenship...

...Rather, such research and development must be required by law to include reinvestment of profits, the amount depending on the volume of pollution inflicted on the public...

...Ralph Nader is the outspoken public advocate who came into national prominence four years ago with his book, Unsafe at Any Speed...

...For example, in 1969 General Motors grossed $24 billion, yet last year spent less than $15 million on vehicle and plant pollution research and development, although its products and plants contribute some thirty-five per cent of the nation's air pollution by tonnage...

...This kind of industrial extortion in a community—especially a company town —has worked before and will again unless citizens anticipate and confront it squarely...

...This disclosure pattern, once established, must not lapse into a conspiracy between private and public officials, a conspiracy of silence against citizens and the public interest...

...The Federal Water Pollution Control Administration (FWPCA) has been blocked since 1963 by industrial polluters (working with the Federal Bureau of the Budget) from obtaining information from these companies concerning the extent and location of discharges of pollutants into the nation's waterways...