The cove of Lake Conway which Exxon claimed was “oil-free”

A new batch of documents received by Greenpeace in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) has revealed that Exxon downplayed the extent of the contamination caused by the ruptured pipeline. Records of emails between Arkansas’ DEQ and Exxon depict attempts by Exxon to pass off press releases with factually false information. In a draft press release dated April 8, Exxon claims “Tests on water samples show Lake Conway and the cove are oil-free.” However, internal emails from April 6 show Exxon knew of significant contamination across Lake Conway and the cove resulting from the oil spill.

When the chief of Arkansas Hazardous Waste division called Exxon out on this falsehood, Exxon amended the press release. However, they did not amend it to say that oil was in Lake Conway and contaminant levels in the lake were rising to dangerous levels, as they knew to be the case. Instead, they continue to claim that Lake Conway is “oil-free.” For the record, Exxon maintains that the “cove,” a section of Lake Conway that experienced heavy oiling from the spill, is not part of the actual lake. Exxon maintains this distinction in spite of Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel saying unequivocally “The cove is part of Lake Conway…The water is all part of one body of water.” Furthermore, Exxon water tests confirmed that levels of Benzene and other contaminants rose throughout the lake, not just in the cove area.

Though Exxon was eventually forced to redact their claim that the cove specifically was  “oil-free,” the oil and gas giant has yet to publicly address the dangerous levels of Benzene and other contaminants their own tests have found in the body of Lake Conway. The Environmental Protection Agency and the American Petroleum Institute don’t agree on everything, but they do agree that the only safe level of Benzene, a cancer causing chemical found in oil, is zero. Benzene is added to tar sands oil to make it less viscous and flow more easily through pipelines.  Local people have reported fish kills, chemical smells, nausea and headaches. Independent water tests have found a host of contaminants present in the lake.

Dead fish in Palarm creek, which Lake Conway drains into. Palarm creek is a tributary of the Arkansas River.

According to Exxon’s data, 126,000 gallons of tar sands crude oil from the pipeline spill is still unaccounted for.

Exxon’s spill emanated from the Pegasus Pipeline, which like the proposed Keystone XL pipeline, connects the Canadian Tar Sands with refineries in the Gulf of Mexico.

I was at a meet up stop In Vienna, Virginia, when a man rolled up and asked what was going on. When he heard that this was a distribution point for riders who had registered to get a free t-shirt, he asked “What do you get if you ride to work everyday?”

I didn’t hear a good answer to that from the group, although they offered him a t-shirt, but the obvious one is health, and the other is wealth. Compared to purchasing, insuring, maintaining and fueling a car, bicycling is a good deal with great side effects.

At the Falls Church stop, a group gathered around one of the city’s four police bike officers. The little bells were tinkling warnings to dog walkers, people with kids and all the folks out on the trail. A few people passed me keeping a faster pace.

Certainly this wonderful Friday was a great day to enjoy the trail. Honey locust trees in blossom perfumed the air. Irises added color to the verge and birdsong cheered me on. The trail into D.C. from Virginia is mostly downhill a lot easier than the way home which climbs out of sea level and up into the hills of the Piedmont.

I paused on the George Washington Bridge over the Potomac River. In the shallows near Roosevelt Island I spied turtles with their heads sticking above the water looking around. Out on the main branch, rowers skimmed over the river gracefully. I overtook the lines of cars moving slowly across the bridge and made my way through the busy campus of GWU. Crowds of people headed into offices along Pennsylvania Avenue and a thousand tourists in various matching t-shirts crowded the gates of the White House.

I sent an email to my Greenpeace colleagues asking if they had biked and if they did so regularly. More than 3 dozen told me they biked just above every day including today. No wonder it’s hard to find a place to park your bike in the office. Occasionally, our facilities department warns on the office intercom that a bike is about to be towed.

Relatively speaking, cars haven’t been around that long. Dec. 1, 2013, will mark 100 years since Henry Ford switched on the first automated assembly line. My grandmothers were born before the age of the automobile and they told me about a very different world without pavement. My parents are in the first American generation to use cars for most of their lives. Born in the 1920s, they walked, biked and rowed boats through the 1930s, but when the 1940s rolled around, so did a lot of cars. I was about 7 when my Dad ran alongside me helping me learn to balance a bike. I kept riding right up through the time I had a driver’s license and well into the 1970s. The late 70s came with Bruce Springsteen solidifying the profile of the automobile in songs like “Born to Run.” I rode a bicycle to work at a gas station for awhile and it was always on the radio. I got a Trek 320 when I was in college which made long distance rides possible. Bikes are fantastic way to see the world.

I have a car and I drive when I have to, but when I’m riding a bike I know I am doing something good for me, and for the planet.

Here’s a cool new toy.

Take Koch Industries. Greenpeace has written extensively about the Koch brothers’ $67 million in support for groups that deny climate change science and promote industries that pollute our air and water, our politics, and our health. The millions of dollars going to groups like ALEC and the State Policy Network also serves to break unions, privatize education, and water down healthcare reform.

Those are good reasons not to give a dime to the multi-billionaire Koch brothers, who own the vast majority of Koch Industries’ private stock. Yet many consumers may not realize that buying products like Quilted Northern toilet paper or Brawny paper towels contributes to Koch profits through their giant pulp and paper subsidiary, Georgia-Pacific. Nor perhaps did the incoming Obama Administration realize that the 2009 inaugural carpet was made by a Koch subsidiary called INVISTA. What a crummy business deal–the President buys your carpet, then you coordinate hundreds of millions of dollars from billionaires determined to defeat his re-election bid…if only there had been an app!

“I have a question–who bought this Koch Industries carpet? Are you serious?!”

The President’s staff aren’t alone. You may well have Koch products in your house. INVISTA also makes the Lycra fabric that goes into our yoga pants and bathing suits, while INVISTA’s Coolmax fiber winds up in all sorts of outdoor gear–an ironic twist for those passionate about preserving the outdoor environments they play in.

Koch is just one example. People who care about various causes can now use the Buycott app to make sure they aren’t supporting companies that spend money against their own values. Forbes explains:

Even more impressively, you can join user-created campaigns to boycott business practices that violate your principles rather than single companies. One of these campaigns, Demand GMO Labeling, will scan your box of cereal and tell you if it was made by one of the 36 corporations that donated more than $150,000 to oppose the mandatory labeling of genetically modified food.

Buycott can also steer consumers toward companies that have openly supported things the buyer cares about:

There are Buycott campaigns encouraging shoppers to support brands that have, say, openly backed LGBT rights. You can scan a bottle of Absolut vodka or a bag of Starbucks coffee beans and learn that both companies have come out for equal marriage.

Of course, David Koch is now a public supporter of gay marriage, so we’ll see how Buycott manages when companies are involved in both progressive and sinister issues, as most large companies are.

Buycott will need some time to fully develop–the explosion in attention is currently overwhelming the app’s servers and giving its developer a list of bugs to fix. As wrinkles are ironed out and as more people upload product and company information into Buycott, it will only become a more powerful tool for consumer advocates. It feels pretty fancy to pull a product off the shelf, scan the bar code, and see what information other people on Buycott have crowd-sourced (ie–you help can help make Buycott more comprehensive by contributing to its product database and ‘campaigns’ yourself).

Cheers to cool technology. And boo to the Koch brothers denial of climate science!

Team Aurora lowers a titanium time capsule with the names of 2.7 million people who want to save the Arctic from the impacts of climate change and pollution of oil production.

Here Team Aurora prepares to lower a titanium time capsule through a hole in the ice and down to a permanent resting place on the seabed. On top is the “flag for the future” a design selected in a global competition. The orb holds the names of 2.7 million people from around the world who signed on to support protecting the Arctic.

This globe is a marker that stakes a claim for all people on the earth that the Arctic should remain as it is, unspoiled and undeveloped. Team Aurora represents people already impacted by climate change. Josefina Skerk, a Swedish-Sami student and member of the Sami Parliament; Renny Bijoux from Seychelles — a nation under grave threat from climate change; 20-year-old musician and Hollywood actor Ezra Miller and Kiera Dawn Kolson of the Tso’Tine-Gwich’in nations in Northern Canada.

Their journey to the top of the world in April 2013 highlights the urgency of stopping the rush to industrialize this wild and stormy region. For a million years, ice prevented fishing, mining and oil drilling. Now as we endure an unpredictable climate with carbon in the atmosphere measured at 400 ppm, a dire situation brought about by the uncontrolled runaway burning of fossil fuels, we should pause before allowing the destruction of the last great wilderness on the ends of the earth.

The future of the Arctic is the future of the Earth.

Now reporters across the country are eyeing the Koch’s first attempt to directly own media themselves. Last weekend’s New York Times confirmed Koch Industries’ bid for the Tribune Company as a way for the Kochs and their allies to “make sure our voice is heard.” Tribune’s newspapers reach tens of millions of U.S. citizens, an ideal captive audience for Charles Koch’s self-serving philosophy to promote “economic freedom,” and to end “crony capitalism,” an ironic choice of words for the one of country’s most infamous corporate political manipulators.

Tribune Co. owns eight newspapers and 23 TV stations across the country including the L.A. Times, the Chicago Tribune and Hoy, the country’s 2nd largest daily Spanish newspaper, a clear asset for conservative politicians still reeling from their underwhelming rapport with the U.S. Hispanic population in the 2012 election.

Reaching Hispanic and Latino voters will be a major topic at the Kochs’ secretive “billionaires caucus” next week, which was delayed three months so the Kochs could audit the results of their 2012 electioneering activities, bolstered by hundreds of millions of dollars raised at previous Koch meetings. It’s worth noting that the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council distributed Arizona’s controversial racial profiling law, SB 1070, to states around the country so private prison companies can rake a profit off the incarceration of immigrants.

Existing Kochtopus Media Publishes Climate Science Denial

Image from Forecast the Facts petition to Tribune Co. to reject Koch's bid

Preceding their bid for the Tribune Company, the Koch brothers’ network ties them to media outlets promoting the climate change denial campaign infamously bankrolled by the Kochs. Read the slaughter of science yourself at the Wall Street Journal opinion page, the Weekly Standard, the National Review, the Washington Examiner, and Breitbart.com.

A Greenpeace investigation detailed key media outlet owners and pundits with ties to the Kochs through their secretive strategy meetings, as did Lee Fang’s ThinkProgress article on the Kochs’ pet “journalists.” Here are some of the Koch’s key allies that own or work in the media:

• Stanley S. Hubbard, the billionaire chairman and CEO of Hubbard Broadcasting, which owns TV and radio stations in major cities across the country, including Washington DC’s WTOP and WFED.

• Karl Eller, who founded the world’s largest outdoor advertising company, Clear Channel Outdoor, and launched numerous TV, radio and newspaper outlets that were absorbed by Gannett Company. Gannett owns USATODAY and dozens of other U.S. newspapers and television stations, and Clear Channel Outdoor stemmed from a Gannett advertising subsidiary purchased by Eller. Karl Eller served on the board of Turner Broadcasting, which owns CNN. He was chosen by the American Advertising Federation for its Advertising Hall of Fame in 2004.

• Ramesh Pannuru, the senior editor of the National Review, an outlet funded by the Charles Koch Foundation. National Review’s “Planet Gore” blog is dedicated to dismissing global warming.

• Foster Friess, the billionaire who provided money to launch the Daily Caller, a conservative news outlet. The Daily Caller has criticized the Obama 2012 campaign’s “anti-Koch” activity.

• Stephen Moore of the Wall Street Journal editorial board, contributor to the National Review and frequent TV news pundit. Stephen Moore used to work at the Cato Institute, which was founded by Charles Koch in the 1970′s and continues to be directed by David Koch and other Koch Industries associates. Moore advises the Koch-funded American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and regularly collaborates with the Heritage Foundation and Americans for Prosperity. In 2009, Moore told attendees of the 2009 RightOnline conference, “What would we do without the Wall Street Journal and FOX News, Right? And Americans for Prosperity?” Moore is a former director of Donors Capital Fund, according to 2010 IRS tax filings.

• Steven Hayward, who is affiliated with numerous groups financed by the Kochs as well serving as treasurer and board member to Donors Capital Fund. DCF and sister group Donors Trust hide money from the Kochs and other corporate interests to groups like the Heartland Institute, the Franklin Center, CFACT, Americans for Prosperity, and many other groups connected to Hayward–read more on Steven Hayward and the Donors Trust network. Steven Hayward frequently dismisses global warming in the Weekly Standard, the National Review, and Powerline Blog, run by attorney John Hinderaker, whose firm has represented Koch Industries.

• Glenn Beck, the former FOX News hysteric who thanked Charles Koch on air for providing misinformation on climate change he presented during his show.

• Dixon Doll, the co-founder and General Partner of DCM, a venture capital firm involved in telecommunications. Dixon Doll sits on the board of directors of DIRECTV.

Oil & Gas billionaire Phil Anschutz. Image: The Telegraph

The New York Times included the brothers’ connection to oil and gas billionaire Philip Anschutz, who owns the Weekly Standard, the Washington Examiner, and other outlets through Clarity Media Group (check out the Weekly Standard’s  puff piece on the Kochs). Phil Anschutz, a fellow financier of climate science denial groups, is one of many elites who attends the Kochs’ twice-annual strategy meetings, where millions of dollars are raised to influence politics through groups like the Heritage Foundation, Americans for Prosperity, the Franklin Center, and the other members of the State Policy Network.

The State Policy Network and its affiliates often gin up their own astroturf media, with the Franklin Center’s “Watchdog” websites dishing out content to bolster the campaigns of Koch’s flagship SPN operations like Americans for Prosperity and ALEC. The Franklin Center is 95% funded by Donors Trust, the “Dark Money ATM” that hides money from the Kochs and other secretive political manipulators.