Big Money Trumps Science in the Nation and in Wisconsin

Richard Schoenbohm and I both contributed to this post.

Governor Walker is going to try again to pass the iron ore mining bill that barely failed in the last legislative session, and big money is again promoting the project. 

During the last session,  Wisconsin Manufacturing and Commerce (WMC), the powerful big-business lobby in Madison, alleged it was a myth that the bill would allow mining corporations to dump toxic waste into wetlands.  WMC claimed in a slick release that this environmental concern is “completely false, and ridiculous. Like current law, the bill requires any mining company to go through a permitting process before disturbing any wetland.”¹

It is no myth, and the concern is not false.  The Nature Conservancy reports that the bill prevents in-depth scientific evaluation of proposed mines by limiting amount of time the DNR will have to create the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to one year. The report says,

Unlike in Michigan and Minnesota, the bill limits the amount of time the DNR will have to create the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) to one year no matter the complexity of the site or the quality of the company’s Environmental Impact Report (EIR).

·   The data gathered and used by the company during the writing of the EIR no longer has to be shared with the DNR, nor is the department consulted in the methods used to gather the data.

·     By removing contested case hearings as well as hearings on the Environmental Impact Statement, there is no third party verification of the company’s data or methodologies.

·        The DNR cannot consider the quality of the information submitted by the company when deeming the application complete. An application could include poor environmental evaluations, but the Department would have no option but to rule the application complete. The Department would not have the time to redo many of these studies in the remaining 360 days. A comprehensive hydrological study takes a minimum of two years.

So how does WMC, a lobby arm of corporate interests, get press time on a scientific issue?  It certainly isn’t its scientific credential.  It is money.  Energy corporations, for example, know that enough expensive propaganda produces policy decisions in their favor despite scientific evidence to the contrary.  How much money?  Here is what Shawn Lawrence Otto reports in Fool Me Twice:  Fighting the Assault on Science in America.

Public data from the Securities and Exchange Commission and charitable organizations’ reports to the IRS show that between 2005 and 2008, Exxon-Mobile gave about $9 million to groups linked to climate change denial, while foundations associated with the private oil giant Koch Industries gave nearly $25 million.  The third major funder was the American Petroleum Institute (API). Between them they created and funded dozens of groups engaged in producing pseudoscience, activism, organizing, media outreach, and lobbying and implemented an all-out propaganda campaign.  But this was a drop in the bucket compared to what they would spend overall.  Between 1999 and 2010, the energy industry spent more than $2 billion fighting climate change legislation, more than $500 million of it from January 2009 to June 2010, or almost $1,900 per day in lobby expenditures for every US senator and representative in Washington – and those numbers don’t include nonreportable expenses like publicity, earned media, rallies, and polling.  They spent an estimated $73 million more on anti-clean-energy ads from January through October 2010, and Koch family foundations gave an overall $48 million to groups engaged in climate change denial between 1997 and 2008.”²

Wisconsin is no different. A lot of big money has been spread around by supporters of the mining project.  Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce spent at least $2 million to influence last year’s recall election, and its members gave more than $1.15 million to candidates in the 2012 election cycle.  Americans for Prosperity, a group founded by the Koch brothers, spent about at least $8 million to influence elections in Wisconsin in 2011-2012.

So, we should not be surprised to learn that Governor Walker is going to try again this year to pass the mining bill. In his “state of the state” speech on January 15, 2013, he said,

One of the best ways we can show the people of Wisconsin that their state government is focused on jobs is to pass a bill that streamlines the process for safe and environmentally sound mining. Start with the legislation that was approved in the Joint Finance Committee last session, include some reasonable modifications, and send me a bill to sign into law early this year.

Maybe you think that Governor Walker’s support of the mining bill is unrelated to the financial support he and other radical rightists in Wisconsin have received, but we are skeptical.

 

1.       Wisconsin Manufacturing and Commerce, Mining Bill 426:  Iron Mining Reform
2.      Shawn Lawrence Otto, Fool Me Twice:  Fighting the Assault on Science in America, p. 198, Rodale, 2011.