Reasons for Environmental Laws and Regulations

By Richard Lewis

March 31, 2006

·        Protecting the Environment

·        Protecting Public Health and Safety

·         Providing an Environment That Will Allow for Future Economic Expansion

Most citizens have heard about or would agree with the reasons stated above.

However, have they heard about or would they agree with the reasons given below?

·        Allowing a corporation to sell emission credits / pollution allowances to another county, state or nation thereby limiting future economic expansion in the local community from which they had been sold? 

·        Giving a corporation control of a local community’s economic future after it has closed shop or left town?

·        Funding a vastly expanded United Nations

Forty years ago there was a shortage of manufactures selling industrial equipment to clean industrial pollution emissions.  “Pollution Credits” were originally created as financial incentives to encourage businesses to develop or purchase equipment to clean our air and water. Times have changed

The EPA has real regulatory teeth and vendors are now competing to provide industry the equipment it needs to comply with EPA standards.

Pollution credits accomplished their original purpose, but they have been allowed to transform into a New Kind of Money a Universal Corporate Currency that has not been subject to public audit or scrutiny.

When a corporation moves out of your town or city it may retain ownership of its pollution credits (credits which an existing industry may need to expand or a new industry needs to move in and replace lost jobs). Private corporate ownership of pollution credits can give a corporation control of a local community’s economic future even after the company has shut down and left many local workers unemployed.

I encourage anyone reading this article to visit the Louisville, KY Business First website and read the article about how Ford Motor Company purchased pollution credits from the Phillip Morris Plant after it had ended their operations in Louisville. (Please note Ford motor company would not say what they paid Phillip Morris for pollution credits that they needed to expand truck production.) 

·        What would have happened if Phillip Morris had refused to sell its credits when their plant left Louisville?

·        If Phillip Morris had dragged its feet longer would Ford Motor Company have expanded production in another state?

Governor Patton made it clear that he would not take an active part in influencing Phillip Morris’s decision regarding the sale of pollution credits! 

·        Would Kentucky be blackballed if it became the first state to strong-arm a corporation to sell or return its credits to a local community?

·        Would injury be added to insult if Kentucky taxpayers were forced to ante up to purchase pollution credits needed to replace lost employment opportunity?

·        Corporations certainly have a right to close, leave town, or even move overseas but why should any corporation be allowed to own "financial instruments" whereby they exercise control over the economic future of a local community after they have closed or moved?

Sequestration credits (pollution credits) are already being traded across international borders. Those trades represent more than a transfer of money or emission credits.  Their market value is million and billions of dollars worldwide. They represent an agreement whereby the corporation or individual selling those credits controls or possibly restricts the future economic growth of the town, city, state and/or country.

All legitimate lawful government is based on the informed consent of its people. The people of the United States and the Commonwealth of Kentucky have not given lawmakers their consent to create financial instruments whereby economic decision making is transferred from elected leaders to global corporations or individual citizens acting in their own interest.

Please find below letters from my Congressman Anne Northup and from Sen. Dan Seum Kentucky Senate Majority Whip addressed to Secretary LaJuana Wilcher at the Kentucky Environment & Public Protection Cabinet.  The letters ask pointed questions about accountability and use of pollution credits.  To date, I have not received any answers to those questions.  Please note one of the letters is dated January 18, 2006.

Isn’t it high time that these questions are answered and that the citizens are informed about these important matters? My hope is that you will educate yourself and others and begin to ask these very important questions of your elected representatives.  Do you trust corporate control and lax public oversight of these very valuable and little known assets that have been created by our government?  Would it help to know that Enron was a large broker of pollution credits?

I intend to get the answers and I intend to work to demand clear policies that prevent corporations from taking control of economic policy decisions via emission credits.