April

The Washington Post
April 22, 2003
The Heartland Wrestles With Biotechnology
By: Justin Gillis

Past midnight on a summer's evening three years ago, Larry Bohlen walked out of a Safeway supermarket in Silver Spring toting $ 66.32 worth of taco shells and other corn products. By the time Bohlen, director of health and environment programs at Friends of the Earth, and his allies in the environmental movement were done having the corn products tested for adulteration, they had forced American food and biotech companies into a recall costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

A biotech corn called StarLink, meant only for animal consumption, had made its way into the human food supply through sloppy grain handling. The incident foreshadowed another mishap last year, in which corn genetically engineered to grow a pig vaccine nearly made its way into food.

The problems have made large American food companies exceedingly nervous about biotechnology. More than half their products in the United States contain biotech ingredients, particularly lecithin or protein made from Roundup Ready soybeans, and they live in fear that some contamination incident will provoke a U.S. consumer backlash.

Agence France Presse
April 10, 2003
Concorde Haters Wave a Cheerful Goodbye to the Sonic Boom
By: Giles Hewitt

As jet-setters on Thursday mourned the end of the Concorde, a hardcore group of American environmental activists were popping champagne corks at the demise of their three-decade-old supersonic nemesis.

"That was one of the first campaigns I ever took part in," said Brent Blackwelder, now president of the US branch of Friends of the Earth.

"It was actually something of a milestone, as it marked one of the first times the environmental lobby moved away from its traditional area of nature conservation and challenged the environmental impact of new technology," Blackwelder said.

"The cancellation of the Concorde service is long overdue and a signal that the world should move towards more sensible modes of transportation," he added.

Financial Times (London)
April 9, 2003
Banks in drive for project principles: Demetri Sevastopulo on moves to enforce emerging market guidelines
By Demetri Sevastopulos

The drive by Citigroup and large European providers of project finance in emerging markets to obtain industry-wide adherence to the International Finance Corporation's social and environmental guidelines may increase pressure on export credit agencies to do the same.

A common perception in Europe shared by most Democrats in the US is that the Bush administration caters more to industry than the environment. But in terms of public sector financing of emerging market projects, many argue that the US has a better track record than Europe.

"In the past, the US Export-Import bank has taken the lead on environmental standards and issues of transparency," said John Sohn, an expert on export credit agencies at Friends of the Earth, one of several non-governmental organisations consulted by the coalition of private banks.

The Associated Press.
April 2, 2003
Interior Deputy's Ties Extend to Oil and Gas Leasing
By Don Thompson

As the No. 2 official at the U.S. Interior Department, former energy lobbyist J. Steven Griles participated in meetings on oil and gas leases off Florida and California in which his firm's former clients had huge financial stakes, his appointment calendars show.

During the time that President Bush's nomination of Griles was pending before the Senate, Chevron USA Inc. was paying Griles' firm $80,000 to lobby the Interior Department where he was about to become deputy to Secretary Gale Norton, according to reports that Griles' firm filed with Congress.

Griles also participated in at least 10 meetings regarding 36 oil and gas leases off the California coast, and requested a top-level review of a legal brief prepared by attorneys representing the interests of several of his former clients.

Griles was a registered lobbyist for Shell Oil Co. and its subsidiary Cal Resources through 1997 and served as an expert witness on behalf of Shell, Chevron and other oil companies being sued for alleged fraud regarding royalty payments to the government. He also lobbied for Devon Energy, which has a 30 percent share in one of the California leases.

Griles' activities were criticized by the Natural Resources Defense Council and Friends of the Earth, which obtained public records under their own requests, and by Democrats who frequently offer him as an example of insiders who have taken key regulatory and policy roles in the Bush administration.

The Washington Post
April 6, 2003
Three Strikes Against a Stadium; Is Our Civic Pride Really Worth $275 Million?
By Brent Blackwelder president of the Friends of the Earth and Ed Lazere director of the D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute.

Baseball is America's sport, and most Washingtonians say they'd love to see it return to the nation's capital. But when they're asked about whether the District should finance a new stadium, polls show an equally strong negative response. Residents worry that paying for a stadium would be too much of a strain for a city that struggles to provide basic services and that lately has been forced to impose serious budget cuts.

Major League Baseball, on the other hand, says it won't place a team anywhere that doesn't put up most of the money for a top-notch stadium.

Caught between a rock and a hard place, D.C. Mayor Anthony Williams has come up with the seemingly perfect answer: a $ 275 million financing package that he says would not take a penny from any other city priority.

Sound too good to be true? It is.

A close look at the plan -- which includes sales taxes on tickets and concessions, a special tax on businesses and income taxes on player salaries -- confirms that a new stadium would be anything but cost-free to the District.

Here are some of the assumptions one has to swallow to believe that a stadium would pay for itself.

* The proposed site won't generate any tax revenue unless a stadium is built there. The mayor's plan counts all taxes generated by the stadium as new revenue. Yet the preferred sites already are being eyed for development by city officials and businesses. The area around the planned New York Avenue Metro station, for example, undoubtedly will see economic growth and will produce additional tax revenue even if no stadium is built there.

* All spending at a baseball stadium would be new. Research shows that new stadiums tend to shift where entertainment dollars are spent rather than increasing overall entertainment spending. So new tax revenue from a baseball stadium would come at the cost of lower tax revenue generated elsewhere.

* D.C. businesses could not be further taxed to pay for education, roads, health care or other needs. Business groups say they would support a new tax to help finance a stadium, but only if no other new taxes were imposed on them. Thus, a stadium would prevent the District from raising business taxes to support other services more critical to improving the city's quality of life.

Stacks of academic studies confirm that sports stadiums are a bad form of economic development. They do not generate much job growth, and the jobs they produce tend to be low-paying. They take valuable property off the tax rolls (most stadiums are exempt), and they don't spur a lot of other development. Other, more mundane public investments, in areas such as infrastructure and education, tend to have much better payoffs. In short, a publicly financed baseball stadium would take away from other pressing needs -- such as schools, recreation centers, affordable housing, environmental initiatives, job training and child care.

The only true benefit would be one that can't be quantified: civic pride. But will spending $ 275 million make us feel that much better about ourselves?

Of course, Williams wouldn't mind spending less, but Major League Baseball -- a monopoly that controls new franchises -- is demanding the best. Perhaps baseball officials know a new stadium would be a money loser that wouldn't be profitable to investors without a public subsidy. Or perhaps they want to maximize profits, which ultimately are shared among all owners. Either way, Major League Baseball is not interested in taking us out to the ballgame. Instead, it wants us to take it to the bank.

The D.C. area is one of the wealthiest in the nation, making it an attractive site for baseball. Given its strengths, the District and Northern Virginia shouldn't allow Major League Baseball to pit them against each other. Instead, the two localities should work to develop more reasonable financing terms that they could present together to Major League Baseball.

Those terms should involve no more than a modest public investment in a new stadium, as has happened in some other cities. In the District, that could be done by asking private investors to pay the entire cost of a new stadium or by renovating RFK Stadium or by doing both.

Even if that kind of agreement with Northern Virginia is not possible, the District should stick to these terms and be prepared to walk away from a bad deal. If the District does not win a baseball team because somebody else offers a lot more public financing, we shouldn't think of ourselves as losers.

We would like to see baseball come to the Washington area -- but not at any cost. The stadium deal should be changed so that the benefits of a new team would not come at the expense of our neighborhoods and basic services.