Environment

Fronting for Rogue Corporations

Only days before the world gathers in Glasgow to discuss the climate crisis, Greenpeace has leaked a trove of documents suggesting that some countries are coming to that gathering with sinister motives. According to the environmental group, several leading coal, oil, beef and animal feed-producing nations are trying to water down the International Panel on Climate Change’s findings to protect their domestic industries.

Among the countries said to be involved are Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil. It seems clear these efforts reflect not only the inclinations of their political leaders but also the interests of major corporations headquartered in those nations.

Saudi Arabia is, of course, the home to the Saudi Aramco—one of the world’s largest oil and gas producers and thus one of the biggest contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Australia is the home to mining companies such as BHP Group, the world’s largest producer of coal. Brazil is the headquarters of meat-producing giant JBS.

Along with their outsized role in CO2 emissions, these companies damage the environment in other ways and have run afoul of regulatory requirements. Take the case of Saudi Aramco. As documented in Violation Tracker, its U.S. subsidiary Motiva Enterprises has racked up more than $170 million in penalties over the past two decades for violations of the Clean Air Act and other environmental laws. In addition to cases brought by the EPA, Motiva has been the target of lawsuits and enforcement actions by attorneys general and environmental regulatory agencies in states such as Texas and Louisiana.

In its U.S. operations, BHP has been cited for violations both by the EPA and by the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement, the federal agency that oversees offshore oil and gas drilling. It has also paid fines to environmental agencies in Louisiana and Arkansas.

JBS, which has taken over several major beef and poultry producers in the United States, has been cited 59 times for environmental violations, paying a total of $5.6 million in penalties. Earlier this year, its Pilgrim’s Pride poultry subsidiary pleaded guilty and was been sentenced to pay approximately $107 million in criminal fines for its participation in a conspiracy to fix prices and rig bids for broiler chicken products.

JBS will also show up in Violation Tracker UK, which will be launched next week. Its Moy Park Limited subsidiary has been fined over £1.2 million since 2010, most of which came from workplace safety violations but also included £82,000 in nine environmental cases.

These examples suggest that the behind-the-scenes efforts of Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil are not just a matter of differences in climate policy. By resisting stronger controls on greenhouse gas emissions, these countries are serving the interests of corporations that repeatedly violate environmental regulations and other laws that serve the public good.

Note: Violation Tracker UK will go public on October 26. It will contain information on more than 60,000 cases brought by over 40 UK regulators such as the Environment Agency and the Health and Safety Executive. The database aggregates cases linked to more than 650 parent corporations based in the UK and over 30 other countries.

Targeting Polluters in the Courts

When it comes to dealing with egregious corporate polluters, we tend to think first about what the EPA and the Justice Department are doing to address the problem. Yet there is another way in which environmental miscreants can be called to account: private litigation.

For the past half century, a series of major lawsuits have served as the means by which large corporations have been compelled to change many of their worst environmental practices and compensate victims of those abuses.

Some of these cases have become legendary and have inspired Hollywood movies. The 2000 film Erin Brockovich told the story of a legal clerk who was central to a successful lawsuit against the utility Pacific Gas & Electric for contaminating the water supply of a California town with the carcinogen hexavalent chromium. The 2019 movie Dark Waters dramatized the efforts of attorney Robert Bilott to get DuPont to take responsibility for exposing residents of a West Virginia community to highly toxic chemicals called PFOAs.

The latest expansion of Violation Tracker includes entries on the PG&E and DuPont cases as well as 100 other lawsuits resolved over the past two decades. As a result of these actions, dozens of major corporations have paid out a total of more than $15 billion in settlements around the country.

These are all group actions in which multiple plaintiffs sued the companies for widespread harm. Initially, major environmental lawsuits were brought as class actions. In the 1990s the U.S. Supreme Court put significant restrictions on such lawsuits, but trial lawyers have been able to achieve substantial settlements through the system of multi-district litigation in which cases from various jurisdictions are transferred to a single federal court with the aim of reaching a global settlement. MDLs are even more common in product liability cases (which Violation Tracker will tackle next).

Among the 104 environmental cases just added to the database, there are class actions and MDLs as well as suits brought by environmental organizations on behalf of communities.

Topping the list of settlement amounts are the cases brought in connection with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico. BP agreed to a $7 billion in 2012 settlement, which was separate from the more than $20 billion it later paid out to federal and state governments. Halliburton, also implicated in the disaster, paid a $1 billion private settlement. The other giant case was the $1.6 billion settlement Volkswagen reached with its dealerships affected by the automaker’s emissions cheating scandal. Like BP, VW also paid billions more in government settlements.

The company with the next highest total is Exxon Mobil, which has paid out more than $590 million in six different private environmental actions. Most of this amount came from a long-running lawsuit stemming from the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill off the coast of Alaska. The company was originally hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award, but it appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which in 2008 slashed the amount to $507 million.

Four of Exxon’s other cases involved the gasoline additive MTBE. Communities and governments in various parts of the country have sued numerous oil companies to hold them responsible for MTBE contamination of water supplies from leaking underground oil tanks.

Another issue involving multiple companies is that of the PFOAs mentioned above in connection with DuPont. A variety of corporations have been sued for contaminating water supplies with these hazardous substances, also known as PFAs or forever chemicals because they do not break down in the body or the environment. DuPont and its spinoffs Chemours and Corteva have paid out hundreds of millions of dollars in these cases, while firms such as 3M and Georgia-Pacific have paid smaller amounts. Other suits are pending.

The dozens of other environmental cases have involved a wide range of toxic substances such as PCBs, dioxin, arsenic, TCE and vinyl chloride. The average of the 104 settlements is $150 million. Sixteen corporations have settlement totals above $100 million.

Missing from the list are major cases involving the role of corporations in exacerbating the climate crisis. Various suits have been brought, often by state and local governments and framed as shareholder actions, but so far none have resulted in significant monetary settlements. That is likely to change as the crisis grows worse and corporations are held culpable. When that happens, Violation Tracker will document the results.

Note: I would like to thank Suzanne Katzenstein and a group of her students at the Duke University Sanford School of Public Policy, who helped identify some of the environmental lawsuits discussed above.

Corporate Contamination

The infrastructure bill making its way through the Senate is said to include $55 billion for water systems, including funding to replace lead pipes throughout the country. That will be a relief for many localities, but other communities face water problems caused not by aging pipes but by corporate negligence.

One example is the town of Hoosick Falls in upstate New York, which discovered in 2014 that its water supply had been contaminated by perfluorooctanoic acid, or PFOA, a toxic chemical linked to a range of ailments, including cancer. PFOA is one of a group of substances known as PFAS, also called “forever chemicals” because they don’t break down in the body or in the environment.

The source of the contamination in Hoosick Falls was a plastics plant that produced electronic components treated with PFOA, which was originally developed by DuPont for its Teflon non-stick coating for cookware. DuPont has been embroiled in a long-running dispute over the impact of PFOA on residents living near the plant in West Virginia where it produced the dangerous chemical.

It is now in a similar controversy with regard to Hoosick Falls, together with the French company Saint-Gobain, which purchased the plant in 1999, and other companies that operated it before that. Residents filed a class action lawsuit against the companies and recently reached a tentative $65 million settlement with most of the defendants.

DuPont is not part of that deal and is challenging it in court, claiming that it will hinder its ability to get a fair deal in its ongoing negotiations with the plaintiffs. A federal judge just rebuffed the company and gave preliminary approval to the settlement.

It is difficult to feel any sympathy for DuPont, whose response to the PFOA problem over the years has left a lot to be desired. As dramatized in the 2019 film Dark Waters, it took a crusading lawyer named Robert Bilott to break through the attempt by the company and its outside attorneys to cover up the pattern of cancers and birth defects experienced by residents of Parkersburg, West Virginia exposed to PFOA.

Yet DuPont is not the only corporation responsible for causing harm to water quality. For example, poultry producer Mountaire Farms recently agreed to pay a total of $205 million to settle a class action lawsuit and a case brought by the Delaware Department of Natural Resources and Environmental Control in connection with groundwater contamination caused by its processing plants.

I am now in the process of documenting these and dozens of other major environmental lawsuits—also known as toxic torts—for the next expansion of Violation Tracker scheduled for September. These cases, pushed by community activists as well as lawyers, are a reminder that the civil justice system is often a necessary supplement to government regulatory action in addressing corporate misconduct.

The Obscure Companies Threatening the Planet

Hilcorp Energy, a privately held oil and gas producer based in Texas, shows up in Violation Tracker with only $2 million in regulatory penalties, compared to more than $1.5 billion for petroleum giant Exxon Mobil. Yet according to a detailed new report published by Ceres and the Clean Air Task Force, Hilcorp dwarfs Exxon when it comes to climate-ruining emissions of methane gas.

Hilcorp is one of a group of lesser-known energy producers which turn out to be responsible for a remarkable portion of greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of the Ceres report, which outed the companies using data from the EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Reporting Project, were surprising enough to merit a front-page article in the New York Times.

Among the other low-profile/high-emissions companies featured in the report are Terra Energy Partners, Flywheel Energy, Blackbeard Operating and Scout Energy. These firms have few or no listings in Violation Tracker.

One of the reasons these companies fly under the radar is that they are not publicly traded. Some are controlled by private equity firms, making their business even more opaque.

As the Times article points out, some of these producers have purchased operations from larger, publicly traded corporations subject to more scrutiny. For example, Hilcorp acquired gas wells in the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico from ConocoPhillips, reducing that company’s carbon footprint while doing nothing to reduce the burden on the climate.

It is significant that the Ceres report is appearing in the wake of the showdown at Exxon Mobil, where institutional investors concerned about the risks associated with climate change have just succeeded in winning three seats on the corporation’s board of directors.

That is a vitally important development in the effort to bring about change at the company which is still the largest overall emitter of greenhouse gases. The Ceres findings point out the necessity for the climate movement to target not only the corporate giants but also the smaller players which are having an outsized impact.

One difficulty in changing the practices of both larger and smaller corporations is the fact that the U.S. environmental regulatory system does little to punish firms for their greenhouse gas emissions. A producer such as Hilcorp can get away with its massive methane emissions because it does not need to worry about activist institutional investors or the possibility of substantial penalties from the EPA.

The EPA has gone after automobile producers such as Hyundai for their greenhouse gas emissions, but the agency has faced strong legal obstacles in the effort to regulate emissions by power plants and energy producers.

Those obstacles need to be overcome, and corporations of all kinds need to face substantial monetary penalties for their contributions to the climate crisis.

Note: Apart from the Ceres report, good use of the EPA’s greenhouse gas data has been made by the Political Economy Research Institute’s Greenhouse 100 Polluters Index, which ranks parent companies by the total emissions of their subsidiaries. In that index, power plant owners such as Vistra Energy and Duke Energy are at the top. Exxon is number 11 and Hilcorp number 36.

The State of Environmental Enforcement

Climate change is the most pressing environmental issue of our time, but we still have to contend with plenty of air pollution, water contamination and hazardous waste proliferation. That task will be easier now that the EPA is abandoning the lax practices of the Trump Administration and is once again getting serious about enforcement.

Yet the federal agency will not be taking on the challenge by itself. Enforcement of laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act is a function shared by the EPA and state environmental agencies. Not all states are equally enthusiastic about this responsibility.

Evidence of this can be found in the latest expansion of Violation Tracker consisting of more than 50,000 penalty cases my colleagues and I at the Corporate Research Project collected from state environmental regulators and attorneys general and just posted in the database. An analysis of the data is contained in a report titled The Other Environmental Regulators.

These cases include $21 billion in fines and settlements (limited to those of $5,000 or more) imposed against companies of all sizes, with the largest amounts coming in actions brought against BP in connection with the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.

It should come as no surprise that the oil and gas industry accounts for much more in aggregate penalties — $8.2 billion – than any other sector of the economy. Utilities come in second with $6 billion. The worst repeat offender is Exxon Mobil, which was involved in 272 different cases with $576 million in total penalties. Those cases were spread across 24 different states.

That last number might have been even higher if all states were diligent about their enforcement duties. Instead, we found disparities that go beyond what might be expected from differences in size. There were unexpected results at both ends of the spectrum.

Given its reputation for being hostile to regulations, we were surprised that Texas turned out to have far more enforcement actions than any other state—over 9,500 since 2000. The Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Railroad Commission of Texas (which oversees pipelines and surface mining) may be cozy with industry when it comes to rulemaking and permitting, but they seem to be serious about enforcing regulations that are on the books.

At the bottom of the list are states such as Oklahoma and Kansas that appear to have brought only a tiny number of enforcement actions over the past 20 years. That is the conclusion we reached because the states post no significant enforcement case information on their websites and denied our open records requests for lists of cases. Little also turned up in news archive searches. It is difficult to believe that the many oil and gas operators in Oklahoma, for instance, hardly ever committed infractions.

Given that state environmental agencies are, to a great extent, enforcing federal laws, there should be much greater consistency in their oversight activities and their disclosure of those efforts.

Note: When using Violation Tracker you can locate state environmental cases by choosing one of the environmental listings in the Option 1 state agency dropdown, or you can do an Option 2 search that includes State as the Level of Government and Environmental Violation as the Offense Type.

Inconsistencies in State Environmental Disclosure

We all know that state governments vary greatly in their policies on a variety of issues. I just discovered the degree to which they also diverge in their willingness to disclose data on their implementation of those policies.

I learned this lesson in the course of gathering data from state environmental regulators across the country for a major expansion of the Violation Tracker database. Next week, my colleagues and I will post 50,000 new entries from those agencies along with a report analyzing the data.

This is the culmination of months of effort to collect data on state environmental enforcement actions over the past two decades. A few state agencies made the process easy by putting the case data on their websites in a form that could be downloaded or scraped.

Others post large archives of individual case documents, sometimes numbering in the thousands. Many agencies put no enforcement information at all on their sites.

This meant we needed to file open records requests—lots of them—for lists of cases with information such as company name, penalty amount, date, category and facility location. Given that some states have more than one environmental agency and some required that separate requests be sent to different divisions (air, water, hazardous waste, etc.), we ended up filing about 90 requests.

The good news is that nearly all states ultimately came through with some information. This was not always in our requested format (a spreadsheet) or time period (back to 2000), but we made the best of what was sent.

There were half a dozen denials, which fell into two main categories. Agencies such as CalRecycle and the New York Department of Environmental Conservation declined to provide lists of case details contained in documents posted on the site. In other words, they felt no obligation to make our data collection more convenient. We thus had to sift through hundreds of documents and create our own lists.

More troubling was the situation with agencies such as the Kansas Department of Health and Environment and the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality, which turned down our requests even though they provide no significant enforcement information on their websites. For these agencies, we checked non-official sources such as the Lexis-Nexis news archive and found references to a small number of cases.

Nearly all of the agencies that denied our open records requests based their rejection on the claim that providing the lists we were seeking would, in effect, require the creation of a new record, whereas their state transparency laws only obligated them to supply existing records.

This position is antithetical to the spirit of open records laws. It is especially troubling when it comes to information on environment enforcement, an area in which states are carrying out a function delegated to them by the federal government under laws such as the Clean Air Act.

Just as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency posts data (through ECHO) on the enforcement actions it carries out on its own, so should the state agencies partnering with EPA be fully transparent about their activities. That would mean not just responding favorably to open records requests for comprehensive data but also posting their enforcement data on the web, ideally in a standardized format.

Accessibility is an essential part of meaningful transparency. It should not be necessary to file 90 open records requests to discover how a key government function is being carried out.

Happy Sunshine Week.

EPA’s New Leadership Will Also Encourage More State Enforcement

The confirmation and swearing in of Michael Regan as administrator of the EPA creates an opportunity for the agency to repair the damage done during the Trump years. Part of that effort will be to change the dynamic between the EPA and state environmental regulators.

It is often forgotten that responsibility for enforcement of laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act is actually shared between the federal and state governments. I was reminded on this in the course of preparing the latest expansion of Violation Tracker, which will consist of more than 50,000 state-government environmental enforcement actions dating back to the beginning of 2000. The new data will be posted later in March along with a report examining the relative level of activity among the states.

Regan ran the Department of Environmental Quality in North Carolina, one of the agencies from which we collected data. The DEQ has brought around 1,500 successful enforcement actions over the past decade, putting it among the top ten states according to our tally, which is limited to cases in which a penalty of $5,000 or more was imposed.

The DEP and the North Carolina Attorney General have collected more than $950 million in fines and settlements, putting it among the top five states in terms of aggregate penalty dollars. North Carolina’s penalty total was boosted enormously by an $855 million settlement reached with Duke Energy earlier this year involving coal ash cleanup.

Regan is not the first state official to head the EPA. But consider the contrast with the person Donald Trump chose to be his first EPA administrator: Scott Pruitt, who had served as the attorney general of Oklahoma and who made a name for himself in that position by repeatedly suing the EPA to bring about regulatory rollbacks. Oklahoma, by the way, came in at the bottom of our tally of state enforcement caseloads.

Under Pruitt and his successor, the former coal lobbyist Andrew Wheeler, the EPA backed away from aggressive enforcement in favor of voluntary compliance, which for many corporations is an invitation to ignore regulations. This not only affected enforcement work at the federal level but also encouraged a hands-off approach by the states that emboldened environmental scofflaws.

Fortunately, places such as North Carolina went their own way. Now that Regan is running the show at EPA, states will feel encouraged to pursue meaningful enforcement of the laws governing air, water and hazardous waste pollution. Maybe even Oklahoma will be inspired to change its ways.

Exxon’s Environmental Baby Steps

Exxon Mobil would have to be included in any list of the large corporations that have done the most environmental damage over the decades.

Part of the reason would be specific events, such as the 1989 accident in which the company’s supertanker Valdez went aground off the coast of Alaska and spilled 11 million gallons of crude oil into the Prince William Sound, polluting more than 700 miles of shoreline. Although much of the guilt was laid to the captain of the vessel, who was intoxicated and away from his post at the time of the accident, Exxon was faulted for not acting quickly enough in dealing with the spill and for not adequately cooperating with state and federal officials.

Then there is the fact that Exxon was for many years one of the key corporate ringleaders in the climate denial effort. In 2015 Inside Climate News published an exhaustive expose on the company’s decades-long campaign, including the suppression of its own research showing the dangers of greenhouse gases and the associated financial risk.

Now, at long last, Exxon is changing its posture—a bit. The company has added a couple of directors with no previous ties to the fossil fuel industry, and its CEO is talking about the importance of carbon capture. In an interview with the New York Times, Darren Woods (photo) promised, as the newspaper put it, “that Exxon would try to set a goal for not emitting more greenhouse gases than it removed from the atmosphere, though he said it was still difficult to say when that might happen.”

It is frustrating to see Exxon take such tentative steps when the climate crisis is so dire and other companies such as General Motors with strong historic ties to fossil fuels are announcing much more ambitious initiatives.

Along with getting serious about climate change, Exxon needs to be a lot more diligent about basic environmental compliance. This has come home to me as I have been processing the data for a major expansion of Violation Tracker involving the addition of tens of thousands of cases from state government environmental agencies.

Exxon will end up high on the list of companies that have paid the most to states for violations of clean air, clean water, hazardous waste and other regulations. My preliminary calculation puts its total fines and settlements with state agencies at more than $540 million since 2000. That amount comes from more than 240 different cases in 22 states.

That total does not include a class action lawsuit brought in connection with the Exxon Valdez disaster. In 1994 a jury ordered the company to pay $5 billion in punitive damages to thousands of Alaskans but the company fought the award all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which slashed the damages to about $500 million.

I suppose it is progress that Exxon has abandoned its total refusal to acknowledge the issue of climate change, but it needs to do a lot more before it can be removed from the environmental rogues gallery.

The Opposite of Sustainability

Oil giant Royal Dutch Shell is one of the many global corporations, especially those based in Europe, that profess to be devoted to sustainability in their operations. Shell claims that its commitment in this area dates back to 1997.

For most large corporations, these assertions of environmental virtue are dubious at best. In the case of Shell, they are especially far-fetched, given the company’s history in countries such as Nigeria.

In the early 1990s Shell began to face protests over its oil operations in Nigeria. In 1994 the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, then led by Ken Saro-Wiwa, began blockading contractors working on Shell’s facilities to bring attention to the large number of pipeline ruptures, gas flaring and other forms of contamination that were occurring in the Ogoniland region. The group described Shell’s operations as “environmental terrorism.”

The Nigerian government, a partner with Shell in the operations, responded to the protests with a wave of repression, including the arrest of Saro-Wiwa, who was hanged in 1995. Shell denied it was involved, but critics pointed to the role played by the company in supporting the military dictatorship. Protests against the company continued.

A lawsuit brought on behalf of the Saro-Wiwa family was later filed in U.S. federal court under the Alien Tort Claims Act. In 2009, just before a trial was set to begin, the company announced that as a “humanitarian gesture” it would pay $15.5 million to the plaintiffs to settle the case. By contrast, a 2011 United Nations estimated that an environmental cleanup of the Niger Delta would cost $1 billion and take 30 years.

A separate Alien Torts Claims case brought on behalf of the Ogoni people against Royal Dutch Shell in 2002 made its way through the U.S. legal system to the Supreme Court, which in 2013 ruled that the U.S. courts could not be used to bring claims against overseas acts by foreign companies.

Another case–this one brought by Friends of the Earth Netherlands and four Nigerian farmers–was filed in a Dutch court, alleging that spills from Shell pipelines damaged the livelihood of the farmers. The case, which represented the first time a Dutch multinational has been sued in the Netherlands for overseas activities, was mostly dismissed in 2013 but the plaintiffs persisted.

Recently the Hague Court of Appeal finally issued a decision on the case, ruling that Shell has to pay compensation to the farmers and install equipment to prevent future pipeline leaks. The amount of the compensation has yet to be determined.

It is unlikely that Shell, which generates more than $300 billion in annual revenue and ranked number 5 in the most recent Fortune Global 500 list, will have difficulty paying whatever the Dutch court mandates. Perhaps the bigger problem is that Shell has never acknowledged responsibility for the ecological damage and still insists that the leaks were caused by sabotage.

Until it fully owns up to its culpability for human rights and environmental damage in Nigeria, Shell has no business presenting itself as practitioner of sustainability.

Toxic Corporations

Given the Biden Administration’s focus on the climate crisis, the announcement by General Motors that it will transition to an all-electric fleet, and the growing emphasis on sustainability among institutional investors, one might be tempted to think the United States is embarking on an environmental rebirth.

Despite some good signs, it is worth remembering that many large corporations—including ones that tout green credentials—are still spewing vast amounts of dangerous emissions into the air, land and water. Perhaps the best reminders of this reality are the data compilations produced by the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

PERI recently released the latest version of its Toxic 100 lists, which cover air, water and greenhouse gas emissions. The lists are based on data from the EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory and its Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program. The EPA publishes the data only for individual U.S. facilities, whereas PERI combines the emission amounts by parent company and thus reveals which large corporations account for the largest pollution shares. PERI’s approach is much like the one we use in Violation Tracker. It helps a lot that database wizard Rich Puchalsky of Grassroots Connection works on both projects.

There are a total of about 220 parent companies that appear on one or more of the three PERI lists. The Netherlands-based chemical company LyondellBasel Industries, which owns heavily polluting plants in Texas and other states, is at the top of the air list. Military contractor Northrop Grumman tops the water list, mainly because of the massive emissions at its subsidiary Alliant Techsystem’s facility in Virginia. The parent with the most greenhouse gas emissions is, ironically, Vistra Energy, which is heavily involved in renewable power generation and storage.

I was interested to see which corporations appeared on all three lists. I found that 16 firms have that dubious distinction. Not surprisingly, they include the country’s largest petroleum, chemical and steel producers.

Five of the group appear in the top 50 on each of the three lists: Dow Inc., Koch Industries, Berkshire Hathaway, ExxonMobil and Marathon Petroleum. Dow is the only one of these to be in the top ten of two different lists. It ranks fourth in water emissions and fifth in air emissions (as well as 44^th in greenhouse gases). Koch Industries is in the top 25 of all three lists.

Dow’s position as the worst overall polluter comes as no surprise, given that the company has a toxic history that dates back decades and includes its notorious role in the production of napalm and Agent Orange during the Vietnam War. Its reputation only worsened after its 2001 acquisition of Union Carbide, which refused to pay adequate compensation for the thousands of victims of the 1984 disaster at its pesticide plant in Bhopal, India. Dow was also embroiled in a major scandal involving faulty silicone breast implants.

The blots on Dow’s record are not all in the distant past. In 2019, for instance, it reached a $98 million settlement with the U.S. Justice Department, the State of Michigan and the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe to restore areas damages by hazardous releases from Dow’s operations in Midland, Michigan.

You wouldn’t learn any of this background by reading the history section of the company’s website, which includes a page headlined “Sustainability from the Start: Dow’s Rich History of Environmental Stewardship.” As for the present, the site declares: “At Dow, we’re working to deliver a sustainable future for the world by connecting and collaborating to find new options for materials that make life better for everyone.”

This sort of greenwashing language is all too typical in the materials large corporations publish about themselves. PERI’s Toxic 100 shows that these companies have a long way to go before they can accurately depict themselves as paragons of environmental virtue.