Environment

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.

Solving the Corporate Identity Crisis

Like the Republican Party, Corporate America is embroiled in a battle between its evil impulses and its better angels. Nowhere is this clearer than with regard to environmental policy.

On one side are the ESG proponents such as BlackRock’s CEO Larry Fink, who according to the New York Times, is using his firm’s role as a massive institutional investor to pressure corporations to embrace sustainable practices. In his annual letter to companies, he called not just for vague aspirations but specific plans that are incorporated in long-term strategies and reviewed by boards of directors.

General Motors has just announced that it will phase out gasoline-powered cars and trucks and will sell only zero-emissions vehicles by 2035. The company will spend $27 billion developing about 30 types of electric vehicles.

At the same time, fossil fuel companies are going ballistic over the Biden Administration’s plan to suspend oil and gas leasing on federal lands, despite the fact that some 90 percent of exploration occurs on private property and is not affected by the executive order. Biden has also not called for a ban on fracking, despite allegations during the presidential campaign that this was his real plan.

The conflict within the business world was epitomized by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which issued a press release that welcomed the Biden Administration’s focus on climate change while rejecting the leasing action.

There is also a corporate identity crisis with regard to employment practices, especially those in the high-tech sector. For many years, Silicon Valley companies had reputations as great places to work and were even accused of coddling their employees.

Now companies such as Amazon have replaced Walmart as the exemplars of bad employers. That image has intensified as groups of workers have begun to turn to collective action to address their concerns. Rather than embracing the right of employees to have a real voice at work, high-tech employers are adopting old-fashioned union-busting tactics. Amazon has even taken a move from the Donald Trump playbook by opposing mail-in voting during a representation election in Alabama.

The one clear lesson from the corporate inconsistencies is that ESG and other voluntary business practices are no substitute for strong government oversight. We should not have to wait until big business decides whether it really wants to help save the planet or will cling to fossil fuels as long as possible.

We should also not have to wait until giant companies decide whether they will treat their workers with respect or continue to regard them as little more than vassals.

It is thus encouraging that the Biden Administration is taking decisive action to restore effective regulation of both the environment and the workplace as well as areas such as consumer protection. Once agencies such as the EPA, the NLRB and the CFPB go back to enforcing the law in an aggressive manor, corporate ambivalence will become much less relevant and we can be confident that the entire private sector will feel pressured to do the right thing.

Trump’s Environmental Charade

When challenged about their climate denialism, President Trump and Vice President Pence tend to respond with a claim that the United States has the world’s cleanest air and water, thereby implying that their administration is doing a good job enforcing environmental regulations. Aside from being a separate issue from climate change, the claim is false in two ways: our air quality and water quality are far from the best, and enforcement has been on the decline.

The latter should come as no surprise, since regulation-bashing has been one of the hallmarks of the Trump Administration. It is one of the few areas in which traditional Republican values have been preserved.

Much of the administration’s focus has been on reversing the environmental initiatives of the Obama Administration, yet there has also been an erosion in the enforcement of longer-standing laws such as the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act.

The latest evidence of this comes in a new study by David Uhlmann of the Environmental Crimes Project at the University of Michigan Law School. The analysis, which has received prominent coverage in the New York Times, finds that during the first two years of the Trump Administration the number of criminal prosecutions under the Clean Water Act fell 70 percent and those under the Clean Air Act declined by more than 50 percent.

It should be noted that criminal prosecutions represent a small subset of environmental cases, the large majority of which are brought as civil matters. Criminal charges are often brought against individuals rather than corporate polluters, and they often involve specific offenses such as ocean dumping of hazardous wastes.

Uhlmann’s analysis is based on the number of cases and the number of defendants, which will differ given that some cases have multiple defendants. His findings are consistent with the data in Violation Tracker, where we focus more on the penalties paid by offenders, and we include civil as well as criminal cases.

Our data shows that the total penalties (both fines and settlements) collected by the EPA and the Justice Department have been trending downward during the Trump years. In the period from 2009 to 2016, environmental penalties averaged over $7 billion a year, an amount boosted by major cases against corporations such as BP for the Deepwater Horizon disaster and Volkswagen for emissions cheating.

Penalties during the Trump Administration have averaged $974 million per year. The average would be much lower if not for the $1.5 billion settlement announced in September with Daimler for its emissions cheating. It is encouraging that this case was resolved during the current administration, but it is one of only a small number of mega-settlements reached over the past few years, and most of these represented the culmination of enforcement initiatives begun under the previous administration.

Thanks to career public servants in the EPA and the Justice Department, environmental enforcement has not disappeared during the Trump Administration. Yet the downward trend in penalties suggests that political appointees are probably thwarting more aggressive action against polluters.

Foreign-Owned Regulatory Violators Found Among PPP Recipients

The massive Paycheck Protection Program was depicted as a necessary measure to save American small businesses, yet the list of recipients of the forgivable loans released by the Treasury Department contains numerous companies that are neither small nor American.

These include firms such as Jindal Saw USA LLC and JSW Steel (US) Inc., two affiliates of the Jindal Group, a multi-billion-dollar conglomerate owned by one of India’s wealthiest families. JSW Steel’s investments in the United States have been touted by Donald Trump, though the company later sued the U.S. Commerce Department when it was denied permission to import steel from India without paying a steep tariff.

Continental Carbon Company, owned by Taiwan’s International CSRC Investment Holdings Company (formerly China Synthetic Rubber Corporation), received a PPP loan worth between $5 million and $10 million.

These are two examples that have emerged from an examination of the PPP recipient list my colleagues and I have been doing as part of the integration of the data into our Covid Stimulus Watch website. Here are some others:

Giti Tire Manufacturing (USA) Ltd and Giti Tire (USA) Ltd, subsidiaries of Singapore’s Giti Tire.

Sekisui Voltek, LLC, a subsidiary of Japan’s Sekisui Chemical.

The U.S. subsidiary of Korean Air Lines (owned by the Hanjin Group).

Asahi Forge of America Corporation, a subsidiary of Japan’s Asahi Forge.

It does not come as a complete surprise that foreign-owned companies appeared on the PPP list. There was discussion of this possibility at the time the program was debated and enacted.

The issue then was whether such entities would be eligible for the loans if they were part of foreign companies with a workforce that surpassed the PPP employee limits. The muddled guidance provided by the Trump Administration has apparently allowed funds to go to firms linked to foreign corporations that are far from small businesses.

Another concern has come to light as we match PPP recipients to the data my colleagues and I have assembled for our other database, Violation Tracker: some of these foreign companies getting PPP loans have a history of misconduct.

The U.S. operations of Jindal Group have paid more than $1.4 million in penalties, mostly resulting from workplace safety and health violations.

Continental Carbon has paid over $2 million in penalties, nearly all of which involved Clean Air Act violations. Giti Tire, Sekisui, and Asahi Forge have also paid penalties to OSHA and/or the EPA.

In 2007 Korean Air Lines had to pay a $300 million criminal fine to the U.S. Justice Department after pleading guilty to conspiring to fix the prices of passenger and cargo flights. In 2018 Hanjin Transportation Co. Ltd., also part of the Hanjin Group, paid more than $6 million to the Justice Department to resolve allegations relating to a bid-rigging conspiracy that targeted contracts to supply fuel to United States Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force bases in South Korea.

In creating the Paycheck Protection Program, Congress probably did not intend to provide assistance to entities that are owned by large foreign companies and that had a track record of repeated regulatory violations and other serious misconduct.

Now that there is consideration of extending and expanding PPP, the question is whether such companies will continue to benefit from the largesse of American taxpayers.

Getting Tough on Corporate Killing

The lead story on the front page of a recent edition of the Wall Street Journal was about the former chief executive of a Brazilian mining company not widely known in the United States. The Journal’s editors probably realized their readers would be shaken by the news that Fabio Schvartsman has been charged with homicide in the deaths of 270 people in a mining dam collapse last year.

The decision by prosecutors in the state of Minas Gerais to bring such charges against Schvartsman as well as other former executives at Vale SA shows the depth of anger in Brazil at the giant iron ore company over the accident in which a torrent of waste swept away people, submerged houses and created a large toxic wasteland (photo).

Vale and a German consulting company, five of whose officials were also hit with homicide charges, are alleged to have long known about a critical safety flaw in the tailings dam but failed to act.

Although Brazil does not have a death penalty or life sentences for civilian offenses, the filing of homicide charges against corporate executives is an aggressive measure that has rarely been applied in that country or anywhere else.

There are more precedents when it comes to corporate manslaughter, which is the idea that a business entity can be prosecuted for causing the death of employees or other persons. For example, in 2007 the United Kingdom enacted the Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act, though that law has not been enforced as rigorously as many advocates had hoped.

In the United States there is no such federal statute, though the principle of corporate criminal liability is well-established, and numerous companies have faced criminal charges, though they frequently end with deferred prosecution or non-prosecution agreements.

The Violation Tracker database has more than 1,600 criminal cases (compared to 395,000 civil matters). Many of these are financial in nature or involve violations of environmental laws such as the Clean Water Act that are deemed negligent or deliberate but usually don’t involve loss of life.

A much smaller number involve corporate killing, including notorious cases such as BP’s role in the Deepwater Horizon disaster or the Upper Big Branch disaster at a coal mine owned by Massey Energy.

In these matters, however, the corporations, as in civil cases, mainly paid financial penalties and their executives faced no personal liability. One exception was former Massey CEO Don Blankenship, who was convicted of conspiring to violate federal mine safety standards and was sentenced to a year in prison. Otherwise, the Justice Department has shown little interest in prosecuting corporate executives for environmental or workplace fatalities.

There has been a bit more of such activity at the local level, especially on the part of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. It has brought criminal charges against both companies and individuals in connection with workplace and other accidents. For example, in November 2019 a building owner, a plumber and a contractor were convicted of manslaughter by causing a 2015 explosion resulting from unauthorized natural-gas connections installed in a rental building.

Three years earlier, the Manhattan DA won a conviction against a construction supervisor accused of ignoring warnings about unsafe conditions on a building site that resulted in a fatal accident.

The approach of the Manhattan DA and the prosecutors in Brazil points to a promising way forward in the handling of corporate misconduct that results in serious harm or death. If they know they may end up behind bars for a long time, corporate executives and managers may become more serious about their responsibility to abide by health and safety laws.

The 2019 Corporate Rap Sheet

While the news has lately focused on political high crimes and misdemeanors, 2019 has also seen plenty of corporate crimes and violations. Continuing the pattern of the past few years, diligent prosecutors and career agency officials have pursued their mission to combat business misconduct even as the Trump Administration tries to erode the regulatory system. The following is a selection of significant cases resolved during the year.

Online Privacy Violations: Facebook agreed to pay $5 billion and to modify its corporate governance to resolve a Federal Trade Commission case alleging that the company violated a 2012 FTC order by deceiving users about their ability to control the privacy of their personal information.

Opioid Marketing Abuses: The British company Reckitt Benckiser agreed to pay more than $1.3 billion to resolve criminal and civil allegations that it engaged in an illicit scheme to increase prescriptions for an opioid addiction treatment called Suboxone.

Wildfire Complicity: Pacific Gas & Electric reached a $1 billion settlement with a group of localities in California to resolve a lawsuit concerning the company’s responsibility for damage caused by major wildfires in 2015, 2017 and 2018. PG&E later agreed to a related $1.7 billion settlement with state regulators.

International Economic Sanctions: Britain’s Standard Chartered Bank agreed to pay a total of more than $900 million in settlements with the U.S. Justice Department, the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve, the New York Department of Financial Services and the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office concerning alleged violations of economic sanctions in its dealing with Iranian entities.

Emissions Cheating: Fiat Chrysler agreed to pay a civil penalty of $305 million and spend around $200 million more on recalls and repairs to resolve allegations that it installed software on more than 100,000 vehicles to facilitate cheating on emissions control testing.

Foreign Bribery: Walmart agreed to pay $137 million to the Justice Department and $144 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission to resolve alleged violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Brazil, China, India and Mexico.

False Claims Act Violations: Walgreens agreed to pay the federal government and the states $269 million to resolve allegations that it improperly billed Medicare, Medicaid, and other federal healthcare programs for hundreds of thousands of insulin pens it knowingly dispensed to program beneficiaries who did not need them.

Price-fixing: StarKist Co. was sentenced to pay a criminal fine of $100 million, the statutory maximum, for its role in a conspiracy to fix prices for canned tuna sold in the United States. StarKist was also sentenced to a 13-month term of probation.

Employment Discrimination: Google’s parent company Alphabet agreed to pay $11 million to settle a class action lawsuit alleging that it engaged in age discrimination in its hiring process.

Investor Protection Violation: State Street Bank and Trust Company agreed to pay over $88 million to the SEC to settle allegations of overcharging mutual funds and other registered investment company clients for expenses related to the firm’s custody of client assets.

Illegal Kickbacks: Mallinckrodt agreed to pay $15 million to resolve claims that Questcor Pharmaceuticals, which it acquired, paid illegal kickbacks to doctors, in the form of lavish dinners and entertainment, to induce them to write prescriptions for the company’s drug H.P. Acthar Gel.

Worker Misclassification: Uber Technologies agreed to pay $20 million to settle a lawsuit alleging that it misclassified drivers as independent contractors to avoid complying with labor protection standards.

Accounting Fraud: KPMG agreed to pay $50 million to the SEC to settle allegations of altering past audit work after receiving stolen information about inspections of the firm that would be conducted by the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. The SEC also found that numerous KPMG audit professionals cheated on internal training exams by improperly sharing answers and manipulating test results.

Trade Violations: A subsidiary of Univar Inc. agreed to pay the United States $62 million to settle allegations that it violated customs regulations when it imported saccharin that was manufactured in China and transshipped through Taiwan to evade a 329 percent antidumping duty.

Consumer Protection Violation: As part of the settlement of allegations that it engaged in unfair and deceptive practices in connection with a 2017 data breach, Equifax agreed to provide $425 million in consumer relief and pay a $100 million civil penalty to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. It also paid $175 million to the states.

Ocean Dumping: Princess Cruise Lines and its parent Carnival Cruises were ordered to pay a $20 million criminal penalty after admitting to violating the terms of their probation in connection with a previous case relating to illegal ocean dumping of oil-contaminated waste.

Additional details on these cases can be found in Violation Tracker, which now contains 397,000 civil and criminal cases with total penalties of $604 billion.

Note: I have just completed a thorough update of the Dirt Diggers Digest Guide to Strategic Corporate Research. I’ve added dozens of new sources (and fixed many outdated links) in all four of the guide’s parts: Key Sources of Company Information; Exploring A Company’s Essential Relationships; Analyzing A Company’s Accountability Record; and Industry-Specific Sources.

De-Enforcement

For the past two years, the Trump Administration has sought to give the impression it is dismantling large parts of the federal regulatory system. The effort is not only wrong-headed – it has largely been unsuccessful. Many of the moves to eliminate rules have been thwarted by court challenges.

Yet the administration has found another way to advance its goal of allowing rogue corporations to operate with much lower levels of oversight: it is reducing the ranks of federal employees whose job it is to enforce the regulations that remain on the books.

A recent overview by the Wall Street Journal found that staffing at the Environmental Protection Agency is down by about half since its height during President Obama’s second term. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration was said to have the fewest workplace inspectors in decades.

Fewer inspectors means fewer inspections and lower levels of penalties imposed for infractions. Last year, Public Citizen and the Corporate Research Project, using data from Violation Tracker, published a report showing how penalty levels were sinking at virtually all the key agencies. The evidence suggests that the trend is continuing.

Some of the staffing decline is due to attrition. Many regulatory agency employees have retired or resigned because they can no longer bear to work to see their mission undermined by the political appointees Trump has installed. More than 700 left the EPA in first 12 months after the administration took office.

Trumpworld is no longer depending entirely on attrition to hollow out the EPA. Now the administration is engaged in a direct attack on the remaining employees at the agency. EPA management has just informed the American Federation of Government Employees, the largest union at the EPA, that it will unilaterally impose changes in working conditions on 9,000 staffers.

The changes, which AFGE is challenging with an unfair labor practice filing, would, among other things, bar employees from telecommuting and would severely limit the amount of time rank-and-file union representatives can spend on grievances and other workplace matters. AFGE reps would also be evicted from the office space at the agency currently being used for union activity. Grievance and arbitration rights themselves would also be put in jeopardy.

The moves by EPA management appear to be an indirect way of implementing harsh policies that Trump tried to implement through executive order last year, but which were blocked by a federal judge. “In the Trump world, there is no bargaining, only ultimatums,” stated Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility and a former EPA enforcement attorney. “Under these rules, important safeguards against political purges within the civil service would be removed.”

Trump has received a great deal of deserved criticism for his attacks on federal prosecutors and Congressional oversight, given the corrosive effect on the rule of law. The administration’s actions against staffers at agencies such as the EPA are just as dangerous for our system of regulatory enforcement.

Oligopolies and Regulatory Compliance

There is growing awareness of the dangers posed by Amazon’s ever-increasing market clout, but the concentration of economic power is not limited to that online retailer. More and more U.S. industries have become oligopolies, and in some sectors the top two companies now have a market share in excess of 50 percent.

This concentration is made clear to me each time I revise the parent-subsidiary data in Violation Tracker. In the just-completed quarterly update, which will be posted next week, I had to make adjustments to reflect about three dozen instances in which one of the companies in our universe of some 3,000 parent companies completed the acquisition of another.

Among these deals: the purchase of Aetna by CVS Health, the acquisition of Express Scripts by Cigna, and the purchase of industrial gas giant Praxair by its competitor Linde.

But the one that stood out to me was the acquisition of oil refiner Andeavor by Marathon Petroleum. Andeavor is the name adopted last year by Tesoro, one of the largest petroleum refiners in the country. Over the last two decades it has bought refineries from large corporations such as Shell and BP, and in 2016 it purchased all of Western Refining.

Marathon Petroleum, which was spun off from Marathon Oil in 2011, has grown through previous deals such as the takeover of the infamous BP refinery in Texas City, Texas, the site of a 2005 explosion in which 15 workers were killed.

The marriage of Marathon and Andeavor will create the largest oil refiner in the United States, but at the same time it will join together two companies with very checkered environmental, safety and labor records.

Marathon’s operations, including those previously owned by BP in Texas City, have amassed more than $920 million in penalties, according to Violation Tracker. This total includes a $334 million settlement with the EPA and the Justice Department covering air pollution at refineries in five states, along with two dozen OSHA penalties.

Andeavor has accumulated $467 million in penalties, most of which comes from a single giant settlement with the EPA in 2016. It also has had about two dozen significant OSHA fines.

The combined company’s page in the updated Violation Tracker, which will include other new data, will show a total of nearly $1.4 billion in penalties. This will put Marathon in the dubious club of only a few dozen mega-corporations that have racked up ten-figure totals in Violation Tracker. It will put the company higher on that list than the long-time environmental miscreant Exxon Mobil.

Aside from the economic consequences, growing concentration may also be weakening regulatory compliance. As industries become increasingly dominated by large corporations with a history of breaking the rules, it is likely that those violations will become even more common. That’s another reason to get tough on oligopolies.

Fake Environmental Regulation?

The Trump Administration likes to play with fire. Now it may be playing with a fire-resistant material that is also a deadly carcinogen. After years of receding as a public health threat, asbestos could make a comeback.

When Donald Trump joined his father in the New York real estate business in the late 1960s, the use of asbestos in high-rise construction was widespread. Yet within a few years it was revealed that the substance was highly dangerous for those who mined it, those who processed it and those who applied it. The hazard had actually been known for decades but had been kept secret by companies such as Johns-Manville in one of the most egregious corporate deceptions of the 20^th Century. Paul Brodeur’s 1985 book on the subject was called Outrageous Misconduct.

Asbestos producers and users were hit with tens of thousands of lawsuits, which forced Manville and other companies into bankruptcy. Use of the material was largely eliminated and vast sums were spent to remove existing asbestos from countless buildings.

Donald Trump appears to be ignorant of this history. In 2012 he tweeted his support for asbestos, claiming that if it had been more widely used in the old World Trade Center the Twin Towers would have survived the 9/11 attack. He did not mention that asbestos fibers were present in the dust clouds generated by the disaster and are believed to be among the causes of the high rate of cancer among first responders and Ground Zero workers.

In recent days there have been reports suggesting that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency might be putting the president’s pro-asbestos sentiments into action. In early July the EPA issued what is known as a significant new use rule (or SNUR), inviting manufacturers to petition the agency to seek approval for asbestos products. An article in Fast Company sounded the alarm, stating that the EPA “has made it easier for companies to begin using asbestos again.”

The EPA is vehemently denying that is the case, insisting that it is actually strengthening asbestos regulation. An agency scientist told CNN that “the SNUR is really a good news story for public health protection.” The argument is that the rule would allow the EPA on a case-by-case basis to impose restrictions that may not currently exist. Unfortunately, it’s true that the United States, unlike many other countries, never fully banned the use of asbestos.

It is difficult to believe that the EPA, which has engaged in a deregulatory frenzy since Trump took office, will suddenly abandon its industry friends and embrace public health considerations in responding to new asbestos proposals.

One industry player, the Russian asbestos producer Uralasbest, apparently does not think so. The company, encouraged by the EPA’s reluctance to push for a total ban on the material, is decorating its shipments with a seal of approval containing Trump’s face and the statement “Approved by Donald Trump, the 45^th President of the United States.”