Research Cited

According to Powelson’s 2014 disclosure, GEE Strategies, an energy and utilities consulting firm, funded his attendance at its Energy Leadership Forum in Falls Church, Virginia. Emails recently uncovered by UtilitySecrets, a joint watchdog project by the Energy & Policy Institute and Center for Media & Democracy, indicate that GEE Strategies has close ties to the Edison Electric Institute, which funded the firm’s Energy Leadership Forum meeting last year.

This “dump” adds to the compendium of documents not only from the March unsealing, but also, in the vast collection that has come to be called “The Poison Papers.” A project of The Bioscience Resource Project (BRP) and the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD), The Poison Papers make publicly available more than 20,000 documents obtained through legal discovery in lawsuits against Dow, Monsanto, the EPA, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Air Force, and pulp and paper companies, among others. These papers were amassed largely by author and activist Carol Van Strum, who kept them in her rural Oregon barn for decades. BRP and CMD describe their project: “The Poison Papers represent a vast trove of rediscovered chemical industry and regulatory agency documents and correspondence stretching back to the 1920s. Taken as a whole, the papers show that both industry and regulators understood the extraordinary toxicity of many chemical products and worked together to conceal this information from the public and the press.” In addition, the Poison Papers are just one part of the larger DocumentCloud, which contains over a million documents.

More than 20,000 internal memos, minuted meetings, letters and other documents have been published in the new archive, many for the first time.

Most were obtained from legal discovery and access to documents requests digitised by the Poison Papers Project, which was launched by the Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy. Chiron Return contributed some documents to the library.

The EPA is known to hold strong ties to oil, gas, and chemical corporations, enforcing extremely lenient regulations that allow these companies to profit at the expense of our health and the environment. The Bioscience Resource Project and The Center for Media and Democracy recently teamed up to expose some of this corruption by publishing the Poison Papers, which contains thousands upon thousands of EPA, government, and chemical company documents.

A project of the Center for Media and Democracy and the Bioscience Resource Project, the files now run to some 200,000 pages, having just doubled in size with the contributions of a 76-year-old activist whose long struggle with pesticide manufacturers and regulators is Lerner’s subject.

A collection of long archived documents dating back to the 1920s were released last week showcasing the efforts of the chemical industry and the federal government to conceal from the public the real dangers associated with the use and manufacture of chemical products. The Bioscience Resource Project and the Center for Media and Democracy released more than 200,000 pages of these documents now accessible on the “Poison Papers” website.