As BP's (British Petroleum) well continues to spew crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico, other oil companies tell us that they can drill in the Arctic safely without despoiling the environment there. After twenty years the mess created by the EXXON Valdez spill, due to a drunken ship captain, is still not cleaned up. The industry's solution to their wanton ways is to set up a fund for such disasters, thus absolving them of their carelessness and ineptitude. Do you believe them? I certainly don't. They don't even know how to stop this current disaster and neither does anyone else.

It really isn't a spill. It's like leaving the garden hose on full blast for three to four months. No one even knows how to stop the flow of oil into the Gulf of Mexico from the accident which sank the drilling platform close to the most sensitive wetlands on the Gulf Coast. Environmental damage will be worse than the Exxon Valdez, which, by the way, Exxon has never really cleaned up.

If you believe the coal industries, coal can be cleaned up and the waste spewing out of the smoke stack rendered harmless. I have a bridge to nowhere I'd like to sell you if you buy that one. If you watched 60 Minutes on Sunday, October 4th you will never buy their propaganda again. In Running on Empty, in Chapter 15, I talked about the exact same environmental disaster that happened in Kingston, Tennessee. On December 22, 2008, a billion gallons of a soup made up of fly ash was dumped on the countryside and into a nearby river leaving a mess 100 times worse than the Exxon Valdez disaster. Some 45 homes were either destroyed or made uninhabitable. Even those homes along the river that were not actually touched by the sludge were made unfit to live in...

On December 22, 2008, a holding pond for coal ash at the Kingston, Tennessee, coal fired power plant, the nations largest, breached the levee allowing 5.4 million cubic feet of toxic ash to flow into a nearby river, onto two dozen homes and covering 300 acres. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) that operates the facility has already spent $143 million on cleaning up the spill and current estimates could top $933 million, and possibly going as high as $1.2 billion. There are hundreds of similar plants  around the nation with holding ponds for toxic sludge that are potential time bombs. Who do you think will be paying the tab for this clean-up?...