Koch Brothers Exposed: Cancer Risk In Crossett Arkansas Blamed On Georgia Pacific

Brendan DeMelle DeSmog
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Brave New Foundation, which is producing a series of videos called โ€œKoch Brothers Exposedโ€ taking a close look at many aspects of the billionaire Koch Brothers’ business interests, just released a new installment probing the link between a cancer cluster in Crossett, Arkansas and the nearby operations ofย Georgia Pacific, a Kochย Industries subsidiary.

The Brave New Films project may ring a bell with DeSmogBlog readers. Earlier this year, I wrote about a previous installment in the series taking a look at how the Kochs stand to profit from the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, if it is ever built. (That video is even more interesting to watch on the heels of a must-read InsideClimate News article from earlier this week indicating that the Kochsย have offered misleading explanations to Congress and the media about how much they stand to benefit from the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.)ย 

Now the Brave New series is taking a hard look at another Koch disaster already in progress in an Arkansas community ravaged by cancer. The residents living (and dying) on Penn Road in Crossett suspect that air and water pollution from the town’s only manufacturer – Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific – is making them ill. Georgia Pacific’s facility – a plywood, paper mill and formaldehyde resin plant – has dumped millions of gallons of wastewater into open ditches nearby, in violation of the Clean Water Act.

Regular readers of this blog might also hear bells ringing since it was my predecessor, former DeSmogBlog managing editor Kevin Grandia, who first broke the story about Koch Industries’ intense efforts to attack the science linking formaldehyde and cancer.ย 

Grandia wrote on DeSmogBlog in Septemberย 2010:

For his commendable charitable work, David Koch was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board,a committee of theย USย National Cancer Institute, in 2004 by President George W. Bushย and remains a memberย todayย [pdf].

Our research has uncovered very strong ties betweenย Georgia-Pacific, a company co-owned by David Koch through Koch Industries, and a political lobby group called theย Formaldehyde Councilย that is involved in efforts to downplay the dangers posed by formaldehyde to humanย health.ย 

As it turned out, David Koch left the NCABย post behind, either in the same month that Grandia exposed the Koch formaldehyde science attack, or six months earlier as Koch Industries claims on KochFacts.com. Either way, his company’s involvement in attacking the formaldehyde cancer link is indisputable, as Jane Mayer demonstrated in her Koch expose inย The New Yorker.ย 

Watch the new video โ€œExposed: Koch Industries and Cancer Riskโ€ย below:

Robert Greenwald, the president of the Brave New Foundation, explains in anย AlterNet article about the new Crossett cancer videoย that:ย 

ย โ€œWhat we’ve done with each of the Koch pieces is to use specific stories to depict people’s lives and show that ideology has consequences. What theย Kochsย are doing is not harmless, it is not victimless, and there are people who are paying a terrible price for the brothers’ politics and theirย profiteering.โ€

Brendan DeMelle DeSmog
Brendan is Executive Director of DeSmog. He is also a freelance writer and researcher specializing in media, politics, climate change and energy. His work has appeared in Vanity Fair, The Huffington Post, Grist, The Washington Times and other outlets.

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