On behalf of these communities, over 100 organizations representing workers, disproportionately impacted communities, healthcare professionals, and environmentalists have repeated their request to President Obama that he use his authority under the Clean Air Act to prevent chemical disasters. And it is not just these organizations and the communities they represent, the New York Times has asked for the EPA to take action, and so has the former Administrator of the EPA under President Bush, Governor Christine Todd Whitman, whose call followed the formal request of the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council.

Congressional Republicans have stymied efforts to correct what the New York Times calls a “clear and present danger,” but the Obama Administration has advocated strongly for a comprehensive policy that would focus on preventing a chemical disaster by using safer technologies, instead of just focusing on fenceline security. President Obama has been clear that he will move his agenda forward with or without Congress and when it comes to the dangers from chemical plants, he has the tools to do just that.

According to chemical facility reports to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), more than 480 chemical facilities each put 100,000 or more people at risk of a poison gas disaster. President Obama knows about this risk and in his 2008 campaign plan “Change We Can Believe In” he pledged to “Secure our chemical plants by setting a clear set of federal regulations that all plants must follow, including improving barriers, containment, mitigation and safety training, and wherever possible, using safer technology, such as less toxic chemicals.”

Now is the time for the president and the EPA to act on this campaign pledge. This Congress has become captive of the chemical companies that want their profits to trump the safety and security of the public and has failed to pass any law that would focus on disaster prevention. President Obama needs to now take the reigns and fully implement the Clean Air Act protections that will make our communities safer.

You can do your part by signing our petition and sharing our interactive map with your friends and family.

Need a refresher on ALEC? It’s the group that brings state legislators to the table with representatives from major corporations in the sectors of energy, healthcare, tobacco, private prisons, and other groups to manipulate state politics to maximize their profits and limit their liabilities. These companies help craft template bills for state legislators to bring home and introduce in their respective statehouses.

Documents obtained and published by Common Cause now give us a roster of specific attendees at ALEC’s environmental meetings, a consortium of state legislators and a who’s who of the most offensive polluting political heavyweights including: Koch Industries, ExxonMobil, Duke Energy and Peabody.  Participating legislators know well they’re walking into a dirty party, sometimes using state taxpayer money to foot the bill.

The corporations that fund ALEC are well known for their political spending on both sides of the aisle. ALEC funders include Koch Industries, known for its coordinated political spending against President Obama, and Duke Energy, which is laying down a ten million dollar line of credit to host the Democratic National Convention in their hometown of Charlotte, NC. But these polluting companies are co-conspirators under the banner of ALEC, where partisan politics are set aside to focus on the mission of destroying environmental protections, clean energy competition and liability for crimes against both people and the ecosystems sustaining us.

So what exactly are ALEC and these oil, coal, chemical and public relations companies focusing on tomorrow?

According to their newest meeting memorandum, ALEC’s Energy, Environment and Agriculture task force is going to discuss some pending model laws that ALEC will likely be approved for state distribution:

• The “Electricity Freedom Act” (really? Electricity Freedom?!) is a new attack on states with plans requiring companies to get a certain percentage of their electricity from renewable sources. This new bill is similar to other legislation ALEC has already peddled in several states and compliments an “email and telephone campaign” against state renewable energy standards, according to the Guardian.

• The “Coal Intrastate and Use Act” serves to prevent EPA from overruling state permits for coal mining and producing dirty coal products (like liquid coal for fuel) if all the coal operations are conducted within the borders of a single state.

• The “Resolution on U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement Accountability” mandates a report be filed on cities and states that have fallen short of their goals to reduce greenhouse gases through the Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, which has over 1,000 signatories. ALEC’s new resolution then demands that any program that hasn’t met its goal be canceled out right, voiding the Climate Protection Agreement altogether. Keeping in mind that ALEC’s members like Koch and Exxon have fought greenhouse gas programs at every turn for years, it is obvious that this ALEC bill is meant for one thing, attacking programs that address carbon emissions.

• A resolution demanding the passage of the notorious federal REINS Act, which would give Congress the power to block the enforcement of just about any federal protection–clean air and water laws, safeguards for mine workers, prohibiting tobacco sales to kids, protection from discrimination, you name it. It’s the ultimate gift from Congress to their corporate fundraisers who would like to avoid responsibility for…everything.

• The exhaustively-titled “Resolution Supporting a Reasonable Compliance Timeline and Economy-wide impact study of EPA’s Mercury and Air Toxics Rule” has a simple purpose: delay when coal-burning utilities have to reduce mercury pollution and other severely hazardous emissions. For major mercury polluters like Energy Future Holdings, American Electric Power, and Duke Energy, this is likely to be a popular item tomorrow.

Documents obtained and published by Common Cause also show us what ALEC’s focal points have been for other meetings in the last two years. Here are a few examples:

• A resolution urging Congress and the State Department to push through TransCanada’s Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. ALEC recycles a lofty jobs lie in their reasoning for this resolution, ignoring State Department KXL job estimates  under 2,000 and a Cornell study warning that “There is evidence to suggest that the effects of KXL construction could very well lead to more jobs being lost than are created.” How many jobs does ALEC assume? 120,000 — see Greenpeace’s letter to the SEC to understand how they were calculated by politics rather than reality. Go figure–the American Petroleum Institute and its largest members were in the room when this resolution was forged.

• A deceptive ALEC bill pushed by ExxonMobil that “discloses” chemicals used by the oil industry in fracking operations, but actually inserts loopholes to avoid disclosure of certain fracking chemicals. This bate-and-switch comes at a time when doctors are concerned about signing confidentiality agreements if they ask for disclosure of fracking chemicals when treating people who are exposed to chemicals from gas drilling.

• A resolution that would prevent EPA from recognizing coal ash as a hazardous substance (it contains neurotoxins, carcinogens and radioactive elements). This may well have served as the model for the coal ash amendment that is currently being tacked on to the federal transportation bill by Rep. David McKinley (R-WV). Coal ash was a repeated topic of discussion at ALEC’s energy task force meetings over the last two years, according to their meeting documents.

Who exactly attends these events? Beyond ALEC staff and dozens of corporate representatives, industry front groups are also represented. Tomorrow will feature John Felmy of the American Petroleum Institute in a presentation on gas prices (spoiler alert: this crowd will probably blame the President). Next up: presentations from representatives of the Edison Electric Institute (utility trade group) and the Nuclear Energy Institute (nuclear industry lobby).

Perhaps most intriguing will be a chat about “The Dirty Truth Behind Reusable Bags” led by Charles Gerba, who will warn attendees that reusable bags will give them “projectile vomiting and diarrhea.” Gerba may not mention this dramatic and messy sickness can be avoided by simply washing one’s reusable bags, since Mark Daniels of Hilex Poly (a plastic bag company) regularly attends these meetings, and Gerba serves as an advisor to Hilex Poly.

ALEC always gets some of industry’s most interesting mouthpieces to set the rhetorical tone for those attending ALEC’s anti-environmental jamborees. Looking back to last August at ALEC’s Energy, Environment, and Agriculture task force meeting in New Orleans, presenters included:

• Robert Bradley of the Institute for Energy Research, which made press recently when its sister group the American Energy Alliance spend $3.6 million on ads blaming the President for high gas prices. IER has a former Koch lobbyist on staff and has received $175,000 from Koch foundations in recent years as part of the climate denial network.

• Gerry Angevene of the Fraser Institute, another longtime player in the Koch- and Exxon-funded climate denial machine

• James Taylor of the Heartland Institute, which has helped champion ALEC efforts to confuse K-12 students about climate science. Heartland is currently in the middle of a crisis as corporate funders are distancing themselves from its comparison of terrorists and serial killers to those who recognize the reality of global warming. Seriously, they put the Unabomber on a billboard saying, “Do you still believe in global warming? I do. www.heartland.org”

• Craig Idso, whose nutjob Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change has been paid by the coal industry and the Heartland Institute to tell people that global warming is good for the planet. Craig Idso explained this nonsense to state legislators in August. As is the pattern here, see the Center’s history of Koch- and Exxon-funding, as well as Idso’s former employment at Peabody and work for the Western Fuels Association.

• Stephen Miller of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, which spends big on national advertisements promoting the idea that perhaps coal isn’t inherently dirty, dangerous and deadly (it is). Miller, who is resigning from ACCCE this year after serving as a dilligent coal apologist for the last decade, came under Congressional fire in 2009 when it was revealed that ACCCE contractors forged letters on behalf of groups “representing senior citizens, minorities and veterans,” including the NAACP.

Likely due to the publicity of ALEC Exposed and the recent mass migration of 16 companies and 34 state politicians away from ALEC (in response to controversial bills on voter suppression and Stand Your Ground laws that protected Trayvon Martin’s killer), ALEC no longer includes the specific members of its task forces in the documents it mails to participants beforehand. ALEC’s Energy task force as of June, 2011 shows the nefarious people who run this dirty operation, by name. People representing the following groups have been consistently present at recent ALEC meetings over the last couple years:

Oil and gas industry:

• Koch Industries
• ExxonMobil
• Shell Oil
• BP
• Chevron
• American Petroleum Institute
• Occidental Petroleum
• Marathon Oil
• Continental Resources
• American Gas Association (trade association)

Coal mining

• Peabody Energy
• Cloud Peak Energy

Coal-burning utilities:

• Duke Energy & Progress Energy (which are merging into the nation’s largest utility company)
• Energy Future Holdings
• American Electric Power
• PacifiCorp (a MidAmerican subsidiary, owned by Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway)
• Alliant Energy
• Pinnacle West
• MDU Resources
• NiSource
• NV Energy
• Edison Electric Institute (trade association, membership includes all utilities above)
• American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (membership includes AEP, Peabody, and Energy Future Holdings subsidiary Luminant)
• Salt River Project
• National Rural Electric Cooperative Association (an aggressive lobbying group for electrical utility cooperatives and top political donor in the energy sector)

Nuclear Industry:

• EnergySolutions
• Nuclear Energy Institute (trade association)
• Duke, Progress, AEP, and Pinnacle West all have notable nuclear generation capacity

Other major polluters:

• Dow Agrosciences
• International Paper
• American Chemistry Council (top trade association for chemical companies)
• Bayer Healthcare (Bayer is the country’s top air polluter according the Political Economy Research Institute at U-Mass, Amherst)
• Honeywell (#31 on PERI’s toxic air polluters list)
• General Motors (GM has a history of climate denial, although GM Foundation just dumped the Heartland Institute)
• LyondellBasell Industries (third largest chemical company in the world)

Front groups, all involved in climate science denial (Koch funding since 2005):

• Americans for Prosperity ($5,760,781)
• Atlas Economic Research Foundation ($152,600)
• Commonwealth Foundation ($84,532)
• Goldwater Institute ($70,427)
• John Locke Foundation ($47,472)
• Heartland Institute ($25,000)

Public Relations Firms

Dezenhall Resources (What Businessweek calls the “Pit Bull of Public Relations,” Dezenhall Resources is currently included in a Greenpeace lawsuit due to its role in hiring spies on behalf of chemical companies to track Greenpeace’s internal campaign plans)

They write:

“More than a decade after 9/11, thousands of facilities that produce, store or use highly toxic chemicals remain vulnerable to a terrorist attack or accident that could kill or injure hundreds of thousands of people living downwind of an explosion. A Congressional Research Service report identifies 483 facilities in 43 states where a chemical disaster would put 100,000 or more people at risk.”

Indeed, an interactive map compiled a map showing how millions of people all around country are at risk of a poison gas disaster because of these chemical facilities. Writing on Huffington Post last week Greenpeace Executive Director Phil Radford wrote:

“Most major U.S. cities are threatened, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia and many more. In fact, Washington, D.C. is one of the only cities no longer at risk, as its dangerous facility quickly converted to a safer technology just a few weeks after 9/11. Every community should be free from the threat of a chemical disaster, not just our capital.”

The New York Times editorial is one more voice among a chorus calling on President Obama and Lisa Jackson to protect Americans from these dangerous chemical plants. Last month, former EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman urged her successor to take action “before a tragedy of historic proportions occurs.”

The National Environmental Justice Advisory Council has also appealed to Jackson, because it is poorer and disadvantaged communities that are often closest and most at risk from the chemical plants, oil refineries, and water treatment plants that use and store these dangerous chemicals.

Greenpeace is part of a coalition of more than 100 labor, environmental, health, and environmental justice organizations that are urging President Obama and Lisa Jackson to follow through on the President’s 2008 pledge to “Secure our chemical plants by setting a clear set of federal regulations that all plants must follow, including improving barriers, containment, mitigation and safety training, and wherever possible, using safer technology, such as less toxic chemicals.”

Last week the Center for Public Integrity reported that on April 3, Christine Todd Whitman, former Governor of New Jersey and Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under President George W. Bush sent a letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson urging her to use Clean Air Act to prevent chemical disasters.

Yes, you heard that right, in a world where Newt Gingrich is calling for the abolition of the EPA, there is common sense bi-partisan support for the EPA using its authority to make us safer. Governor Whitman can speak with authority about this issue because she, as EPA chief under President George W. Bush, drafted such a program in 2002, driven by the country’s national security concerns following the 9/11 attacks.

The EPA’s 2002 proposal, complete with a roll out plan, hinged on using the “Bhopal Amendment” of the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments. Commonly called the “General Duty Clause” (GDC) this section of the Clean Air Act obligates chemical facilities who handle hazardous chemicals to prevent chemical disasters.

Greenpeace joined over 100 organizations last year in a letter to President Obama calling on him to fully implement the Bhopal Amendment and prioritize disaster prevention through the use of safer technology.

One in three people in the United States live within the potential disaster zone of one of the 480+ highest risk chemical facilities. Each of these facilities puts 100,000 people or more at risk. Most major US cities are threatened, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Miami, Detroit, Philadelphia and many more. In fact, Washington DC is one of the only cities no longer at risk, as its dangerous facility quickly converted to a safer technology just a few weeks after the September 11, 2001 attacks. Every community should be free from the threat of a chemical disaster, not just our capitol.

Just weeks before Governor Whitman made her plea to Administrator Jackson, the National Environmental Justice Advisory Council (NEJAC) made the same recommendation in a letter to Jackson. The NEJAC is a federal advisory committee to the EPA that recommends actions for the EPA to take to protect the interests of the most vulnerable communities in the US, and is made up of representatives from the EPA, environmental justice communities, and industry.

In President Obama’s State of the Union address this year he made it clear that if “election-year politics” is going to keep Congress from making progress, that his administration would take action. Congress has had over ten years to secure the nation’s chemical facilities and it has failed to close this massive security gap and threat to communities. By fully implementing the Clean Air Act’s general duty clause President Obama can make real progress in creating a safer nation without having to deal with the obstructionist Congress. President Obama has been incredibly consistent in his desire to see dangerous chemical plants switch to safer technology, from cosponsoring bills in the Senate to his campaign platform where he set as a goal: “Secure our chemical plants by setting a clear set of federal regulations that all plants must follow, including…where possible, using safer technology, such as less toxic chemicals.”

President Obama has sent clear signals that he will pursue initiatives that he can move forward within existing laws and without the need to wrestle with Congress. Now is the time for the president to take action to protect communities from the threat of chemical disasters.

Click here to sign our petition to president Obama.