Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (18 page)

One possibility was that dissolved aromatic compounds from oil might have harmful effects on fish embryos or fish development at much lower levels of concentration than previously believed. If so, the toxic compounds might create defects in young fish that could be difficult to detect through clinical observation because the fish wouldn’t necessarily all die of the same cause; their weakened condition might play out in an ocean environment, over the fish’s lifetime, in varied and unpredictable ways. As evidence emerged to support this hypothesis, one of the scientists working with Short, Ron Heintz, had an inspiration: Auke Bay could set up its own pink salmon hatchery, expose embryos and young fish to varying levels of oil, send the fish out to sea, and count their mortality rates two years later, when they reliably returned to their birthplace. “Here’s an idea!” Short exclaimed when he heard the proposal. “We should do that!” It was an expensive and risky experiment by government standards—more than a half million dollars. But they won approval in 1996.

Over the next several springs, Auke Bay’s scientists and their collaborators tagged tens of thousands of pink salmon and then counted and examined the fish as they returned. This work produced a significant scientific discovery: Dissolved or exposed oil
did
have a sublethal toxic effect at levels of concentration many hundreds of times lower than previous research had suggested was dangerous. (The scientists could not initially explain why oil caused elevated mortality rates, only that it did. Later research by other scientists showed that oil exposure could damage a fish’s heart as it developed, which in turn damaged the circulation system and sometimes produced early death. The Auke Bay scientists later found the same effect when they studied herring and cod embryos; other scientists would reproduce the results with zebra fish and mummichogs.) The damage caused by oil exposure did not seem to be passed down from one generation of fish to the next, however; at least, Jeffrey Short’s team could not demonstrate such an intergenerational effect. Salmon populations steadily recovered in Prince William Sound after the initial disruptions. The single-generation effects of oil toxicity meant ExxonMobil was probably off the hook for further financial damages on that score.
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Still, as a result of the Auke Bay’s post-
Valdez
work, the underlying science about the dangers of oil spills to marine environments had been revised, at least in the opinion of the N.O.A.A. team and other scientists who reviewed and duplicated their findings. This might influence the environmental liabilities of ExxonMobil and other oil corporations when other spills occurred. “It was a really unexpected and pretty profound change” in how scientists “viewed oil toxicity,” Short said.

As the team’s work was published, ExxonMobil began to fund competing studies using other methodologies and sample sizes; all of the studies the corporation supported challenged the premise that oil was dangerous in the way that the N.O.A.A. team suggested. ExxonMobil employed many chemists in its refinery and research divisions. Its scientists did not dispute the notion that certain aromatic compounds such as benzene, toluene, and xylene could be dangerous to living beings. However, ExxonMobil did not accept the finding by the N.O.A.A. scientists that dissolved oil present in a natural breeding ground might harm embryo development, even after the Auke Bay’s original salmon study was replicated and extended to other species.

The corporation’s resistance and argumentation did not particularly bother Short, once the confirming studies from other noncorporate scientists came in. “I think in the wider scientific community we’ve won that battle, because other people have independently replicated it and figured out the biochemical mechanisms underlying it, and in fact there’s some really elegant work done by people who are not us. So they [ExxonMobil] can have that position if they like, but most people think it’s flawed.”
⁷

In 1999, to memorialize the tenth anniversary of the
Exxon Valdez
spill, reporters and camera crews descended on Prince William Sound. ExxonMobil spokespeople emphasized that the sound’s beaches were free of oil—as was true, at least on the surface—and that wildlife in the region had recovered, as was also true, generally speaking. And yet some area residents claimed that they had accidentally set a few oiled Prince William Sound beaches on fire while camping. Dave Janka had discovered beaches around Knight Island where he could easily dig beneath the rocks and find pockets of fresh oil. Where had the oil come from? Was it left over from the
Valdez
? During the tenth anniversary season, Janka ferried media crews to those beaches and helped the reporters dig out handfuls of oil to show their audiences. “There was a considerable range of opinion” about whether Prince William Sound remained burdened by submerged
Valdez
oil, Jeffrey Short recalled. So, around the time of the anniversary, he proposed a study “to actually measure how much oil was on the beach, which had never been done before and was widely viewed as impossible.” Given the findings about oil’s sublethal effects, if the oil was still around the Sound, hidden, it might pose persistent dangers.
⁸

Two scientists at the United States Geological Survey, Jim Bodkin and Brenda Bellachey, were in the meantime intrigued by a second biological mystery in local wildlife populations. Scientists funded by a trust established with proceeds from the Exxon legal settlement had discovered elevated levels of an enzyme known as P450 in sea otters and harlequin ducks. Biologists sometimes track the enzyme because it increases in an animal’s liver if the creature is exposed to oil or other pollutants. Where was the pollution coming from? All of the scientists studying Prince William Sound could see that residual oil on the surface of the beaches was declining almost to the vanishing point, and that tides and rain were chipping away at what little remained on the surfaces of rocks. Did significant quantities of oil that nobody could see persist around the sound and were they somehow getting into the sea otters’ food chain or ecosystem?
⁹

If there was persistent oil, it had to lie below the surface. Jeep Rice, a biologist at Auke Bay who specialized in toxicology, Mandy Lindeberg, and Jeffrey Short recruited a statistician to help them design a random sampling on the sound’s beaches. On each beach segment, they would stretch out surveyor’s tape and implant stakes to initially divide beaches into squares, at randomly selected locations, and then dig. Short feared that the whole project could prove to be an embarrassment; they would dig seven thousand holes, spend hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars, and find perhaps four or five pockets of persistent
Valdez
oil. As it turned out, Mandy Lindeberg’s pit-digging teams almost immediately struck fresh oil—oil that had not been weatherized into relatively harmless tar balls, but which seemed to be preserved beneath the rocks, as fresh—and toxic—as the day it spilled from the
Exxon Valdez
. Her initial findings meant that fresh oil had survived in many more places inhabited by the sound’s wildlife than had previously been contemplated, which might have implications for ExxonMobil’s liability under the reopener clause. Accounts of her initial findings reached the Alaskan press in May 2001. “Within about a week,” recalled her colleague Jeep Rice, “she’s being followed” by the ExxonMobil cruise ship.

Letters arrived at Auke Bay from O’Melveny & Myers, a large corporate law firm based in Los Angeles. They contained Freedom of Information Act requests from ExxonMobil demanding all of the documents, plans, and preliminary research findings in the federal government’s possession concerning not only the seven-thousand-hole study Lindeberg had started, but other studies the Auke Bay scientists had undertaken about the possible toxic effects of oil on the environment.
¹⁰

J
effrey Short published a newspaper essay that summer in which he described the findings of N.O.A.A.’s work examining the legacy of the
Exxon Valdez
spill: “Much more oil was found than anticipated—around 200 times more than claimed by Exxon’s contractor.” Sea otters and some bird species that forage on beaches where oil remained beneath the surface “have biochemical markers that indicate they are still exposed to oil. It appears that oil may still be a factor impeding their recovery, possibly through ingestion of oiled prey.”
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The Auke Bay scientists knew that their findings would be provocative, but the response they drew this time went beyond any line of argument they had heard before. David S. Page, a professor at Bowdoin College in Maine and a scientist under contract with ExxonMobil, published a rejoinder that came close to accusing the Auke Bay scientists of faking their evidence.

It was Page, as it turned out, who had overseen the effort to shadow Lindeberg around the sound during the summer. After inspecting the beaches studied, he wrote, “We saw no evidence that Short dug 7,000 pits. . . . Had thousands been dug, we would have located many more.” The pit sites he could find “were chosen subjectively” by the N.O.A.A. team, he argued; the government scientists had employed an approach that “exaggerates the extent of remaining residues. . . . It indicates a strong bias in Short’s study and raises questions about the scientific validity of its conclusions.” Overall, Page wrote, “Prince William Sound today is as healthy as it would have been if the spill hadn’t happened.”

Page’s published accusations prompted an internal review at N.O.A.A. to determine whether Short and his colleagues had indeed committed fraud. “It’s against the law for civil servants to take the public’s money and make stuff up,” as Short put it later. Eventually, the investigators exonerated the Auke Bay team. Short hired lawyers and fired off cease-and-desist letters to Page and to the administration of Bowdoin College; he accused his adversary of defamation. Neither Page nor the college took any action in response.
¹²

David Page was an academic scientist who had been working on the biological effects of oil spills since the mid-1980s. After the
Exxon Valdez
accident, he received contracts from the oil corporation, as well as from other funders, such as the state of Maine. Over the years he had come to regard the government scientists at N.O.A.A. as rent seekers who perpetuated a narrative of persistent oil pollution in order to justify their professional funding and projects. “It’s like the Arabian Nights—if you run out of stories, you get your head cut off,” he said. “They kept doing research long after it would do any good.”
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It was with Page’s collaboration that ExxonMobil began to deliver the Freedom of Information Act (F.O.I.A.) requests to the Auke Bay Laboratories at a rate sometimes as high as four per week. Whenever Short or Rice made a public presentation of their findings, “an Exxon lawyer, biologist or chemist would be in the audience,” and the corporate-affiliated scientists would sometimes stand up to make “an out-and-out attack on our work,” Rice recalled. At one conference in San Diego, Rice had heard enough; he “got up and told them I thought it was a classless act. People attending were shocked—it’s not something you normally see.”

Pete Hagen, a biologist who arrived at Auke Bay as the program manager for Exxon Studies, a title that referred to N.O.A.A.’s research into the
Valdez’
s impact, found that his views about the scientists working for ExxonMobil hardened as time went on and as F.O.I.A. requests accumulated on his desk. “They may want to wear down government scientists,” he reflected. “Beyond harassment, we don’t know what Exxon’s motivation is.” His thinking about the oil corporation and its allies in the scientific community “has become more extreme,” he admitted. He felt that their willingness to bend data to serve the corporation’s legal and business aims was “not too dissimilar to what the tobacco industry went through, or the lead industry. . . . Sometimes you win by persistence.” For his part, Jeep Rice regarded ExxonMobil’s tactics as “legal, but just immoral.” Jeffrey Short resented ExxonMobil’s drive to “access data before we’d even published it, which put us in the position of giving data before we interpreted it—giving them, in theory, the chance to write up papers before we did.”

For David Page, too, the arguments about science in Prince William Sound grew personal. He found the N.O.A.A. scientists’ responses to his criticisms of their research to be “shrill . . . I wasn’t accusing them of fraud. I was just saying my observations were at variance with what they were claiming.” In fact, his published essay did come close to implying that Short’s team had faked its hole digging, but after the initial, accusatory exchanges, Page did not return to that charge. He supported Exxon’s Freedom of Information Act demands because Jeffrey Short “rarely presents data” and “the only way” you can get detailed information underlying his studies is to make a formal legal request. “F.O.I.A. is not harassment; F.O.I.A. is to find out important information that government agencies aren’t willing to let become public,” Page said. As to Short’s concern that ExxonMobil was seeking raw data in order to advance arguments in public before the government scientists could, he said, “The record shows that our requests were made well after published reports were made in various venues, often several years or more after the studies were done.”
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Science is innately uncertain. Its progress has been marked again and again by the defiance of settled wisdom by independent-minded mavericks, from Galileo Galilei to Charles Darwin. It can be difficult even for excellent scientists to distinguish between a revolutionary new insight and plain foolishness. Vested interests—governments, clergy, or private corporations—have long sought to control and manage the policy implications of scientific findings. Only in an environment of free debate can the best scientific facts and interpretations eventually win out. Even where new facts affecting the public welfare become well established, as had occurred with the research into global warming by 2001, it does not follow from scientific logic which public policy response is the best one; in the case of climate change, the economic costs of full and rapid remediation would be high. Governance and economics are not hard sciences, despite the contrary aspirations of some of their theorists and practitioners.