By John Leschak
GALLOWAY, N.J.-Independent presidential candidate and longtime consumer activist Ralph Nader spoke to a gathering of more than 400 students and community members as part of the Seventh Annual Stockton Environmental Forum at the Richard Stockton College in Galloway, N.J.
Nader was the keynote speaker at the forum which consisted of a day of workshops and panel discussions. He began his speech by praising Stockton’s efforts to protect the environment.
“Stockton is one of the most environmentally friendly campuses in the entire U.S.,” he said. “They have the largest geo-thermal energy generator of any college in America, and all of their recent construction has been LEED [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] certified.”
Nader was deeply involved in the environmental movement for decades and helped to pass the Clean Air Act and the Clean Drinking Water Act, and he participated in the first ever Earth Day back in 1970. “Back then, our focus was primitive,” Nader said. “Our platform did not go very far beyond opposition to pollution. Today, Earth Day is much more advanced, with detailed plans and goals.”
Despite the progress of the environmental movement, Nader said that our ecosystem is in greater danger than ever before because “corporations have counter-attacked.”
After the passage of environmental laws like the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act, lawsuits became a means of protecting the environment. According to Nader, there has been a serious decline in civil litigation and class-action suits against pollution as a result of recent legal reforms, like the Class-Action Fairness Act of 2005. Nader said the primary lobbyists for these reform bills were big corporations like ExxonMobil.
ExxonMobil drew a significant amount of fire from Nader, who described the company as “worse than King Kong and Godzilla combined.”
Currently, the corporation’s lawyers are attempting to throw out the $5 billion punitive damage award from the Exxon-Valdez case, in which an Exxon supertanker crashed and spilled oil in Alaskan waters. Exxon’s lawyers are claiming that $5 billion is too much even though ExxonMobil made more than $200 billion in profits last year. “Anyone who has seen pictures of the Valdez oil spill knows that $5 billion is not too much,” Nader said.
Nader, a former lawyer, criticized the allocation of legal services in America. “The EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] only has 73 lawyers. That is not even one-tenth of the size of a large Wall Street firm with clients like Bear Stearns and ExxonMobil,” he said.
Nader finished his speech by calling for a “green revolution” and ending our dependence on oil, but not by switching to nuclear power or corn-based ethanol. “Ethanol is not the solution to global warming,” he said. Instead, he proposed large-scale investment in solar and wind technology.
One of the panels at the forum explored why the use of ethanol is ineffective. According to Tait Chirenje, a professor of environmental science at Stockton, using corn-based ethanol would be as bad as gasoline because in order to produce ethanol, one would need to more than quadruple the current amount of corn grown, which in turn would lead to the depletion of vital aquifers, or underground layers of water, to irrigate the corn.
Water tables are decreasing everywhere, according to Chirenje. He discussed the “desertification” of Zimbabwe, his native country, and other African countries which results from the overuse of soil. Chirenje claimed that increasing corn production to accommodate ethanol demand might lead to desertification in the U.S.
Chirenje thought Nader’s proposal for a “green revolution” was unrealistic. “We cannot make do totally without fossil fuels,” he said.
Tiffany Kaye, a professor of biology and Stockton alumna, thought Nader made a good point about the increasing barriers to environmental class-action lawsuits. However, she said that pollution could be fought by mobilized students and consumers, as well as lawyers.