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A Commoner’s Response to Colorado Governor Jared Polis’s recent State of the State address

“Optimism…is the obstinacy of maintaining that everything is best when it is worst.” (Voltaire, Candide)

You, Governor Polis, are fond of saying you’ve worked ceaselessly “to create jobs and save the people of this state money.”

The question is, does this statement hold any water when weighed against the climate crisis that besets the world, as the Los Angeles fires once again remind us? In terms of intensity and speed, the LA fire, already called the most expensive in this nation’s history, is eerily reminiscent of the Marshall fire just north of Denver in Boulder County, only a couple of years back. Though it certainly doesn’t diminish personal loss and devastation in the individual case, the LA fire is vastly larger in terms of duration and scope, with 28 people already reported dead, well over 130,000 people told to evacuate, and over 15,000 structures damaged or destroyed, exposing once again society’s immediate and growing long-term vulnerability to a changing and dangerously unpredictable climate.

Ever the vainglorious braggart Il Capitano of Commedia dell’Arte, President elect Donald Trump has declared that had he been California’s governor the LA fire would not have happened. He made a similar pronouncement during the late world pandemic, when he proclaimed, Il Duce-like, with jutted jaw, that the coronavirus would never dare cross our borders. He became very ill with the virus, but unlike the many who died, he received the country’s best medical attention to aid in his recovery. He is also a climate denier, proclaiming it a hoax.

But, enough of stock characters in early Italian comedy and their modern day counterparts in American politics. The central question we must address and resolve, Governor, is your meme- like claim that you are saving us jobs and money. The following are but a few of the things we must consider when judging whether your easy optimism is sane and just or just bunkum.

Since 2019, when you were sworn in as Governor, your administration has approved over 7700 new oil well proposals. Fewer than a hand full have ever been denied, and those denials were generally made by your appointed state regulators on technical or jurisdictional grounds, not because they were judged to pose a threat to public health and wellbeing or the natural environment.

Remember, too, it was you Governor who said in signing the 2019 Oil and Gas Reform Act into law, as one of your first official acts, that it represented a “sea change” in the way oil and gas activities would henceforth be evaluated and regulated in this state. (This law, which has boundless public support, is better known to many as SB 181.) This reform act promised, without equivocation or exception, to change the state’s long-standing policy of encouraging oil and gas development to a policy of only permitting new or continuing oil drilling and production provided it could be demonstrated that such development did not pose a substantial threat to public wellbeing or the environment, which of course, as any 3rd grader knows, includes the earth’s climate—one of the few things, like birth and death, we still all share commonly.

According to state records, your administration, working ceaselessly I would argue, has overseen and approved production of 2.9 billion barrels of oil or oil equivalent since 2019. And according to you, this massive production of fossil fuels has been done with no substantial injury to the people or the environment. This has been accomplished, say you, because of your belief in a market- based economy, which, in its turn, has helped create a climate of goodwill and cooperation between your administration and the oil industry. As a result, we are told, you and the oil industry have been able to develop and adopt the strongest oil and gas regulations in the nation, if not todo el mundo.

Well, maybe not Governor, for if we convert this fossil fuel production to the amount of atmospheric loading of CO2 resulting from its use in the marketplace or on the battlefield, we come up with nearly one billion tons of atmospheric loading.

But that’s not all. If we add in the amount of methane leaked from oil and gas operations in this state since 2019, we arrive at a rough doubling of CO2 for a grand total of over two billion tons of atmospheric loading, a simply staggering number.

While it’s true the volume of methane leaked is but a fraction of overall fossil fuel production, methane’s 86 times greater atmospheric heat-storing capacity makes it oil production’s climate destroying equal over the short term of 10 to 20 years. This important distinction is why scientists say that while both CO2 and methane emissions must be controlled and reduced, it is methane reduction which has the greatest short-term impact on climate and should therefore be our first focus if we are to save ourselves and the planet. It perhaps goes without saying, Governor, that the best way to reduce methane is to not produce more of it.

The methane leak rate used here is derived from actual, though intermittent, satellite measurements. They indicate the leak rate is 1.7 percent of production Your office says the leak rate is only 0.6 percent. This may be, once again, because your administration has developed the best regulations in the world, but it may also be because you rely heavily on the oil industry to tell you how much methane it is leaking into the atmosphere. To this commoner, reliance on industry reporting to measure public and environmental outcomes is a little like having Bernie Madoff do your personal financial planning. Could you really trust him?

Governor, as you undoubtedly know, this reliability issue is being addressed by independent field observers like Earth Works. They do actual field measurements using sophisticated gas- identifying FLIR cameras. In 2023 they found methane leaks at 29 of the 77 well sites inspected. None of these leaks were reported by the industry in its annual leak report to the state. It is these industry reports that form the basis for the state’s Bower of Bliss 0.6 methane leak rate. To this commoner it looks like a true 100 percent error rate, and suggests flat dishonesty or duplicity in the state’s good-news reporting to the people. The fact that independent studies in other oil producing states project leak rates of between 4 and 8 percent strengthens that perception.

Governor, the real question now becomes what are the societal costs of loading CO2 into the earth’s atmosphere? A new study published in The National Bureau of Economic Research places the social cost of CO2 loading at a slobber knocking $1065 per ton.

Thus we can reasonably say, as shown in the table below, that your administration has caused or helped cause $2.6 trillion in social costs or damages through its continuing, unrestrained protection of oil and gas production in this state. These are of course societal costs borne by every person and creature in every nation of the earth; nevertheless, the final accounting is much greater still, since the calculations look only at physical damages. Not included are the human deaths or species diminishment and extinction caused either directly or indirectly by your embrace of the oil industry.

Table showing Colorado Oil and Gas Production Causes Vast Economic Damage
Year2019 2020 2021 2022 20232024 (partial year)Total 2019 – July 2024
Oil and gas produced (million barrels) 15165625225235282452896
CO2 emitted
(million tons) 2		179195182182184851007
Methane CO2 equivalent 1.7% leak rate and methane 20-year warming factor of 86(million tons) 32622862662662691251473
Social Cost of Carbon at $1065 per ton CO2
(billion $) 4		$471$512$476$477$482$223$2,641

Prepared by Wes Wilson and Barbara Mills-Bria, BE THE CHANGE -COLORADO, September 5, 2024, for Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission, Cumulative Impact Rule Making.

1. Colorado Energy Office, GHG Pollution Reduction Roadmap 2.0, February 2024, https://energyoffice.colorado.gov/climate- energy/ghg-pollution-reduction-roadmap-20
2. Rick Heede, Climate Accountability Institute, Climate Mitigation Services, Oil Emissions Factor Calculation, Snowmass, CO, June 2013 republished, https://climateaccountability.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/Oil-EmissionFactorCalc-6p.pdf
3. Environmental Defense Fund, MethaneSAT, New Data Show U.S. Oil and Gas Methane Emissions Over Four Times Higher than EPA Estimates, https://www.methanesat.org/project-updates/new-data-show-us-oil-and-gas-methane-emissions-over-four-times-higher-epa-estimates. EDF reported leak rate for Colorado’s Denver Julesburg Basin. The amount of CO2 equivalent based on the methane global warming potential of 86 times CO2 over a 20-year period.
4. The Macroeconomic Impact of Climate Change: Global vs. Local Temperature, Adrien Bilal and Diego R. Känzig, Working Paper, National Bureau of Economic Research, revised August 2024, https://www.nber.org/papers/w32450

For the lovers of market wisdom as the road to enlightenment and wise decision making, a recent report from the Energy Information Administration, EIA, may shake that faith. It reports that the market value of Colorado’s total oil and gas production in 2023 came to about $17.4 billion. Of course, much of the profit from this production went to CEOs and rich investors, many living in other states or nations. The social costs of this production in 2023 was about $480 billion as shown in the table above. Thus, we can say that from a market standpoint the negative climate impacts exceed the market value of the product by a ratio 28 to 1.

Governor, you’ve said in the past that you thought the market would decide the oil issues in this state. That was and is a cryptic statement for a commoner like me, but still, the market seems to have spoken. Why is no one listening while your administration leads us down the road to serfdom and worse?

The one thing that can be said with certainty is that the requirements of the Oil and Gas Reform Act, which you signed into law, have been scattered to the four winds, and as a result, you have neither protected the people nor the environment from substantial harm. Oddly, Governor, the many cities, like your hometown of Boulder, that are suing the oil industry for climate damages might rightfully add your administration to their suit, thus creating the even greater oddity that they would be suing themselves and us commoners as well.

The authors of this new study on climate are Harvard and Northwestern university economists. The Harvard economist has stated that if global average temperatures rise 2 degrees Centigrade above preindustrial averages the world’s economy would be reduced by half.

Now to be sure, Governor, the average world temperature increase has not reached 2 degrees C, but, as you know, last year it did reach a 1.5 degree C average increase for the first time ever. Scientists have long held we must stay below that ceiling if we are not to unleash destructive forces way beyond the control of puny mortals. Red alert Governor, the IPCC says that if we don’t significantly reduce emissions the 2 degrees C threshold could be reached within the decade. Scientist have also long held that if we get to 2 degrees all bets are off, Milton’s Chaos and Old Night will become each person’s personal Netflix.

So here’s where it starts to get really ugly, Governor. Many informed people, not just scientists, are saying because governments are unwilling to control fossil fuel production and its unavoidable pollution we, the people, will suffer the whirlwind. Indeed, given the moral collapse of governments in the face of industry wealth and power, even keeping to a 2 degree C increase as the IPCC warns is very, very unlikely. You may well ask, Governor, what the employment picture in Colorado would look like if we pushed to 2 degrees C, or even beyond?

According to a 2023 study by the Colorado Fiscal Institute, another study your administration seems to willfully ignore, the oil jobs in this state are relatively unimportant to the state’s economy. The industry accounts for only 1.8% of total wages in the state and an even smaller 0.7 percent of total employment.

Governor, if we reach the unthinkable, and achieve a 2 degree C increase, you can not only kiss the 20,000 oil and gas jobs goodbye, but half of the 2.7 million other jobs in the state would disappear with them. Could organized society survive Governor? Maybe, but I think many of us commoners would start to experience the dehumanizing privations visited upon the people of Gaza. In fact, we might find ourselves close to realizing our natural state, which the English political philosopher Thomas Hobbs once described as: poor solitary, nasty brutish and short. Governor, your claim of saving us jobs, like your claim you are saving us money, just doesn’t hold water.

If more evidence is needed in defense of this conclusion, studies show that rapidly spreading fires like those in Los Angeles and Marshall, right here at home, have increased by 250 percent over the past 20 years. Other analysts suggest that nationwide 1 in 5 homes are already in danger of fire or flood.

The continuing health impacts of oil and gas production in this state, while not strictly speaking, job and money issues, are also morally confounding, especially since protection of public health and wellbeing are specific requirements of the Oil and Gas Reform Act. For example, a recent citizen directed study of pollution from the Suncor oil refinery, located in the heart of Denver, indicates small particulates, PM 2.5 exceed the new federal health standard of 9 ug/l all of the time in the Suncor and surrounding neighborhoods. In fact, they exceeded those standards by 60 percent on average. Health organizations attribute 8 to 9 million deaths worldwide to PM 2.5 annually. Governor, it‘s not overreach to suggest some portion, no matter how small, of the PM 2.5 mortality rests on your doorstep. That same study found frequent peaks of other pollutants such as benzene and radioactive particles that exceed health risk criteria coming from the refinery.

EPA’s regional office, clearly understanding the health risks the refinery poses, has rejected your administration’s attempts to get new pollution permits approved for the refinery under the Clean Air Act. With the dangerous buffoon Donald Trump, Il Capitano, in office, you will find an openly willing ally in oil industry subservience.

And of course there is the Denver region’s terrible air quality, especially its ozone pollution, which has exceeded federal standards for well over a decade. Methane, as even the state admits, is chief culprit in the creation of this problem. Your claim that your new super-duper rules have reduced methane releases to 0.6 of production allows you, not accidentally I think, to pin the tail on the wrong donkey. You’ve convinced the public it’s their fault for driving too much and using gas lawn mowers. I think we don’t have to dwell long upon this blaming the victim fiction. Oil and gas production and its resulting methane releases locally are the major source of our ozone problem, and only its reduction will result in the clean air results we need, want, and were promised by a state law you signed almost 6 years ago.

And just so no one can accuse me of ignoring the many other good things you’ve done for the people with regard to oil and gas development in this state, I’d like to pivot briefly to bonding, or how the oil and gas industry insures itself against being unable to close all the wells in its ownerships once those wells run dry. One of the purposes of the Oil and Gas Reform Act was to ensure that bonding was adequate so that the financial burden of closing these played out wells did not become the public’s.

This is somewhat of an aside, but the proposed rules for bonding were under review a couple of years back. I, as part of a small grassroots group, argued that there should be full cash bonding for every well in an ownership. That a trust should be established with this money and any interest earned dedicated to the long-term maintenance of those wells after the oil industry had left the state for greener pastures–say Greenland after the ice sheet melts.

This proposal was ridiculed by Mr. William Gonzalez, a lawyer and landsman for Occidental who’d taken a leave of absence to serve on your commission at a salary of $150 thousand annually. He said the oil industry had better things to do with its money. He apparently thought we commoners didn’t. His position won of course. He resigned and went back to work for Occidental with a nice promotion.

Governor, the last time I saw Mr. Gonzalez, a couple of weeks ago, he was chairing your Air Quality Control Commission. This commission, made up of your appointees, is responsible for the development of air pollution guidelines in the state, including oil and gas pollution regulations; yet, it refuses to implement the clear requirements in the Oil and Gas Reform Act that the public and environmental protection test must be met in every oil and gas permitting case. Governor, it is state law. Thus in this commoner’s opinion, It applies equally to all state activities relating to oil and gas production or it becomes merely Swiss cheese, worthless for everything save sandwiches.

For several years I engaged in a back and forth conversation with this commission over why it was refusing to use the Oil and Gas Reform Act’s clear public and environmental protection requirements as the basis for approving or disapproving oil and gas pollution permits, the approval of which, I might add, makes up a substantial part of its operating budget. They finally tired of my questions and told me it was none of my business.

Governor, a month or so ago Carbon Tracker came out with an analysis showing
the minimum cost for closing all existing wells in the state is $6.8 billion. They also calculate that your administration has only about $218 million in bonding on hand to remediate and close an inventory of roughly 47,000 open wells, and another 13,000 wells that have been closed but remain uninspected for adequacy of closure.

Carbon Tracker goes on to say, given the sieve-like nature of the state’s bonding regulations, that the best the state can ever expect to recover from the industry is about $456 million. Governor, that leaves us commoners on the hook for $6.4 billion in cleanup costs, and that’s if there are no cost overruns and no new wells—both truly head-in-the-sand assumptions.

While the bonding shortfall is only a fraction of the trillions of dollars in social damages this state has gifted the world, it is very doubtful we can gull someone else into to paying our well cleanup costs. That $6.4 billion bill will not be carried by the wind to far away places. It will be ours to pay.

Governor, I think the foregoing rules out any serious comparison of your optimism with Candide’s. Candide, the titular hero of Voltaire’s satire, foolishly persists in his belief that this is the best of all possible worlds, even as events such as war, disease, earthquakes, and mistreatment at the hands of ruling class nobility make his life a relentless series of torments and misfortunes.

Governor, you’re not delusional like the haplessly foolish Candide. Neither are you like Il Dottore, another stock character in Commedia dell’Arte who knows everything, but understands nothing. There is something much more sinister going on here, for your manufactured optimism is a carefully constructed deception in service of the corporate world, particularly the oil industry which in this state always has held the upper hand. The clear result is your administration has created the fiction that oil and gas production can be made good provided it is guided by the leading edge management expertise your administration provides. The combined efforts of the ruling class and the very rich working together can create, as you so often remind us, the best of all possible worlds.

The economist Nancy Frasier says this alliance of the ruling class, of which you are a member, and the super rich, of which you are also a member, is an effort to make sure government serves only the narrow interests of wealth and power. This framing, Governor, is of course all at the expense of the rest of us, making it the best of all possible worlds for the few, and worst of all possible worlds for the many, the commoners. She calls it Cannibal Capitalism. I call it “we eat our own.”

Note: the foregoing information on the cumulative climate impacts of oil and gas production in Colorado was presented to the state’s Energy and Carbon Management Commission in a more detailed 20-minute presentation in September of last year. The Commission is composed of 3 attorneys, 2 of them oil and gas attorneys, a wildlife biologist, and a former county commissioner. Each draws a public salary of between $150 thousand to $160 thousand, plus benefits. They asked not one question following the presentation, neither have they ever asked for or sought clarification on any of the information we presented. We made the presentation as a “party” to a proposed rulemaking on how to do cumulative impact evaluations of oil and gas production in the state. Cumulative impact evaluations are required by the state’s Oil and Gas Reform Act, an act Governor Polis signed into law almost 6 years ago.

bthacker Fracking, News

Ever disdainful, Colorado’s Suncor refinery is at it again, polluting to high heaven

Did you catch the big Colorado news flash?   Denver’s century-old Suncor refinery got fined again–this time a reported $10 million for continuing its poisoning of the people. 

The fine, issued by the state, gives the illusion of corrective action, but it is only an illusion.  It will not save one child from developing asthma, or, even worse, developing cancer.  It won’t save one person with heart or lung problems from worsening complications, or dying prematurely.   And it won’t change the air quality for the thousands upon thousands of people who are Suncor’s next-door neighbors and victims.  

What this fine truly represents is a form of payola that is ongoing and deeply deceptive.  It works like this.  Suncor pays a $10 million fine, but 80 percent of it is forgiven and returned to Suncor.  So, it’s really only a $2.5 million fine.  Why then does the state pat itself on the back for what is basically a headline stealing lie?  

The reason, quite frankly, is that it leaves the impression with the casual observer of rectitude and corrective action.  Yet, the fine in no way requires Suncor to straighten up and fly right.  And what is more, why should the lion’s share of the fine, which is really taxpayer money, be returned to Suncor so that it can install a new generator to prevent its frequent cold-weather breakdowns?  Yes, according to the settlement, the state gave the money back to Suncor so it could upgrade its equipment.  

Should the public have to pay Suncor’s maintenance and operating costs?  After all, it is the second largest corporation in Canada, with gross revenues in 2022 of $27 billion.  Clearly, Suncor is not a mom-and-pop grocery store selling an underage kid a six-pack of Bud.  Mom and pop might get a break if they weren’t habitual underage sellers, but why should Suncor?  It’s a big-time habitual abuser. 

If you were to receive a ticket for driving impaired, along with a $600 fine, you would almost certainly have to go to drunk-driving school as well as pay the fine.  Try asking the state to return most of that $600 to offset lost time and expenses required to attend driving class?  Even a Pollyanna might blush at the foolishness of such a request.   Indeed, it’s a certainty that if you continued to drive drunk, and were caught, you’d soon lose your license and go to jail. 

Suncor’s record of killing its neighbors, if ever so slowly, is the equivalent of the habitual drunk driver, except in its case it doesn’t go to jail; it’s not the victim of a debilitating disease, unless, of course, you consider greed and disdain diseases rather than pathologies; and most of the tinselly fine money is returned to it’s corporate sock drawer for rainy-day spending. 

In fact, just 5 years ago Suncor was fined $9 million, again for poisoning the people.  Here again $5 million of the fine went back to Suncor to hire a consultant to find out why its operations were so filthy.  Events confirm the $5 million was wasted–or may still be in the sock drawer.  

We know this because about $1.8 million of that earlier $9 million fine went to a small, community-based Latina citizen group called Cultivando.  Cultivando, with the help of other sympathetic citizens, used the money to continuously monitor the releases of toxins from the refinery.  (Admission, I was on their advisory board.)  What they found was a full-time abuser.  For example, they found that soot, what air-quality people call PM 2.5, exceeded federal regulatory clean air standards all the time.  Spikes in this pollutant were measured as high as 1700 micrograms per cubic meter (ug/m3.)   In fact, the federal Clean Air Act  (CAA) 24-hour standard for PM 2.5 of 35 ug/m3) was exceeded about 14,820 times over six months of monitoring, including two winter months when the refinery was supposedly shut down for “major” repairs.    PM 2.5 is estimated to annually kill 8 to 9 million worldwide.  It is not overly speculative to conclude a few of those millions live in the Suncor neighborhoods. 

A chemical cocktail of other toxins was also recorded during this six-month period.  The following is a pared down list:  benzene, with a .9 parts per billion (ppb) health threshold was exceeded 316 times; hydrogen sulfide, with a 8 ppb threshold was exceeded 3,895 times; hydrogen cyanide, with a 2.7 ppb threshold was exceeded 24 times; and nitrous oxides, with a 53 ppb threshold were exceeded a whopping 65,203 times.  Radioactive particulates, the measurements of which may be a national first for a refinery, also exceeded the health threshold of 1 pc/L 18 times. 

In the past, Suncor has released sun-blotting clouds of sulfur dioxide (SO2).  A release in 2016 caused an interstate highway to be closed down, with local school children told to shelter in place.   This event was repeated in 2019 when orange clouds of SO2 and clay like particles called catalysts rained down on a defenseless population.  

Cultivando’s monitoring equipment recorded two similar events in April of 2022.   Suncor failed to report the first of these, as is required of it under its operating permit.  That event may have resulted in the CAA one-hour standard of 75 ppb for SO2 being exceeded roughly 5030 times over.  The event was repeated a couple of weeks later.  Suncor, as is its habit, claimed there was no danger.  The state offered hesitant agreement.  These denials of any danger might lead one to question why any standards should exist if when exceeded no danger to the public results? 

More broadly, the state’s regulatory agency, the Air Pollution Control Division (APCD), has given a rather muffled response to the findings in Cultivando’s air monitoring of Suncor.  The state talks often about forcing Suncor to meet the release limits required of it in its pollution permits.  Generally, these permits tend to be quite liberal since they are based on what is engineering or economically possible for the polluter rather than on strict health protecting considerations.  In other words, they are corporate first considerations. 

The APCD also asserts, despite Suncor’s myriad short-term permit violations, that the refinery remains in compliance with the federal standards as set forth in the Clean Air Act.  These standards cover only 6 pollutants, however, and are based primarily on daily or annual averages.  As a result, the spikes in pollution as measured and recorded by Culitvando’s monitoring are subsumed and become unidentifiable in the process of averaging.   

Many other pollutants beside the 6 with standards are, of course, listed as hazardous by EPA, but no firm ambient air-quality standards have been set for them.  Many reasons can be found for the regulatory slovenliness, but the power of the oil industry to frustrate enlarged federal oversight is surely chief among them. 

Still, even the claim that Suncor meets the CAA standards, and therefore the state’s hands are effectively tied, is highly questionable.  Cultivando’s monitoring indicate that not only is the 24-hour small particle, PM 2.5, standard exceeded as discussed earlier, but so is the average annual.  The average annual PM 2.5 release as calculated from the citizen monitoring is 14.5 ug/m3.  Thus, EPA’s spanking new CAA standard for these small particulates of 9 ug/m3 was exceeded by over 60 percent on average.  Even the old standard of 12 ug/m3 was exceeded by almost 20 percent. 

The state has shown no inclination to act on this damning information, even though it accepts the scientific integrity of the monitoring program itself.  Unfortunately, the new standard, which should be even harder to ignore, will not go into effect for at least another 3 years as the polluting industries are given time to adjust.  The people will be asked to endure, once again.  Equally important the 4,500 premature deaths EPA estimates would be canceled out by this rule as well as health benefits of up to $46 billion will have to wait for the Suncors of the world to straighten up and fly right.

By comparison, California’s Bay area regulators are not waiting for the future.  On the heels of a court-settled $20 million fine, it told the East Bay’s massive Chevron refinery that it would also have to reduce its small particulate releases by 80 percent by 2026.  If it doesn’t, it will be subject to annual fines of $17 million, rising to 32 million in 3 years.  The required retrofit may cost $1 billion.

John Cioia, the county supervisor representing Richmond, said of this ruling, “This is one battle, but the war is not over.”   Most Coloradoans would suspect the miracle of midnight religious conversion if a Colorado regulator or the governor, in particular, issued such a straight-forward declaration.  Polis like his predecessor, John Hickenlooper, now a U.S. senator (D), is a hands-off type of guy when it comes to corporate regulation.  Corporate friendship rather than citizen protecting, but friendship threatening, regulation is their mantra. 

Perhaps the greatest disappointment for the citizens conducting the Suncor monitoring program is the state’s reluctance to examine the effect massive spikes in various toxins, shown to occur over and over again, has on people over time.  It really comes down to a question of whether it’s safer to put your head in an old gas oven for a year with an average low release rate, or to do it many times intermittently over a year on those occasions when release rates are high.    The state’s position is that only if you put your head in the oven for a year is there damage.  Both kill you, so why hide behind a distinction without much meaning in terms of human health? 

The state also refuses to look at the multiplying or synergistic impact of people inhaling these toxins in combination.  The Cultivando study indicates that often when one toxin is spiking others toxins are also present at heightened levels in the air. As a for instance, when PM 2.5 is spiking off the page in the Suncor neighborhoods, it is very likely other toxins such as benzene and radioactive particles are also spiking.  

The two health professionals, enlisted by Cultivando to help with the health evaluation of the Suncor monitoring results, think that in many cases mixing of toxins in the air people breath has a negative multiplying effect from a human health perspective.  (Both of these professionals, Wilma Subra and Dr. David Brown, have national reputations.)  The state is unwilling to recognize the science of multipliers, even though it appears to be a well-established principle within the field of toxicology. 

I asked Dr. Brown recently if he would live in one of the Suncor neighborhoods.  An octogenarian, he is a deliberate man, wise with the wisdom of age, not prone to enthusiasms.  He looked at me for a moment and said, “Well Phil, there is one thing I can tell you, if I had a pregnant daughter I sure as hell wouldn’t let her live there.”