Statistics released earlier this spring by the Centers for Disease Control revealed that one in 88 U.S.-born toddlers has an autism spectral disorder — from the less severe Asperger’s syndrome to the so-called classical form of the ailment. Worse, it’s not just a North American phenomenon; Belli also reports a 57 percent spike in Asia and Europe.

The question is why. Perhaps, some posit, medical professionals have simply become better diagnosticians, and people previously labeled eccentric or developmentally disabled were in fact, autistic. Or, perhaps there’s a genetic culprit since ASD typically runs in families. Belli gives credence to both theories, but ultimately concludes that there is more to the puzzle. “If the rise in autism numbers were only due to improved diagnosis and awareness of autism among the medical community — or if the roots of the epidemic were primarily genetic — professionals would have seen an increase in adult or adolescent patients who had not been diagnosed or who had been misdiagnosed in the past,” she writes.

But they haven’t. This realization piqued Belli’s curiosity, and her investigation into the relationship between environmental poisons and human health is riveting. “The idea that a toxin can cause autism is neither controversial nor speculative,” she begins. In fact, thalidomide, a medication used in the 1960s to control morning sickness in pregnant women, was tied to autism almost 20 years ago. Likewise valproic acid, used to treat bipolar disorder; misoprostol, an ulcer drug; and chlorpyrifos, an insecticide.

And that’s just the tip of the chemical iceberg. “Many other chemicals distributed far and wide across the natural world by power plant smokestacks, leaking waste sites, improper storage facilities and outdated manufacturing processes have been proven to cause injury to developing brains,” Belli continues. More specifically, mercury, lead and polychlorinated biphenyls — also known as PCBs — along with the chemicals used to make insulation, flame retardants, electronic equipment and plastic pose known health risks to fetal life and newborns.

Belli cites recent studies by the Environmental Working Group that discovered an average of 200 pollutants in the umbilical cord blood of infants. Among them: pesticides, perfluorinated compounds, antibiotics and polybrominated diphenyl ethers.

Belli is particularly interested in “autism clusters,” geographic areas with higher-than-average rates of the disorder. One such place is Brick Township, N.J., where 63 million gallons of septic waste were dumped into a nearby landfill between 1969 and 1979. By the time the community learned that heavy metals and volatile organic compounds had leaked from storage containers, it was too late — soil and groundwater had already become contaminated by bromoform, chloroform and chloroethylene.

Researcher Carol Reinisch tested the impact of each of these substances on clam embryos (a precursor to human trials) and found that the “chemical cocktail” — the combined impact of the three substances acting together — was far more destructive to the body than each of the chemicals acting alone. Reinisch’s research, Belli writes, “made a solid case for the fact that toxins in combination can have a unique impact on the way brains develop. It is likely not one bodily insult that’s driving up [autism] cases, but a number of contaminants and exposures acting in concert.”

That there are approximately 1,300 Superfund sites on the National Priorities List — 200 of them in New Jersey, the state with the highest autism rates — should both give us pause and make us furious since we know who is responsible for fouling the air, water and soil: unscrupulous businesses. In fact, Belli reports that the corporations responsible for the lion’s share of pollution often avoid taking responsibility for their misdeeds, sometimes declaring bankruptcy to avoid paying necessary cleanup costs, at other times disappearing altogether. Many companies simply continue polluting without consequence.

Take Fairfax County, Va. “The EPA’s Toxic Release Inventory for the country notes that BP Products North America releases 2822 pounds of toxins per year,” Belli writes. Joining BP are the Newington Concrete Plant (171 pounds); the Sipca Securink Corporation, which makes security inks for bank notes (250 pounds); the Virginia Concrete Edsall Road Plant (154 pounds) and several petroleum and concrete operations for which pollution data were unavailable.

Unfortunately, Fairfax County is not an anomaly. In fact, Belli presents a startling statistic: 25 percent of us live within four miles of a hazardous waste site.

Are you scared yet? Me too.

Belli offers readers a few commonsense — albeit limited — suggestions: Eat fresh fruit and vegetables or choose frozen over canned; avoid washing plastic in the dishwasher or putting it in the microwave because chemicals like biphenyl A (BPA) can leach and contaminate food; use a French-press coffeemaker instead of one with phthalate-containing tubing; avoid Teflon, Gore-Tex and stain-, grease- and water-resistant materials; and steer clear of cosmetics containing triclosan, formaldehyde, toluene, dibutyl phthalate and lead. She also suggests cleaning with white vinegar and baking soda rather than harsh chemical cleansers.

Regardless of where scientific research goes in the next few years in its conclusions on the environmental connections to autism, we are undoubtedly in an environmental crisis.

And that current environmental crisis will take more than individual action, which is why Belli believes the government needs to enforce and strengthen environmental protections. The Toxic Substances Control Act was first passed in 1976 and has remained essentially unchanged — that is, toothless — for 36 years. When the act passed, Congress grandfathered in 62,000 chemicals, in essence giving a free pass to known toxins such as trichloroethylene and BPA. To remedy this, Sen. Frank Lautenberg has introduced the Safe Chemicals Act (S. 847), which would, for the first time, require industry to provide information on the health and safety of chemicals in order for them to be introduced or remain on the market. It would further allow the EPA to take immediate action on hazardous chemicals including lead, mercury and flame retardants.

Whether passage would roll back autism levels to what they were 20 or 30 years ago is impossible to know. What is certain is this: The number of autism diagnoses is spiraling and is cause for immediate concern and immediate action. One child in 88 will soon be one adult in 88. And then?

According to Ian Bremmer, the author of the new book “Every Nation for Itself,” the rise of the “G-Zero” means the world has entered a transformative new phase — which will be more chaotic, uncooperative and dangerous. In his book, he charts how America assumed the burden of global leadership in the wake of World War II, and how institutions like the United Nations, NATO, the G-7 and the IMF helped it dictate the international agenda for much of the past century. He also explains how the breakdown of those (often problematic) institutions is now hurting our ability to marshal global leaders to deal with some of the greatest threats facing our planet. Bremmer, the head of a global political risk research firm who has written for the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek and Foreign Affairs, believes that this new dynamic could lead us to a new, more egalitarian world — or to a new Cold War.

Salon spoke to Bremmer over the phone about America’s new isolationism, the cyber-attack threat and why China will never replace the USA.

You start off the book by talking about the Copenhagen climate summit. What does the outcome of that conference tell us about the changing dynamics in the world?

Frankly, the only success that was had at that summit was that Queen Margaret of Denmark managed to avoid sitting next to Mugabe from Zimbabwe. There had been so much buildup to this summit, that the climate is incredibly important and we’ve all finally gotten to the point where we agree that something needs to be done. It seemed like the classic area that you could get some form of global agreement on. Of course we came away with absolutely nothing.

Following the Copenhagen summit we haven’t pushed harder to get stuff done, we’ve actually just moderated our expectations. Every country is prioritizing its own very strong agenda and there’s an absence of acceptance of what the global road map should look like, what the global architecture should look like. This dynamic is increasingly true in so many aspects of the world, whether we talk about the election of a new president of the World Bank, or on how you fund the IMF (and what you do with the money once it’s there), global trade initiatives, security issues in places like Syria, sanctions on Iran, bailing out the Europeans.  I mean, really the principal dynamic in the world today is the fact that there just isn’t anyone driving the bus.  We don’t have a G-20. We have a G-Zero.

Why is the G-7 an anachronism?

The G-7 is an anachronism in the same way that the United Nations Security Council is an anachronism, in the same way that the old structure of the IMF and the World Bank is an anachronism. All of that stuff basically came out of World War II, when the United States was the dominant power in the world, and it created a world order using its own capital, using its allies, building up its allies, prioritizing its values and its interests. And that world order functioned very well for us for decades but of course over the last 30 years, the underlying balance of power shifted away from this G-1 environment toward China. It hasn’t shifted to China — it’s not as if China is now the new superpower — but toward China, and away from the developed world toward the developing world, and away from debtor states toward creditor states.  When the underlying balance of power no longer in any way reflects the global architecture that you have, then at some point, clearly, a shock will come along that will be big enough to crash that system.

The end of the Soviet Union was not big enough to make that happen, and 9/11 was not big enough to make that happen, but the 2008 financial crisis was big enough. And that effectively made the G-7 an anachronism. And it did so in part, of course, because it showed some of the vulnerabilities of the U.S.-led free market system; it certainly made it harder for the Americans to rally the emerging markets behind their values and preferences. But more important, the Europeans have been almost completely absent from the global stage over the past four years, and frankly so have the Japanese, with their 17 prime ministers in 22 years. And by the way, I strongly feel this is not a book about U.S. decline. I actually don’t believe the U.S. is in decline. It’s much more a book about the fact that the United States is not going to do this stuff anymore and its allies certainly are not coming along, but nobody else is either.

What happened after World War II to propel America to this position?

Well, it wasn’t just that they helped win the war, it was that the economies and infrastructures of the other countries — both victors and vanquished – were utterly destroyed, and the United States rebuilt them. Of course, that was the Marshall Plan. And that also was MacArthur in Japan. So the U.S. basically built up both its allies as well as the vanquished Japanese who surrendered, to create folks that would support a U.S.-led global system. And that worked very effectively indeed.

In polls, more and more Americans want a kind of inward focus and less involvement in the world stage — an issue that’s also played itself out in the Republican primary. Why do you think that is? 

The reason why I make the point that this book is not about whether or not the U.S. is in decline is because it’s very clear that America is the world’s largest economy, and more important, even if it weren’t, even when China becomes the largest, richest economy, China will still be a poor country. If the Americans wanted to remove Assad from power in Syria they surely could. If America wanted to bail the Europeans out they surely could; we have the money. It’s also true that if we wanted to balance our budget, we could, but we don’t. The political will doesn’t exist for that. And so much of that has to do with the political system, and it has to do also with the inward-lookingness of the U.S.

I happen to think that there has been this significant “coming apart” within the United States of the top 10 percent and the bottom 90 percent economically. But that coming apart within the U.S. is also being mirrored by a coming apart globally. And that there aren’t many Americans that are prepared to support the U.S. as the world’s policeman anymore. There aren’t many Americans that are prepared to say they benefit from U.S.-led globalization. With the levels of unemployment that exist in the U.S., with manufacturing jobs that have gone away and aren’t coming back, with Katrina and New Orleans not getting rebuilt, large numbers of Americans are saying, “We do not see the benefit from all of what the U.S. has been doing internationally.” And that will make it politically inconceivable for the U.S. to do the kind of things that it did when it was putting together the old world order. I mean, Geithner can get on a plane and go to Europe and give as much advice as he wants to. But there’s nowhere near the level of political support in the United States for the Americans to pull off another Marshall Plan in Europe, or anything remotely close to that.

And even in the case of Libya, which of course is the big intervention that happened after the 2008 financial crisis, look at what actually happened. The U.S. did not want to do it. Everyone hated Gadhafi — U.S. enemies, U.S. allies. The Brits and the French said, You’ve gotta remove this guy. And only then did the U.S. say they would, and still the U.S. did not have troops on the ground. In some ways, Libya is the exception that proves the rule, that whether we’re talking about trade or climate or security or the European crisis, all of these are issues where we’re just not going to see the kind of leadership anywhere that we have historically.

I think many people would see this as a positive decline in so-called American imperialism.

Well, first of all there’s no question that American intervention on the military side has been seen as problematic. But for every country that sees it as problematic, others have seen it as something essential. You can talk about Marshall Plan, the role that the U.S. has played in the World Bank and the IMF, the importance of the Peace Corps and all of this sort of stuff – these have been organizations that generally have been very welcomed in terms of the benefit for the common good.

A few years ago, I remember reading endless magazine articles about how China was going to become the new superpower, and we’ll all be learning Mandarin in grade school. You don’t think that’s going to be the case. 

I put that into strong question and there are a number of reasons for it. The first is that for the Chinese to continue to succeed they need to fundamentally restructure both their economy and their political system. They’re aware of this. It’s an enormous challenge, it’s never been attempted with a country remotely the size of China, and they’ll need to do it relatively quickly.  First of all, there are no guarantees that they will succeed and, even assuming that they succeed, or they even succeed sufficiently to stave off various crises, when China becomes the world’s largest economy, it will still be a poor country. And I don’t think we sufficiently appreciate how different that will be. They will be focused much more on ensuring that they can provide the minimum form of employment and growth and commodity inputs for their own people. The United States is a rich country. The U.S. can easily afford to spend a lot of time helping to provide public goods, acting as a global policeman across the world, and it’s done that for over a century, again for good and for bad. The Chinese will not be prepared to play that role.

Look at what China’s doing in the Middle East: They are interested in defending very narrow interests – economic and security interests. It’s easy for the United States to say, we want to do more on the global environment, because the average American is paying attention.  The average Chinese person has a very different view of the global environment. They want a car. They want their kids to be able to have an apartment. They want a proper education. Hundreds of millions of them want to get out of absolute poverty.

The last few decades have been sort of notable, because there’s been relatively little death and conflict around the globe, compared to other periods of time in global history — a point made by the recent book, “The War on War.” What do you think the G-Zero environment means for the security of the world?

Clearly we’re going to see much more conflict in this environment. And the question is what kind of conflict it will be. I tend to not see this as a world where we’re going to have military and the sort of conventional warfare between major powers. Compared to the pre-WWII environment, there’s so much more interlinkage between the economies of countries. But having said that, we’re definitely seeing a fragmentation of the world order, compared to a globalization and statelessness that had been driven by the United States at the order of the global markets over the past decade. What does that mean? Well, first of all it means we’ll see much more cyber-conflict. Much more industrial espionage. Much more direct and overt conflict between states and corporations. More protectionism.  More industrial policy. Those sorts of things, I think we will see more conflict overall. I think that can spill over into military conflict regionally that won’t necessarily involve the United States.

In a G-Zero environment the Middle East is much more problematic. Because absent strong US, European, Japanese, Chinese or Russian intervention, what you end up having is the Saudis, the Iranians, and the Turks playing much greater roles in terms of diplomacy and political influence, economic influence, military influence.  Those countries support completely different outcomes. Clearly that means more sectarian conflict.  We’re not going to see more integration in the Middle East, we’re going to see more disintegration, more fragmentation, more confrontation.

In the book you also suggest that we’ll be see the rise of privatized warfare, using contractors like the company formerly known as Blackwater. I find that a worrisome prediction.

You know, absent U.S. intervention, you are likely to see many more local arms races, like India vs. China, for example. But you’ll also see the privatization of warfare, where countries with cash will be buying mercenaries that are well-trained, whatever they can afford, and they’ll be doing the fighting for them. And that will also be true in terms of folks that can engage in cyber-warfare and folks that can protect you from cyber-warfare. In a G-Zero environment, fighting of all sorts gets fragmented.

How does this affect our ability to deal with global warming?

Well, this is one of the problems I have today with the political debate. You’ve got so many people out there who are saying, “Global warming is horrible and we have to do something.” But it’s fairly obvious that we’re not going to. And again, it’s not as if the world has never been capable of dealing with climate problems.  You remember, we had a hole in the ozone, and I believe it was in 1976 that there was this Montreal protocol that was going to stop putting the CFCs in the atmosphere.  And it was effective.

It’s very clear that this climate issue, as you mentioned, is a much, much bigger order of baggage. It’s going to cause a lot of death, a lot of displacement. There will be winners as well. There will be folks who are successful economically out of climate change, but overall, it’s a negative for the world economy, and it is inconceivable in a G-Zero environment that you’re going to move efficiently even toward the beginning of a global solution, and so what will happen is you will have local solutions.  Local solutions will not be coordinated, they will be less efficient, and they will focus on those issues that are most important to individual governments directly. In the case of the Maldives, they’ll buy land and they’ll move. In the case of China, they’ll focus on issues that are impacting their domestic population, without worrying about what they’re doing to the global public commons in terms of emitting pollutants into the air. As they need to industrialize but they’ll focus much more on water, for example, because they desperately need that water for themselves.

And the U.S. and others will start focusing on geo-engineering — looking at what can be done to potentially artificially lower temperatures and create cloud cover and, you know, all of these sort of things which 10 years ago were fanciful but now increasingly people are starting to look into seriously.  But the issue is that those solutions will not be taken globally.  And what will be seen as a solution by one country or a set of like-minded countries might actually be seen as very strongly against the interest of other countries and other actors.

What countries do you think are going to be helped by this new G-Zero arrangement?

There are a group of countries that I think will do particularly well in this environment and I call them pivot states. The reason I focus on these pivot states is in a G-Zero environment you need to not just focus on growth — because there’s so much more volatility in the world, you need to focus on growth and resilience together. It’s countries that are able to hedge and adapt between different models of growth and integration, that don’t get captured by any individual large country [that will thrive] and certain countries are particularly good at doing that.

Canada’s really good at doing that. If Obama doesn’t want to do the Keystone pipeline, there are a lot of Chinese that want to have access to Canadian energy. As climate change occurs, the Canadians will have this northern shipping route, which will help them to have access to folks all over the world and will help them have access to Arctic resources. They sell more timber in British Columbia to China now than they do the United States, and that’s very interesting. Singapore pivots very well. Kazakhstan increasingly pivots well where Mongolia, nearby, actually doesn’t because they’re much more in the pocket of the Chinese. I would argue that Indonesia pivots relatively well, Turkey pivots quite well. Mexico doesn’t. Ukraine doesn’t.

You claim there are a few possible outcome scenarios from the G-Zero world. What are they? 

The G-Zero is not the next world order. It is a global power vacuum that is not sustainable. Something will fill it, because crises will continue to grow and not be resolved and so that very process will lead to something new.  And the question is what that something new is. And I think to understand what’s coming next there are two questions you need to answer. The first is, what will be the relationship of the United States and China toward each other: Will they be relatively cooperative or relatively competitive? And the second is how much do other countries matter; do they matter a little or a lot? If you can answer those two questions you have a really good sense of where the world is going.

The only one of my scenarios that gets you to a G-20 that actually works is one where the U.S. and China have relatively harmonious relations and other countries matter a lot. So far we are not moving in that direction. So far we’ve been moving into an environment where the U.S. and China have more confrontational relations and we’re moving toward an environment where other countries are indeed likely to play a fairly significant role. So you’ll end up with a world of regions.  That’s a much more inefficient environment and it’s one where pivoting is absolutely critical.

The other two possibilities are one where the U.S. and China have good relations and other countries don’t matter: That’s the G-2 path. That’s an environment where pivoting doesn’t matter so much but where nothing gets resolved unless it happens to be a priority on the agendas of both the United States and China.  The U.S. does relatively well in that environment, actually, and so does the dollar. The other environment is the one where no one can pivot and that’s if the U.S. and China have bad relations and other countries don’t matter very much, and that is really a bipolar cold war. It’s by far the worst of all outcomes, though it’s not actually the one I expect.

But this is very much in process. Countries are in play right now, geopolitics are in play. We are in a process of creative destruction, globally, that hasn’t occurred since after WWII.

It turns out that testing water and fish flesh under the surface oil after the spill was not very telling about long-term impacts as oil and water don’t mix and the chronic, toxic impacts were delayed until long after BP was put in charge of the “cleanup.” When BP sprayed chemical dispersants containing a slew of toxic heavy metals including arsenic, the oil didn’t magically disappear. It sank into the sediment. Disturbingly, the allowable levels set by the government for the toxins in our seafood are based on health impacts for a 176-pound adult eating less than two medium shrimp a day. The testing is for one chemical out of a crude oil mixture containing thousands of chemicals. No synergistic effects are considered. This in no way protects children, fetuses, people who weigh less than 176 pounds or anyone who eats seafood on a daily basis like the folks here on the Gulf Coast.

Dr. Andrew Whitehead, Ph.D., associate professor, Department of Biological Sciences, Louisiana State University, who is studying the BP spill and has reviewed much of the scientific studies of the Exxon Valdez spill, explained that stock declines of species may take several years to develop as reproduction is impacted in successive generations and across species. The Exxon Valdez spill is now known to be responsible for the decline of many species, including marine mammals, marine birds, and fishes such as pink salmon and herring. Though we have a take on the immediate acute impacts of the BP spill on animals caught in the oil, the chronic ultimate impacts of the BP spill are still unknown. But we do know that the killifish, the most abundant forage fish for the bigger fish in Gulf Coast marshes, are being affected. Fish from oiled marshes show signs of direct toxicity and reproductive impairment. Dr. Whitehead’s experiments involving exposures to oiled sediments, done in collaboration with colleague Dr. Fernando Galvez, show that killifish embryos are taking longer to develop or don’t hatch at all. They are being born with malformed hearts and hearts that may not function properly when they mature. And as the impacts from the spill on the fish bioaccumulate and propagate across generations, liability is harder to prove without good and strategic scientific study that sadly is harder to fund.

But some impacts are being felt now, especially for sediment dwelling seafood. Current reports from fisherman up and down the coast are startling. The oyster harvest for 2010 was the worst in more than four decades and oystermen continue to report catches down as much as 75 percent. Crab catches are in steep decline. Brown shrimp production is down two-thirds. And the white shrimp season was even worse, leading to descriptions of “worst in memory” and “nonexistent.” This from the region that before the spill provided 40 percent of the nation’s seafood.

Dr. Patricia Williams, Ph.D., Diplomate of the American Board of Toxicology, Associate Professor, Coordinator of Toxicology Research Laboratories, Pontchartrain Institute for Environmental Sciences, University of New Orleans, spoke at the summit about what she sees as a failure to properly assess the impact of the spill on seafood and on human health. She said:

In 1996, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration acknowledged that direct measurement of tissue for PAH (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon) concentrations generally does not provide a useful indicator of exposure of fish to PAHs from petroleum spills. Regardless, an extremely expensive seafood testing program was launched using this method. Testing included only 13 PAH parent compounds out of 200 PAHs present in crude oil. PAHs act on each other resulting in greater toxicity than expected from a single PAH (synergism). The synergistic nature of the PAHs were ignored in interpretation of the results. Additionally, the Levels of Concern were calculated for a 176 pound individual. This does not address toddlers and children or the developing fetus and placental transfer. The public was not warned of these deficiencies in the seafood testing program.

Dr. Williams explained that “PAHs are endocrine disruptors that interfere with the normal blood-borne hormones (e.g., estrogen and testosterone) that are responsible for the regulation of reproductive and developmental processes. Only very low amounts of chemicals are needed to disrupt the normal endocrine balance of both humans and animals. Evidence of reproduction imbalance is seen in the second generation of white shrimp in the 2011 harvest. Shrimp were harvested with defective eye stalks, pleopods, and pereiopods. Such anatomical defects are occurring in the markedly reduced white shrimp population in the Gulf and warn of endocrine dysfunction that could result in the loss of the species.”

Furthermore, “The heavy metals known to be present in crude oil are being ignored in the testing of seafood. Metal toxicity can produce neurobehavioral abnormalities in sea life such as: alterations in avoidance or attraction responses; critical swimming speed; changes in social interactions (e.g. aggression), reproduction, feeding, and predator avoidance; food foraging with reduced feeding ability; loss or orientation in swimming and changes in schooling behavior. Heavy metal testing in BP Oil clean-up workers has documented increased arsenic levels in 24 hour urine specimens.”

Finally, Dr. Williams warned that “The future chronic health effects from consumption of contaminated seafood and biomagnification along the food chain are yet to be realized in both sea life and humans. Chronic effects may take years to present and may elude an analysis of their causal origins. ”

On the second day of the summit, a settlement between private plaintiffs and BP was announced in the press. This settlement does not resolve the government cases, either civil or criminal, against the responsible parties. But the settlement of the private case raises the question whether the government prosecutions will be resolved without a trial and without jail time for executives ultimately responsible for the deaths of 11 workers and severe and ongoing environmental and economic impacts on the region. The summit attendees were abuzz with speculation about what will happen in the federal and State of Louisiana cases.

In Louisiana, petroleum is king. This state is the third largest producer of petroleum in America, Louisiana is responsible for more than one-quarter of the nation’s natural gas production, and Louisiana is the third leading refiner of petroleum in the country. In addition, the state makes over 600 petroleum products making it the second in the nation in primary production of petrochemicals. The 20-mile stretch on the Mississippi from New Orleans to Baton Rouge known as “The Cancer Corridor” pumps out one-quarter of the chemicals made in America. Louisiana leads the United States in release of toxic chemicals into the environment. The seven-parish industrial corridor has the highest density of petrochemical industries in the nation and possibly the world.

All this money in petroleum has a huge impact on politics in Louisiana, just as it does on a national and international level. It’s probably impossible to get elected to any Louisiana office without courting petroleum dollars and making campaign promises to that industry. A visit to the petroleum friendly website for the Louisiana Department of Natural Resources reveals the following section titled “Legacy Liability Reform.”

This “Legacy Liability Reform” is less likely to ensure any protection for Louisiana’s resources or its citizens than it is to assure petroleum companies that Louisiana and its resources are theirs for the taking. The reform is code for “don’t worry about liability because immunity for really bad stuff is all part of the deal for investing in Louisiana.” Oh, by the way, the Louisiana courts have been very protective historically of petroleum interests as well.

From the 1950s on, drilling for oil and gas on federal lands and waters has produced the second largest source of revenue for the federal government besides taxes. This has led to a rather cozy relationship between the federal government and those corporations that extract petroleum here. Let us not forget that since the inception of the Minerals Management Service (now renamed the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement to emphasize what it should be doing) has been involved in numerous scandals. For example, in 1990, MMS employees were linked to prostitution, and in 2008 the Department of Interior’s inspector general reported that MMS employees were engaged in both drug use and sexual activity with employees from the very energy firms they were to be regulating. This wasn’t just the foxes guarding the chicken coop, but the foxes actually in bed doing lines of coke with the chickens.

Clint Guidry, president, Louisiana Shrimp Association, spoke at the summit about the political ramifications of the spill and the unlikelihood of real justice coming from the government case. Mr. Guidry had worked for BP earlier in his career like so many Louisiana men have. He knows intimately both the oil industry and the fishing industry. When the spill happened, Louisiana shrimping was devastated. First, Guidry lobbied for jobs for all the shrimpers when the fisheries closed. Then he fought for job site safety for the workers and community residents impacted by the cleanup. Guidry’s role became that of witness to the harms on fisherman response workers when they began to suffer from being exposed to aerial application of the chemical dispersant and being downwind from burn sites of the surface oil. For instance, on May 26 seven shrimpers from the offshore response crew were admitted to West Jefferson Hospital with chemical poisoning. Two days later, after Obama’s May 27 visit to Grand Isle where he was photographed picking up tar balls, two more shrimpers were airlifted to West Jefferson Hospital for emergency medical treatment, also for chemical poisoning. Guidry met with the Occupational Health and Safety Administration, the U.S. Coast Guard, the National Institute for Occupational Health and Safety, and with other government representatives from the local to the federal including Secretaries Napolitano and Salazar and U.S. EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.

Mr. Guidry still has the following unresolved questions:

1. Why did we allow people who caused the oil spill to be in charge of the cleanup? Everything they did was to limit liability, not to protect the environment, the resources or the people.
2. How could the government announce on Aug. 5, 2010, that suddenly 75 percent of the oil had disappeared? Corporations run this country and they operate under the Golden Rule: Who holds the gold makes the rule.
3. According to statements made by Louisiana Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority Chairman Garret Graves, BP is choosing the direction of the environmental damage assessment. Shouldn’t the Oil Spill Recovery fund be administered independently so it could fund real scientists like Dr. Whitehead?
4. Oil companies are good at covering up spills and sinking the oil with additional chemicals, but they are no good at cleaning up spills. If we are allowing these companies to drill in the Gulf, shouldn’t they be required to have the technology to prevent disasters and to clean them up? They don’t.
5. Even after the largest loss of life and oil, no laws have been changed. Eleven men are dead but I don’t believe anybody will go to jail. The government is the keeper of the record of the criminal investigation and if they settle the case, the public will never see that information. If the record is not made public in a trial, how do we learn from this spill?
6. I’m a third generation fisherman. We were the first environmentalists because if you don’t take care of the environment, it doesn’t take care of you. I love wildlife. The spill has devastated wildlife. What price do you put on a dead dolphin?
7. The head of Minerals Management Service at the time of the BP disaster came from big oil. She was fired by Obama and MMS was split up but no one else was fired. Is that enough house cleaning? Can these people keep us safe when they have failed in the past?

As the federal government and affected states including Louisiana move toward trial or settlement, we should all be asking these questions.

How will the government cases be resolved? Potential penalties of more than $17 billion for environmental violations remain on the books for BP. Peter Lehner, executive director of Natural Resources Defense Counsel writes in his blog, “How the remainder of the case pans out says a lot about the future of energy in this country. Will the government allow BP, and the rest of the oil industry, to continue business as usual with nothing more than a slap on the wrist? Or will the company be put on trial and held accountable for its actions? Will the penalties be severe enough to make the oil industry clean up its act? BP reported profits of $21.7 billion in 2011, nearly 3 times the estimated cost of its settlement with private parties in the Gulf.”

And one question looms even larger than the spill, the resulting legal cases or even BP profits: How can we establish a separation between the oil industry and our government?

“It sets a floor for what the industry needs to do,” said attorney Erik Schlenker-Goodrich of the Western Environmental Law Center. “The reality is we can do far better.”

Over the past few years, more information has come out about fracking’s potential harms to the environment and human health, particularly relating to the risk of groundwater contamination. In addition to the many potentially toxic components of the highly pressurized fluid injected into the ground during the natural gas drilling process, fracking can also release cancer-causing chemicals like benzene and greenhouse gases like methane into the air. The federal government has made moves to tighten regulations, and we’ve chronicled the history of those regulations.

The EPA’s new rules don’t cover most of those issues. Instead, they address a single problem with natural gas: air pollution.

“These rules do not resolve chronic water, public health and other problems associated with fracking and natural gas,” Schlenker-Goodrich said.

The agency is actually barred from regulating the impact of fracking on groundwater because, in 2005, Congress exempted fracking from the Safe Water Drinking Act. Congressional proposals to give the EPA more oversight have so far failed.

With the new rules on air pollution, the EPA rejected an industry request to exempt some wells with low emissions of toxic compounds but did give drilling companies more time to comply. Notably, the final version provides a two-and-a-half-year transition period (rather than the 60 days in the original proposal) that gives drilling companies until 2015 to comply with the strictest regulations.

The industry lobbied hard for the delay, and its reaction to the rules have been mixed.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest oil industry trade group, said it is still reviewing the new rules but said it’s happy with changes from the original proposal that will allow companies to “continue reducing emissions while producing the oil and natural gas our country needs.” Another industry group told The New York Times that the rules are too strict and could “make exploring in new areas cost-prohibitive.”

A key rule targets one large source of air pollution — the burst of gas released during the first few days after a well is first tapped but before production begins. The EPA requires that companies start using “green completions,” a technology that captures the released gas and fumes in tanks and transports them via pipelines to be sold as fuel. (The Natural Resources Defense Council has a good breakdown of the process).

Many drilling companies already use green-completion systems. One natural-gas company recently told Bloomberg that the system doesn’t cost the company “any more than just venting the gas into the atmosphere.” The EPA says that once companies buy the necessary equipment to separate and collect the released gas, they could actually make up to $19 million a year selling the captured gas.

“By ensuring the capture of gases that were previously released to pollute our air and threaten our climate, these updated standards will not only protect our health, but also lead to more product for fuel suppliers to bring to market,” EPA Administrator Lisa P. Jackson said in a statement.

For the next two and a half years, in addition to trapping the gas, companies are allowed to burn off, or “flare,” the excess gas, which reduces air toxins but is wasteful because the gas can’t be resold. Peter Zalzal of the Environmental Defense Fund said the EPA rules give companies an incentive to adopt the green-completion technology instead of flaring.

This hasn’t been a problem only in Wyoming. Similar ozone spikes have appeared near drilling fields in Utah and Colorado, and at least a portion of Texas’ air problems could be linked to drilling there. Air pollutants like benzene are also threatening the health of people living near gas wells. And so today the Environmental Protection Agency announced new standards for oil and gas companies that within the next few years should reduce emissions from gas wells. They’re the first ever air quality standards that apply to wells drilled using fracking methods. For newly fracked wells, the EPA estimates the rules will reduce the emissions of some hazardous compounds as much as 95 percent.

Since the Obama administration started touting its “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the president has been emphasizing that natural gas should be embraced, and at the top of the EPA call announcing the new standards, Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy reiterated that “natural gas is key to country’s clean energy future.” This enthusiasm rests on the premise that drilling companies can extract natural gas from the ground safely and with minimal impacts to the environment and to the health of people living in and around gas fields. Or, at least, more safely than they’re managing to now.

The rules announced today won’t fix fracking: They don’t address the well-documented issues with water contamination, and in Wyoming and Colorado, where similar regulations are already in place, air quality remains a problem. The EPA also backed down on the timeline for requiring “green completions,” a technique that allows gas companies to capture methane and other pollutants coming out of wells and to make money doing it. Still, environmental groups are praising these rules as a step in the right direction. At the local and state level, environmental activists are pushing for fracking to be banned altogether, but on the national level, any regulation at all counts as a victory.

“People are being poisoned today, and we need to be able to deal with those impacts,” says Jeremy Nichols, director of the climate and energy program at WildEarth Guardians. His organization, along with the San Juan Citizens Alliance, took the EPA to court back in 2009 in order to force the agency to review the air pollution standards updated today. “Establishing some reasonable level of certainty that they’ll be protected is important,” Nichols says.

In theory, the industry should be happy to implement the EPA’s new requirements. They’re the rare environmental regulations that save companies money — as much as $19 million a year, once the rules are fully implemented, the EPA estimates. To reduce pollution using green completions, gas drilling companies need to capture the methane and other compounds they right now let escape into the atmosphere. Methane is natural gas and, separated from the other pollution, it can be sold at a profit. The EPA has found that, across the country, as many as half of fracked wells that could be using this process already are.

That hasn’t been enough to wipe away air pollution problems, though. In Wyoming, the rising ozone levels convinced legislators to put in place rules requiring these sort of controls years ago. The spikes in ozone levels in Sublette County showed up despite those rules.

“Wyoming was forced to do our innovations because we had such a hammer fall on us, especially in 2008, when we had astronomical readings in the ozone area,” says Stephanie Kessler, Wyoming program manager for the Wilderness Society. “We’ve had many years of some of these control technologies in place, and we still had our worst ozone season ever last winter.”

The goal of environmental groups, though, isn’t to fix fracking, but to ensure a basic level of safety and accountability that’s been missing up until this point.

“Is this going to solve all our problems and the underlying issue of the safety of fracking? Certainly not,” says Nichols. What the EPA rules could do is help protect people who are living near the more than 11,000 wells newly fracked each year. Whether those wells should be drilled at all is a thornier question that’s not on the table, at least not in this election year.