Fired Kansas Environmental Sheriff Speaks Up, Softly

Roderick Bremby, Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment from 2003 until November 2, 2010, finally spoke in public since he was prematurely dismissed from his post. In front of a packed room at Kansas City, Kansas Community College, he began by addressing the topic foremost on people's minds: the disgraced air permit for a new coal-fired power plant that was issued after his dismissal.

He told the audience in a firm but soft tenor that he no longer thought about what transpired when he acted as KDHE Secretary under the administration of then-Governor Mark Parkinson, and he had no intention of opening that topic again.

But he would say this: "I did not resign. I was removed."

It was confirmation of something the Parkinson Administration adamantly denied in the last two months of its lease, but it was something that his audience had assumed before they arrived.

Throughout the presentation he consistently denied any alignment to a political party, and indeed it was a Democratic Governor who dismissed him before he could complete his work of seven long years. He made pains to stress the fact that the endangerment finding that allows for federal regulation of CO2 pollutants was made at first by a Bush administration EPA official. "How do you legislate away the truth?" he had asked rhetorically; to which a man in the crowd volunteered, "It's Washington, D.C."

The man had a point. Even now House Republicans are leading a witch hunt to overrule the overwhelming evidence of climate change that demands carbon regulation. There is even a bill, introduced by Republicans Fred Upton of Michigan and Edward Whitfield of Kentucky, that would overrule the Supreme Court's finding in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, the decision that put CO2 regulation in Secretary Bremby's tool box in the first place.

Even as House Republicans try to turn back the clock of science, the effects that science predicts with increasing urgency become more dire; but Bremby is, even after his boss fired him for doing his job, hopeful. There is currently a lawsuit pending, brought by the Sierra Club of Kansas, that calls into question the quality of the Sunflower air permit and the process that created it.

It turns out that the coal plant Sunflower Electric Corp. had been billing as "the cleanest in the world" would have been ranked in the U.S. as something much less: 670th in particulate matter emission, 322nd in mercury emissions, 54th in sulfur dioxide emissions, and 19th in nitrogen oxide emissions. The deal with Governor Parkinson that opened the door to construction called for an ultra-supercritical pulverized boiler, which would have decreased CO2 emissions. The permit passed in December requires a less efficient boiler.

Proponents of the coal plant who parroted claims of its superiority, it seems, received this information from Kansas legislators and Sunflower Electric Corp.

More than 175 Change.org members have requested that U.S. EPA investigate this miscarriage of science and law in the plant's approval by the state. EPA is indeed progressing on this front: It recently chose to begin a "dialogue" to investigate the air permit process.

When this reporter pressed Bremby to respond to this petition, requesting that EPA's regional representative defend both him and the democratic process in Kansas, he had this to say in closing:

“This was not a benign, pristine, routine bureaucratic process. Unfortunately, there were abuses, and I think we all just need to stay tuned and be observant. And I firmly believe that, as a result, change is inevitable...but what occurred cannot happen again. If you look at the three-year period of time and the lobbying dollars in this process, it’s staggering. If we are to protect this way of governing ourselves, things like this just can’t happen.”

The Sierra Club's lawsuit and the EPA's investigation are now in motion.  Sign the petition. And as Bremby said, stay tuned.

Photo Credit: EVIL EMRE