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Brave New Foundation, which is producing a series of videos called "Koch Brothers Exposed" taking a close look at many aspects of the billionaire Koch Brothers' business interests, just released a new installment probing the link between a cancer cluster in Crossett, Arkansas and the nearby operations of Georgia Pacific, a Koch Industries subsidiary.

The Brave New Films project may ring a bell with DeSmogBlog readers. Earlier this year, I wrote about a previous installment in the series taking a look at how the Kochs stand to profit from the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, if it is ever built. (That video is even more interesting to watch on the heels of a must-read InsideClimate News article from earlier this week indicating that the Kochs have offered misleading explanations to Congress and the media about how much they stand to benefit from the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline.) 

Now the Brave New series is taking a hard look at another Koch disaster already in progress in an Arkansas community ravaged by cancer. The residents living (and dying) on Penn Road in Crossett suspect that air and water pollution from the town's only manufacturer - Koch subsidiary Georgia Pacific - is making them ill. Georgia Pacific's facility - a plywood, paper mill and formaldehyde resin plant - has dumped millions of gallons of wastewater into open ditches nearby, in violation of the Clean Water Act.

Regular readers of this blog might also hear bells ringing since it was my predecessor, former DeSmogBlog managing editor Kevin Grandia, who first broke the story about Koch Industries' intense efforts to attack the science linking formaldehyde and cancer. 

Grandia wrote on DeSmogBlog in September 2010:

For his commendable charitable work, David Koch was appointed to the National Cancer Advisory Board,a committee of the US National Cancer Institute, in 2004 by President George W. Bush and remains a member today [pdf].

Our research has uncovered very strong ties between Georgia-Pacific, a company co-owned by David Koch through Koch Industries, and a political lobby group called the Formaldehyde Council that is involved in efforts to downplay the dangers posed by formaldehyde to human health. 

As it turned out, David Koch left the NCAB post behind, either in the same month that Grandia exposed the Koch formaldehyde science attack, or six months earlier as Koch Industries claims on KochFacts.com. Either way, his company's involvement in attacking the formaldehyde cancer link is indisputable, as Jane Mayer demonstrated in her Koch expose in The New Yorker. 

Watch the new video "Exposed: Koch Industries and Cancer Risk" below:

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A new campaign has been launched taking straight aim at the multi-million dollar effort by the coal industry and their front groups to convince us all that somehow the dirtiest energy source in the world is somehow clean.

The reality is that coal is dirty and the industry knows it. Why else would the coal companies funnel tens of millions to a group called Americans Coalition Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE)?

As this new campaign points out, there’s simply no such thing as clean coal technology:

Check out writer Adam Seigel for a comprehensive look at coal: “This is Reality”: “Clean Coal” Vaporware

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UPDATE: I’ve started a List of Global Warming and Climate Change Experts for Media on DeSmogBlog, this one includes a lot of well-known scientists actively publishing in the scientific fields related to global warming and climate change.

Please drop me a line at: desmogblog@gmail.com with any additional names you would suggest.

Given the economic crisis we’re in that’s due in large part to the unrestricted abuse of the “free market” even the most jaded of sorts must now be more than a little wary about the expertise of the so-called “free market” think tanks that abound in the United States.

One such free-market champion, the Heartland Institute has sent out a “Journalist’s Guide to Global Warming Experts” in the hopes that somehow journalists will be fooled into thinking that the list they have been provided is “the nation’s leading experts on climate change and related topics.”

Nation’s leading experts in global warming?

It’s amazing what will pass for an expert these days. Well, at least by the Heartland Institute’s standards, which include:

Calvin E. Beisner, the evangelical organizer who once posed the question regarding AIDS funding:

[but] is it rational to allocate $3.5 billion dollars to fight a disease that is almost 100 percent self-inflicted by people intent on immoral and irrational behavior?”

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Check back here tomorrow at 10am pacific time, when yours truly will be on Brave New Film Foundation's online talkshow Meet the Bloggers. 

If you haven't seen Meet the Bloggers before it is a very cool high production-value online show that discusses the hottest issues of the day with top bloggers. This week's topic is Sustainability versus Big Oil - a subject that is very near and dear to the DeSmogBlog team.

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Several members of the DeSmogBlog team are off to Montreal for a training session April 4-6 with Nobel laureate Al Gore - an opportunity to learn from the master how best to spread the word about the challenges of and solutions to global warming.

Kevin Grandia, Emily Murgatroyd and I will all attend as trainees. Jim Hoggan, who attended a Nashville Bootcamp last year, will be back as a presenter. I start my own pilgrimage on the (carbon-conscious) train this evening and will be blogging across the country, in cooperation with the Vancouver Sun. See the set-up post here. And stay tuned.