The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette reported a shocker on its front page Sunday. The rotten-egg odor from the Koch brothers’ sprawling paper plant at Crossett is still making people sick, but the state’s pollution control agency is unaware of the problem.

Forgive the snark. Two superb reporters for the paper, Emily Walkenhorst and Eric Besson, actually deserve awards for painstaking reporting on an environmental and health horror, and the paper deserves credit for lending the story the credence of its front page and a full page inside. Environmental and health advocacy, whether by government or private pursuits, will get you labeled nowadays as an enemy of free enterprise and jobs. If you are a politician, it will turn off the spigot to the Koch fortune (nearly $1 billion in political gifts in 2016) and other “pro-business” PACs.

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Toxic sulfide gas from Georgia Pacific’s boilers, wastewater plant, ponds and ash basin has been a problem for the people of Crossett for many years. The company and regulatory agencies couldn’t settle on precise ways to measure the emissions, either of the gas or the odor, so people just suffered — in spite of national exposes. A few years ago, company agents went door to door handing out checks to people to buy their damaged homes and cars or to reimburse them for property damage or health problems in exchange for a signed waiver that they would never try to hold the company responsible. It was akin to paying porn stars and Playboy bunnies for sex and silence.

The damage to property and health was indisputable and, after a long-delayed rule by the federal Environmental Protection Agency forced the company to disclose how much hydrogen sulfide it was releasing, the company eventually lowered the toxic compound in its emissions to below what was clearly harmful to health. But the foul-smelling gas from the waste treatment plant and ponds was still overwhelming. Two air-monitoring programs recently concluded that the heavy sulfide odor in the air was still so intense that it caused health problems.

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Sylvia Howard, 58, told the reporters that the gas aggravated respiratory problems for her, her children and her grandchildren. “If they paid me,” she said. “I’d get out of here tomorrow.” But hush payments aren’t available anymore. Why should they be? The government and the courts aren’t going to hold the company liable, anyway.

Crossett’s mayor said such people were chronic complainers and that Ashley County’s biggest employer always took care of any problems. That is the common stance of government now. Arkansas Attorney General Leslie Rutledge is joining suits all across the country and in Arkansas to stop environmental watchdog agencies from trying to curb air and water pollution. The Department of Environmental Quality, the state watchdog for healthy air and water, had to be informed by the Democrat-Gazette reporters that Georgia Pacific had exceeded its limit on emissions in 2016. It refused to be bothered by questions about it.

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How times have changed. When Congress and President Nixon enacted the modern clean-air and clean-water laws and created the EPA to protect air, water and people from harmful industrial pollution, they recognized that they were finally carrying out the Declaration of Independence’s guarantee that the American government would protect people’s right to life, health and the pursuit of happiness. It was bipartisan. Every member of the Senate, led by Republicans, voted for the Clean Air Act. Signing it, Nixon called 1970 “the year of the beginning,” when the government accepted its duty to protect future generations and the land from harmful pollutants. I remember when the feisty Republican Sen. Alfonse D’Amato said the government was sponsoring “pollution terrorism” by allowing smog to drift across state lines. Today, Donald Trump would call Nixon and D’Amato communists or worse.

So many great works followed. The creeks and valleys in the oilfields of my youth in South Arkansas are no longer the cesspools, wastelands and brownfields that sickened and crippled so many of my relatives and neighbors. The Cuyahoga and other rivers in the east no longer catch fire spontaneously. Thick smog no longer chokes the air over Los Angeles and other big cities. The gasoline our cars burn no longer carries the lead that harms babies’ brains, and vehicles are far more efficient and emit cleaner exhausts, thanks to toughening EPA rules. Acid rain from the nitrogen and sulfur oxides from coal plants is no longer killing the rivers and forests of the east. [We still have a little problem with smokestack emissions in Arkansas that the attorney general is trying to continue.]

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In the 1980s, a new notion gathered force. Corporations and President Reagan said government was inherently bad and that health and safety restrictions on industry were a plot to destroy free enterprise and an infringement on the constitutional freedoms of business. The Republican Party has made a 180-degree turn from its environmentalism. Trump’s EPA administrator and much of our state government are on a crusade to roll back rules and restraints on industry so that companies like the Kochs’ that have bankrolled their political trajectories will no longer be bothered by pesky rules on toxic air.

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