Call it obvious: big money rides on many environmental and land-use decisions, and industries have strong incentives to defeat regulation at every possible turn. Doing so becomes an inextricable part of corporate business – it is called regulatory affairs. As Chapter 3 explained, industry groups mount aggressive antiregulatory campaigns directed at the executive branch of government, which holds permitting authority under environmental statutes.

An antiregulatory campaign works like a well-oiled machine, each part creating powerful torque. As this chapter explains, industry leaders prevail upon state governors as well as the president to place their loyalists in the highest ranks of agencies. They deploy public-relations campaigns to calm the public about the harm caused by their toxic chemicals and harmful practices. They hire and dispatch paid “experts” to produce skewed studies disguised as objective “science,” which portray minimal risk from their industrial practices. They even create professional-looking journals in which to publish the drummed-up science. And moving upstream to the headwaters of the science that threatens to expose their harm, they attack legitimate, credentialed scientists through lawsuits and relentless criticism, seeking to damage their credibility and careers through harassment campaigns that can persist for years.