Years before Mark Ruffalo made Dark Waters, I was teaching the story behind the film to students in my Contemporary Science and Technology class at Suffolk University. My students read and analyzed the New York Times Magazine investigation of attorney Rob Bilott’s extraordinary battle to uncover how DuPont had contaminated drinking water in West Virginia with PFOA. More important than our discussion of PFOA itself was the question of what happens when a corporation becomes so powerful that challenging it becomes extraordinarily difficult.

So when Ruffalo made Dark Waters, I was delighted. I took my class to see it.

I still agree with Ruffalo about many of the issues that have motivated his activism. Climate change is real and demands serious action. Corporations can become dangerously powerful. Workers and their families can suffer when corporate interests overwhelm other considerations. Enormous concentrations of wealth deserve scrutiny. And I share Ruffalo’s concern that combining Paramount and Warner Bros. raises legitimate questions about competition, jobs and the concentration of media power.

But the facts of Dark Waters did not lead to the conclusion that the corporate world was evil.

Rob Bilott was not an environmental activist who had spent his career fighting corporations. He was a corporate attorney. For eight years, he had primarily represented large corporate clients, particularly chemical companies, in environmental matters. What Bilott uncovered about DuPont’s contamination of drinking water with PFOA ultimately drew him and his law firm, Taft Stettinius & Hollister, into a years-long battle against one of the most powerful chemical companies in America.

DuPont’s conduct demonstrates the danger of excessive corporate power. But Bilott and his law firm demonstrate something else: corporations and the people who work for them cannot simply be divided into villains and heroes according to which side of the corporate divide they occupy. A corporate lawyer, supported by a corporate law firm whose business came from representing corporations, could examine the evidence and conclude that a corporation had done something terribly wrong.

Bilott did not begin by assuming that DuPont executives were evil because they ran a powerful chemical corporation. In fact, his experience representing chemical companies initially inclined him to believe that sophisticated corporations generally tried to comply with environmental regulations. But he followed the evidence. The condemnation resulted from that evidence, and that is what made Dark Waters so compelling.

It is also a standard Mark Ruffalo increasingly seems not to apply.

Consider Ruffalo’s condemnation of fracking. He was right to call attention to its environmental risks; the Environmental Protection Agency has documented circumstances in which activities associated with hydraulic fracturing have affected drinking-water resources.

But Ruffalo went considerably further. In 2016, he declared that “there is no fracking that can be done safely.”

That is not what the scientific evidence established. Evidence that a technology can cause environmental harm under particular circumstances is not evidence that it can never be used safely.

Consider Ruffalo’s condemnation of nuclear power. Nuclear power has one of the best safety records of any major source of electricity and produces extremely low lifecycle greenhouse-gas emissions. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concludes that nuclear power can provide low-carbon energy at scale. The International Energy Agency considers continued operation of existing nuclear plants an important part of a cost-effective path to net zero.

Yet Ruffalo became a........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)