The Heavy, Heavy Hand of the Feds

Hillyer has a two-part essay about a fellow who is working on creating renewable energy.

Excerpt from Part One:

In Salmon, Evertson spent $100,000 of his family’s money seeking to create a fuel cell that would use pure sodium, mixed with borax (yes, the detergent ingredient), to create clean energy without polluting the environment.

Pure sodium is a metal that, when in direct contact with a certain amount of water, can explode. But it can be easily bought online when it is packaged correctly, that is, surrounded by an oil solution that protects against water.

...Evertson said he planned to return once he raised enough money to re-start his experiments. He moved to his mother’s house in Wasilla, Alaska, taking a few dozen pounds of sodium with him, and began selling the sodium on E-bay to raise funds to finance a new gold-mining expedition.

Then on May 27, 2004, federal agents in black SUVs and waving assault rifles, appeared out of nowhere, forced Evertson’s truck off the road, and arrested him. He was charged for shipping sodium he had sold on E-Bay by air, which is understandably forbidden as a result of its potential explosiveness.

What he didn’t know was that in the UPS system, ground transportation from Alaska actually is carried by air. That meant Evertson should have put a special sticker on the package of sodium routing it for special “ground” treatment.

Federal authorities could have treated the incident as a simple civil violation, but instead chose to charge Evertson with a serious criminal offense.

You'll have to go to the link to find out what happened in court.

Oh, don't worry: it gets worse.

When federal agents first interviewed Krister Evertson about his shipping sodium he had sold on E-Bay via UPS, he described his fuel cell experiments back home in Idaho in great detail.

Federal authorities in Alaska sent word to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Idaho, which promptly dispatched its agents to the industrial supply facility in Salmon where Evertson had stored his fuel cell materials.

The EPA agents treated the materials like a Superfund site. They cut open his steel drums, cleared away a perimeter – and, by their own account, spent some $430,000 disposing of every bit of Evertson’s painstakingly assembled experiments.

“They never told me; they just went and did it,” Evertson told The Washington Examiner ...

Never mind that Evertson had clearly saved the material for future use rather than abandoning it. Never mind that it would be potentially dangerous only if taken out of the storage materials Evertson had so carefully constructed.

And never mind, finally, that, in the words of Evertson’s appellate brief, none of the materials were “discharged into the air, land or sea,” and the government failed to produce any evidence “that the defendant intended this to happen.”

Indeed, the brief notes, “the EPA witness, Marc Callaghan, testified that the materials became hazardous waste [only] when the EPA disposed of them.”

Again, you have to go to the link. But no matter if you're a "Greenie" or not, you'll be disturbed.

Unless, of course, you're a Justice Department "greenie" lawyer.

The reason for the article?

Simple. The utterly distorted (you could say "lying") claims that GWB's folks applied a 'litmus test' to Justice candidates--which is another linked item at the source, Southern Appeal.