by Brendan DeMelle at DeSmogBlog

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 XLpipeline, 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:

Robert Greenwald, the president of the Brave New Foundation, explains in an AlterNet article about the new Crossett cancer video that:

“What we’ve done with each of the Koch pieces is to use specific stories to depict people’s lives and show that ideology has consequences. What the Kochs are doing is not harmless, it is not victimless, and there are people who are paying a terrible price for the brothers’ politics and their profiteering.”