eorge W. Bush's assault on the environment over the past two years has been
so blatant and relentless that even American television now reports it as a
simple fact, like gravity. Is there another issue where Bush has gotten such
critical news coverage? Not Iraq, where reports have made plain the
Administration's determination to go to war but declined to challenge it. Not
economics, though that could change if unemployment and federal deficits keep
climbing. Some stories have mentioned Bush's bias toward the rich and corporate,
but the tone of most economics coverage has been relatively respectful, except
during the Enron scandal, and the White House slipped that noose by changing the
subject to Saddam.
The environment, however, has been one bad story after another. Every week seems
to bring news of a fresh abomination, from making environmental impact
assessments in the national forests optional, to excusing the country's dirtiest
power plants from upgrading their pollution controls, to stripping protection
from 20 million acres of wetlands, to recycling nuclear waste within consumer
goods. (The latter lunacy so far remains only a proposal, but it illustrates a
mindset.)
The temptation in writing a mid-term evaluation like this one is to list every
anti-environmental action the Bush Administration has taken the past two years.
But that would make for long and tedious reading, and besides, environmental
group websites already offer the information. Suffice to say that no
Administration since the dawn of the modern environmental era forty years ago
has done more to facilitate degradation of the ecosystems that make life on
earth possible.
The irony is that Bush has compiled this odious record without having an
environmental policy as such. Instead, his environmental achievements - an
ever-lengthening list of regulations relaxed, actions delayed and foxes put in
charge of henhouses - have come mainly as a consequence of policies pursued in
other fields: economic, military and, above all, energy. The environment is not
even an afterthought for the Bush crowd. The Administration's energy plan, for
example, never once mentions the words "climate change," even though its
lopsided emphasis on fossil-fuel development promises to boost US greenhouse-gas
emissions between 14 and 38 percent by 2007.
It's easy enough to say that Bush's approach reflects his and his top aides'
pasts in the oil, mining, timber, chemical and electric utility industries. It's
likewise easy to understand Bush's actions as thanks for the $44 million in
contributions those industries showered on him and the Republican National
Committee in 2000. Here, the indispensable resource is Paybacks, a report
prepared by the NGOs Public Campaign and Earthjustice.
Paybacks offers the most complete listing available of which former corporate
executives now oversee their erstwhile colleagues from which federal agencies.
In a crowded field, perhaps the most egregious conflict of interest belongs to
Steven Griles, the Deputy Interior Secretary. During two years of government
service, Griles has continued to be paid $284,000 a year by his former lobby
firm, National Environmental Strategies, where he represented mining companies.
Apparently not a man to take something for nothing, Griles has returned the
favor by meeting with and lobbying on behalf of former clients, most notably in
the Administration's attempted recasting of the Clean Water Act to allow the
dumping of mining debris into streams and rivers in Appalachia.
The ecological consequences of all this are as predictable as they are
lamentable, but the questions that most urgently need answering are political.
Why does the Bush Administration think it can get away with such a
slash-and-burn approach to a mom-and-apple-pie issue? Surely Karl Rove, the
powerful White House political director, is aware that poll after poll shows
that large majorities of Americans care about clean air and water and support
the goals of the environmental movement. And why have environmentalists, and
specifically Democrats, had so little success in countering the Bush agenda?
They turned back the last concerted effort to gut the nation's environmental
laws, led by Newt Gingrich in 1995. Did that victory depend so heavily on Bill
Clinton's veto threats that it can't be replicated now? Or do environmentalists
need a new strategy?
George W. Bush is not the quickest calf in the pasture, but even he recognizes
that it's risky for a U.S. President to look bad on the environment. Back when
Bush was running, his advisers organized dozens of tutorials to remedy his
ignorance of global and presidential issues. Only one such session was devoted
to the environment, and it was held in the living room of the Texas governor's
mansion on an afternoon in May 1999, according to Steven Hayward, a senior
fellow at the Pacific Research Institute for Public Policy, and Terry Anderson,
the executive director of the Political Economy Research Center. Hayward and
Anderson were two of fifteen experts who heard Bush open this meeting with the
following request: "I am going to be the next President of the United States.
And when I leave office, the air will be cleaner, the water will be cleaner and
the environment will be better. Tell me how I'm going to make that happen."
By the end of the three-hour session, the assembled experts had assured Bush
that he could accomplish this politically happy outcome without discomforting
the corporate interests or right-wing groups central to his candidacy. The
secret was to embrace what Gale Norton, soon to be Bush's Interior Secretary,
called "a philosophy of environmental federalism." The idea, as Anderson later
explained it, was that Washington should "devolve some responsibility for
meeting environmental standards to local levels, where [officials] have better
information about how to reduce pollution cost-effectively." A second element of
the philosophy presented to Bush that afternoon was replacement of government
regulation with market mechanisms such as corporate self-audits, a device Bush
had implemented as governor. A third element was elevation of private-property
rights over public prerogative.
These ideas had been gestating in right-wing and libertarian think tanks for
years. Norton, for example, had spent the first four years of her career at the
Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit law firm co-founded by James Watt,
Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary, that frequently represented corporate
interests. In a 1989 speech Norton's admiration for market mechanisms led her to
suggest that corporations should "have a right to pollute" and then be charged
accordingly. Her friend Hayward, who got Norton invited to the May 1999 meeting
with Bush, conceded that she "put it poorly" but defended her underlying point:
"Let's give landowners an incentive to protect species we want protected." The
same basic reasoning underlies another concept that Norton championed for Bush
that afternoon: "takings" theory, which asserts that government must compensate
a landowner if a government policy precludes full economic exploitation of his
property. Most environmentalists criticize takings theory as paying people to
obey the law, but it is gaining ground under Bush. In a June 2001 decision the
US Supreme Court endorsed takings theory by a 5-to-4 vote.
The intellectual rationale presented to Bush that afternoon in Austin has proven
wonderfully convenient to him as President, for it enables him to tell himself
he is helping the environment even as he pursues the corporate-friendly agenda
that has defined his entire political career. How the philosophy translated into
action became evident less than two weeks after Bush took office, when soaring
electricity prices and threatened blackouts in California began making national
news. Bush quickly blamed environmentalists and the overly stringent regulations
they had supposedly imposed to keep the state from building enough power plants.
California's energy shortages, Bush argued, were another reason to support his
plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling (which Vice
President Dick Cheney promised could be done with minimal environmental impact).
Environmentalists and public officials in California scoffed that the new
President was talking nonsense. Just what devious nonsense, however, only became
clear a year later, with the unfolding of the Enron scandal. What had really
driven up electricity prices in California, it turned out, were the artificial
shortages that Enron and other companies created by manipulating a deregulated
marketplace. The right-wing gospel had said leave corporations alone and the
environment would prosper, but reality in California proved otherwise.
Jump ahead now to the summer of 2002. Much of the nation has been suffering from
prolonged, extreme drought. In the West, millions of acres have been ravaged by
wildfires. Once again Bush is faced by a genuine public emergency. Once again he
scapegoats environmentalists and federal regulators to advance a corporate
agenda. During a visit to a still-smoldering forest in Oregon, the President
declares that the wildfires are the result of irresponsible forest management.
Excessive underbrush had accumulated, and then caught fire, because loggers had
been prevented from thinning forests in a scientifically sound manner. From now
on, said Bush, federal policy would promote well-managed forests and recognize
that "there's nothing wrong with people being able to earn a living off of
effective forest management." To set things right, Bush turned to a man who had
long made a very good living from timber: Mark Rey, the vice president of the
American Forest and Paper Association before becoming Bush's Under Secretary of
Agriculture. Rey's solution called for waiving fundamental stipulations of the
National Environmental Protection Act, such as mandatory environmental impact
assessments, while making protection of wildlife an "optional" goal for national
forest managers. With straight faces, Bush's spin doctors proclaimed it the
"Healthy Forests Initiative."
In truth, the wildfires of 2002 were more likely rooted in an environmental
reality that Bush refuses to confront: global climate change. Drought of the
sort experienced in 2002 is exactly what scientists project will occur
increasingly in the years ahead as global temperatures rise, bringing more
extreme weather of all kinds. Thus killer floods punished central Europe and
southern Asia in 2002, while Arctic ice is melting at record speed. The signs of
impending disaster are so unmistakable and frightening that they are converting
even such die-hard skeptics as Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who has
watched his state absorb billions of dollars of property damage as melting
tundra buckles roads and buildings, and forests are consumed by a species of
beetle suddenly able to survive Alaska's warming climate.
Bush, meanwhile, remains loyal to his oil-industry roots: Global warming is
something to study, not resist. Bush promised in a September 2000 campaign
speech to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide (and three other pollutants). But
it's doubtful he understood the implications of his speech, and once it became
clear that honoring the promise would preclude the kind of energy plan Cheney
cooked up in secret with Enron and other industry representatives, the promise
obviously had to go. So did US support for the Kyoto Protocol on global warming,
a move that provoked more anger overseas than perhaps any other action Bush took
in his first year in office.
The White House has won the legal battle over whether it can keep secret the
meetings that gave rise to the Bush energy plan, but who needs further proof of
industry fingerprints when the policy speaks for itself? Its call for oil
drilling in Alaska has driven discussion in Washington and therefore media
coverage, but that may be a diversion. Even as environmental groups fundraise
and Democratic senators threaten to filibuster over Alaska, the Administration
has pursued a less-noticed but equally destructive aspect of its energy plan:
encouraging drilling and mining in millions of acres of public land in the West,
including national monument areas. Court rulings have blocked much of the
Administration's efforts-so far.
The single most powerful action Washington could take to slow global warming
would be to impose a meaningful increase in vehicle fuel efficiency standards.
The Bush philosophy instead dictates a voluntary plan to reduce emissions, one
that respects corporations' freedom to make whatever products the market
demands. Bush believes that, like him, America's corporate leaders care about
the environment, and they will do more to protect it if government stops telling
them how to do so (which explains why he has cut environmental enforcement
budgets and prosecutions nearly 50 percent from Clinton-era levels). Let
consumers start buying more hybrid-powered cars, and Detroit will respond.
The same faith in corporate goodness underlies the rollback of the Clean Air
Act's so-called New Source Review provision, a policy that literally threatens
death for thousands of Americans, especially very young and very old people who
already suffer from asthma or other respiratory ailments. Approximately 75
percent of all power-plant emissions in the United States come from facilities
built before 1977, which pollute four to ten times as much as plants with modern
pollution controls. The Clean Air Act has long required companies to install
modern pollution controls if they expand capacity at older plants. The companies
complained that this requirement discouraged modernization and thereby prevented
them from cutting pollution. The Administration has endorsed this logic with its
new rules, which make pollution upgrades largely voluntary. The upshot, EPA
Administrator Christie Whitman has promised, will be cleaner skies as
corporations step up and do the right thing.
The military, however, may not even have to pretend to do the right thing.
Perhaps the single most disturbing and overlooked environmental proposal of the
past two years is the Pentagon's post-September 11 suggestion that it be
exempted from environmental laws. Congress rejected this request last fall, but
the Pentagon is back this session with a better-prepared proposal and is
confident of victory. Robert Alvarez, a senior policy adviser to the Energy
Secretary during the Clinton Administration, warns that such a policy could
enable the military, the nation's biggest polluter, "to write off large areas of
land, bodies of water, and the people that are dependent on them, just as the
Soviet Union did." Nuclear weapons sites in particular, says Alvarez, might
become "national sacrifice zones."
So, will Bush end up paying a price in 2004 for his betrayal of environmental
values? His supporters within corporate America and the far right are apparently
so blinded by their ideological biases that they perceive little political risk.
Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation, told the Washington
Post in March 2001 that things would be fine as long as the body count didn't
get too high: "There's a risk with some of the swing voters, but unless
something happens where lots of people turn up dead before the election, these
issues are not going to resonate with lots of voters." An unnamed senior
Republican agreed, asserting that "unless there's a catastrophe, these decisions
aren't going to affect a mom in Fairfax."
Karl Rove, however, has a more sophisticated analysis. He knows Americans,
especially the suburban swing voters so coveted by presidential campaigns, care
about the environment. But he thinks they care more about other issues: the
economy, security (both economic and military) and healthcare. The environment,
Rove reportedly calculates, ranks eighth or ninth among the average voter's
priorities. He may be right-recent polls indicate that Americans oppose Bush's
environmental actions by a 2-to-1 margin, yet 65 percent of them approve of the
job he is doing as President. So it may make sense for Bush to pursue an
environmental agenda that rewards corporate backers and throws red meat to his
right-wing base; the White House just has to make sure that it doesn't unleash
its own Chernobyl in the process.
Remember the arsenic flap early in Bush's presidency? Many environmental issues
are too technical or abstract to resonate with average voters, but the idea of
allowing more arsenic in the drinking water connects with nearly everyone, which
is why the Administration quickly retreated. If opponents can make Bush's other
policies equally visible in the media, and their dangers equally concrete to
voters, they may force additional retreats and persuade significant numbers of
voters to oppose his re-election.
Environmentalists in Washington fret that Republicans now control both houses of
Congress and the White House, but this situation may be forcing the movement to
recall that its true strength lies out in the country among the general public,
which supports it by approximately 2 to 1. There is no reason the environmental
movement has to be a marginal player in American politics. It commands
significant financial resources, public credibility and intellectual capital.
But too much fighting over turf and too little coordinated action has frequently
left the movement in disarray. That may now be changing. According to a report
in gristmagazine.com (another indispensable source of environmental news) by
former New York Times reporter Keith Schneider, mainstream environmental groups
have begun collaborating like never before in the face of the Bush threat. Their
so-called "collaborative defense campaign" mirrors part of Bush's strategy by
focusing more effort on state and local resistance to environmental rollbacks,
both among activist groups and such politicians as New York Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer. The national groups also hope to mobilize public unease by
highlighting one or two egregious, easily communicated environmental outrages (à
la arsenic) and convincing politicians, both Democratic and moderate Republican,
that they can win votes by opposing Bush's agenda.
In the longer run, environmentalists also need to get serious about economics if
they want to make political progress. Perhaps because so much of the mainstream
environmental movement is made up of affluent white people, they forget how
close to the economic edge a majority of Americans live. Most Americans want to
see the environment protected, but many fear the economic consequences. History
shows that no issue except war has more effect on voters' views of a President
than the economy. A policy to restore our damaged ecosystems and transform our
technologies toward renewable energy and environmental sustainability would
create more jobs and business opportunities than today's dead-end approach, but
most Americans don't know that. A movement or a candidate who opened their eyes
could become Bush's biggest nightmare.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Hertsgaard is the author of "The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and
Infuriates the World" and four previous books, including "Earth Odyssey: Around
the World In Search of Our Environmental Future."