by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental
president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has initiated
more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the
protection of our country's air, water, public lands and wildlife. Cloaked in
meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the public, the administration
intends to eliminate the nation's most important environmental laws by the end of
the year. Under the guidance of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White
House has actively hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive
rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople, secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and
bureaucrats. The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had
the grimmest environmental record of any governor during his tenure in Texas.
Texas became number one in air and water pollution and in the release of toxic
chemicals. In his six years in Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based
prosperity, which enriched his political contributors and corporate cronies by
lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the
same to America. After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit,
diminishing standards of living for millions of Americans.
I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and I
watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days. And they're comparatively lucky:
One in four African-American children in New York shares this affliction; their
suffering is often unrelieved because they lack the insurance and high-quality
health care that keep my sons alive. My kids are among the millions of Americans
who cannot enjoy the seminal American experience of fishing locally with their dad
and eating their catch. Most freshwater fish in New York and all in Connecticut are
now under consumption advisories. A main source of mercury pollution in America,
as well as asthma-provoking ozone and particulates, is the coal-burning power
plants that President Bush recently excused from complying with the Clean Air Act.
Furthermore, the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House policies
encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished
our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks and increased our
reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by
their own people.
When the Republican right managed to install George W. Bush as president in
2000, movement leaders once again set about doing what they had attempted to
do since the Reagan years: eviscerate the infrastructure of laws and regulations
that protect the environment. For twenty-five years it has been like the zombie
that keeps coming back from the grave.
The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush's chief of staff and
former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card quietly initiated a moratorium on all
recently adopted regulations. Since then, the White House has enlisted every
federal agency that oversees environmental programs in a coordinated effort to
relax rules aimed at the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical industries as well as
automakers, real estate developers, corporate agribusiness and other industries.
Bush's Environmental Protection Agency has halted work on sixty-two
environmental standards, the federal Department of Agriculture has stopped work
on fifty-seven standards, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
has halted twenty-one new standards. The EPA completed just two major rules --
both under court order and both watered down at industry request -- compared to
twenty-three completed by the Clinton administration and fourteen by the Bush Sr.
administration in their first two years.
This onslaught is being coordinated through the White House Office of
Management and Budget -- or, more precisely, OMB's Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs, under the direction of John Graham, the engine-room mechanic
of the Bush stealth strategy. Graham's specialty is promoting changes in scientific
and economic assumptions that underlie government regulations -- such as
recalculating cost-benefit analyses to favor polluters. Before coming to the White
House, Graham was the founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis,
where he received funding from America's champion corporate polluters: Dow
Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa, Exxon, General Electric and General Motors.
Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to protect
Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental laws. Or they've
simply stopped enforcing them. Penalties imposed for environmental violations have
plummeted under Bush. The EPA has proposed eliminating 270 enforcement
staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level ever. Inspections of
polluting businesses have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal cases referred for federal
prosecution have dropped forty percent. The EPA measures its success by the
amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its own actions. Last year,
the EPA's two most senior career enforcement officials resigned after decades of
service. They cited the administration's refusal to carry out environmental laws.
The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have
embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative
promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program,
which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The
administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming
instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging.
In a March 2003 memo to Republican leadership, pollster Frank Luntz frankly
outlined the White House strategy on energy and the environment: "The
environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general and
President Bush in particular are most vulnerable," he wrote, cautioning that the
public views Republicans as being "in the pockets of corporate fat cats who rub
their hands together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute America for fun
and profit." Luntz warned, "Not only do we risk losing the swing vote, but our
suburban female base could abandon us as well." He recommended that
Republicans don the sheep's clothing of environmental rhetoric while dismantling
environmental laws.
I prosecute polluters on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance. As George W. Bush began his presidency, I
was involved in litigation against the factory-pork industry, which is a large source
of air and water pollution in America. Corporate pork factories cannot produce
more efficiently than traditional family farmers without violating several federal
environmental statutes. Industrial farms illegally dump millions of tons of untreated
fecal and toxic waste onto land and into the air and water. Factory farms have
contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways, put tens of thousands of family
farmers and fishermen out of work, killed billions of fish, sickened consumers and
subjected millions of farm animals to unspeakable cruelty.
On behalf of several farm groups and fishermen, we sued Smithfield Foods and
won a decision that suggested that almost all of American factory farms were
violating the Clean Water Act. The Clinton EPA had also brought its own parallel
suits addressing chronic air and water violations by hog factories. But almost
immediately after taking office, the Bush administration ordered the EPA to halt its
Clean Air Act investigations of animal factories and weaken the water rules to allow
them to continue polluting indefinitely.
Several of my other national cases were similarly derailed. Eleven years ago, I sued
the EPA to stop massive fish kills at power plants. Using antiquated technology,
power plants often suck up the entire fresh water volume of large rivers, killing
obscene numbers of fish. Just one facility, the Salem nuclear plant in New Jersey,
kills more than 3 billion Delaware River fish each year, according to Martin Marietta,
the plant's own consultant. These fish kills are illegal, and in 2001 we finally won
our case. A federal judge ordered the EPA to issue regulations restricting
power-plant fish kills. But soon after President Bush's inauguration, the
administration replaced the proposed new rule with clever regulations designed to
allow the slaughter to continue unabated. The new administration also trumped
court decisions that would have enforced greater degrees of wetlands protection
and forbidden coal moguls from blasting off whole mountaintops to get at the coal
beneath.
The fishermen I represent are traditionally Republican. But, without exception, they
see this administration as the largest threat not just to their livelihoods but to
their values and their idea of what it means to be American. "Why," they'll ask, "is
the president allowing coal, oil, power and automotive interests to fix the game?"
Back to the Dark Ages
George w. Bush seems to be trying to take us all the way back to the Dark Ages
by undermining the very principles of our environmental rights, which civilized
nations have always recognized. Ancient Rome's Code of Justinian guaranteed the
use to all citizens of the "public trust" or commons -- those shared resources that
cannot be reduced to private property -- the air, flowing water, public lands,
wandering animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.
When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages, feudal kings began
to privatize the commons. In the early thirteenth century, when King John also
attempted to sell off England's fisheries and erect navigational tolls on the Thames,
his subjects rose up and confronted him at Runnymede, forcing him to sign the
Magna Carta, which includes provisions guaranteeing the rights of free access to
fisheries and waters.
Clean-air laws in England, passed in the fourteenth century, made it a capital
offense to burn coal in London, and violators were executed for the crime. These
"public trust" rights to unspoiled air, water and wildlife descended to the people of
the United States following the American Revolution. Until 1870, a factory releasing
even small amounts of smoke onto public or private property was operating illegally.
But during the Gilded Age, when the corporate robber barons captured the political
and judicial systems, those rights were stolen from the American people. As the
Industrial Revolution morphed into the postwar industrial boom, Americans found
themselves paying a high price for the resulting pollution. The wake-up call came in
the late Sixties, when Lake Erie was declared dead and Cleveland's Cuyahoga River
exploded in colossal infernos.
In 1970, more than 20 million Americans took to the streets protesting the state
of the environment on the first Earth Day. Whether they knew it or not, they were
demanding a return of ancient rights.
During the next few years, Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental
statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered
Species Act, and it created the Environmental Protection Agency to apply and
enforce these new laws. Polluters would be held accountable; those planning to use
the commons would have to compile environmental-impact statements and hold
public hearings; citizens were given the power to prosecute environmental crimes.
Right-to-know and toxic-inventory laws made government and industry more
transparent on the local level and our nation more democratic. Even the most
vulnerable Americans could now participate in the dialogue that determines the
destinies of their communities.
Earth Day caught polluters off guard. But in the next thirty years, they mounted
an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive counterattack to undermine these
laws. The Bush administration is a culmination of their three-decade campaign.
Strangling the Environment
In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan declared, "I am a Sagebrush Rebel," marking a
major turning point of the modern anti-environmental movement. In the early
1980s, the Western extractive industries, led by one of Colorado's worst polluters,
brewer Joseph Coors, organized the Sagebrush Rebellion, a coalition of industry
money and right-wing ideologues that helped elect Reagan president. The big
polluters who started the Sagebrush Rebellion were successful because they
managed to broaden their constituency with anti-regulatory, anti-labor and
anti-environmental rhetoric that had great appeal both among Christian
fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and in certain
Western communities where hostility to government is deeply rooted. Big polluters
found that they could organize this discontent into a potent political force that
possessed the two ingredients of power in American democracy: money and
intensity. Meanwhile, innovations in direct-mail and computer technologies gave this
alliance of dark populists and polluters a deafening voice in American government.
Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976 to bring lawsuits
designed to enrich giant corporations, limit civil rights and attack unions,
homosexuals and minorities. He also founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation,
to provide a philosophical underpinning for the anti-environmental movement.
While the foundation and its imitators -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the
American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Federalist Society, the
Marshall Institute and others -- claim to advocate free markets and property rights,
their agenda is more pro-pollution than anything else. From its conception, the
Heritage Foundation and its neoconservative cronies urged followers to "strangle
the environmental movement," which Heritage named "the greatest single threat to
the American economy." Ronald Reagan's victory gave Heritage Foundation and the
Mountain States Legal Foundation immeasurable clout. Heritage became known as
Reagan's "shadow government," and its 2,000-page manifesto, "Mandate for
Change," became a blueprint for his administration. Coors handpicked his Colorado
associates: Anne Gorsuch became the EPA administrator; her husband, Robert
Burford, a cattle baron who had vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land
Management, was selected to head that very agency. Most notorious, Coors chose
James Watt, president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, as the secretary
of the interior. Watt was a proponent of "dominion theology," an authoritarian
Christian heresy that advocates man's duty to "subdue" nature. His deep faith in
laissez-faire capitalism and apocalyptic Christianity led Secretary Watt to set about
dismantling his department and distributing its assets rather than managing them
for future generations. During a Senate hearing, he cited the approaching
Apocalypse to explain why he was giving away America's sacred places at fire-sale
prices: "I do not know how many future generations we can count on before the
Lord returns."
Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted EPA's budget by sixty percent,
crippling its ability to write regulations or enforce the law. She appointed lobbyists
fresh from their hitches with the paper, asbestos, chemical and oil companies to
run each of the principal agency departments. Her chief counsel was an Exxon
lawyer; her head of enforcement was from General Motors.
These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt. By 1983, more than
a million Americans and all 125 American-Indian tribes had signed a petition
demanding Watt's removal. After being forced out of office, Watt was indicted on
twenty-five felony counts of influence-pedaling. Gorsuch and twenty-three of her
cronies were forced to resign following a congressional investigation of sweetheart
deals with polluters, including Coors. Her first deputy, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for
perjury.
The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper on the Sagebrush
Rebels, but they quickly regrouped as the "Wise Use" movement. Wise Use
founder, the timber-industry flack Ron Arnold, said, "Our goal is to destroy, to
eradicate the environmental movement. We want to be able to exploit the
environment for private gain, absolutely."
By 1994, Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the speaker's chair of the U.S.
House of Representatives and turn his anti-environmental manifesto, "The Contract
With America," into law. Gingrich's chief of environmental policy was Rep. Tom
DeLay, the one-time Houston exterminator who was determined to rid the world of
pesky pesticide regulations and to promote a biblical worldview. He targeted the
Endangered Species Act as the second-greatest threat to Texas after illegal aliens.
He also wanted to legalize the deadly pesticide DDT, and he routinely referred to
the EPA as "the Gestapo of government." In January 1995, DeLay invited a group
of 350 lobbyists representing some of America's biggest polluters to collaborate in
drafting legislation to dismantle federal health, safety and environmental laws.
Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle that they had to
conceal their radical agenda. Carefully eschewing public debates on their initiatives,
they mounted a stealth attack on America's environmental laws. Rather than
pursue a frontal assault against popular statutes such as the Endangered Species,
Clean Water and Clean Air acts, they tried to undermine these laws by attaching
silent riders to must-pass budget bills.
But the public got wise. Moderate Republicans teamed up with the Clinton
administration to block the worst of it. My group, the NRDC, as well as the Sierra
Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, generated more than 1 million
letters to Congress. When President Clinton shut down the government in
December 1995 rather than pass a budget bill spangled with anti-environmental
riders, the tide turned against Gingrich and DeLay. By the end of that month, even
conservatives disavowed the attack. "We lost the battle on the environment,"
DeLay conceded.
Undermining the Scientists
Today, with the presidency and both houses of Congress under the
anti-environmentalists' control, they are set to eviscerate the despised laws. White
House strategy is to promote its unpopular policies by lying about its agenda,
cheating on the science and stealing the language and rhetoric of the
environmental movement.
Even as Republican pollster Luntz acknowledged that the scientific evidence is
against the Republicans on issues like global warming, he advised them to find
scientists willing to hoodwink the public. "You need to continue to make the lack of
scientific certainty a primary issue," he told Republicans, "by becoming even more
active in recruiting experts sympathetic to your view."
In the meantime, he urged them to change their rhetoric. " 'Climate change,' " he
said, "is less threatening than 'global warming.' While global warming has
catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more
controllable and less emotional challenge."
The EPA's inspector general received broad attention for his August 21st, 2003,
finding that the White House pressured the agency to conceal the public-health
risks from poisoned air following the September 11th World Trade Center attacks.
But this 2001 deception is only one example of the administration's pattern of
strategic distortion. Earlier this year, it suppressed an EPA report warning that
millions of Americans, especially children, are being poisoned by mercury from
industrial sources.
This behavior is consistent throughout the Bush government. Consider the story
of James Zahn, a scientist at the Department of Agriculture who resigned after the
Bush administration suppressed his taxpayer-funded study proving that billions of
antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be carried daily across property lines from meat
factories into neighboring homes and farms. In March 2002, Zahn accepted my
invitation to present his findings to a convention of family-farm advocates in Iowa.
Several weeks before the April conference, pork-industry lobbyists learned of his
appearance and persuaded the Department of Agriculture to forbid him from
appearing. Zahn told me he had been ordered to cancel a dozen appearances at
county health departments and similar venues.
In May, the White House blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing
contamination by the chemical perchlorate -- the main ingredient in solid rocket
fuel. The administration froze federal regulations on perchlorate, even as new
research reveals alarmingly high levels of the chemical in the nation's drinking water
and food supply, including many grocery-store lettuces. Perchlorate pollution has
been linked to neurological problems, cancer and other life-threatening illnesses in
some twenty states. The Pentagon and several defense contractors face billions of
dollars in potential cleanup liability.
The administration's leading expert in manipulating scientific data is Interior
Secretary Gale Norton. During her nomination hearings, Norton promised not to
ideologically slant agency science. But as her friend Thomas Sansonetti, a coal-
industry lobbyist who is now assistant attorney general, predicted, "There won't be
any biologists or botanists to come in and pull the wool over her eyes."
In autumn 2001, Secretary Norton provided the Senate Committee on Energy and
Natural Resources with her agency's scientific assessment that Arctic oil drilling
would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward, Fish and
Wildlife Service biologists contacted the Public Employees for Environmental
Responsibility, which defends scientists and other professionals working in state
and federal environmental agencies. "The scientists provided us the science that
they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that she had given to
Congress a week later," said the group's executive director, Jeff Ruch. There were
seventeen major substantive changes, all of them minimizing the reported impacts.
When Norton was asked about the alterations in October 2001, she dismissed
them as typographical errors.
Later, she and White House political adviser Karl Rove forced National Marine
Fisheries scientists to alter findings on the amount of water required for the
survival of salmon in Oregon's Klamath River, to ensure that large corporate farms
got a bigger share of the river water. As a result, more than 33,000 chinook and
coho salmon died -- the largest fish kill in the history of America. Mike Kelly, the
biologist who drafted the original opinion (and who has since been awarded federal
whistle-blower status), told me that the coho salmon is probably headed for
extinction. "Morale is low among scientists here," Kelly says. "We are under
pressure to get the right results. This administration is putting the species at risk
for political gain -- and not just in the Klamath."
Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive twelve-year study by
federal biologists detailing the effects that Arctic drilling would have on populations
of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists' report two weeks later
as a two-page paper showing no negative impact to wildlife. She also ordered
suppression of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service concluding that the
drilling would threaten polar-bear populations and violate the international treaty
protecting bears. She then instructed the Fish and Wildlife Service to redo the
report to "reflect the Interior Department's position." She suppressed findings that
mountaintop mining would cause "tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial
habitat" and a Park Service report that found that snowmobiles were hurting
Yellowstone's air quality, wildlife and the health of its visitors and employees.
Norton's Fish and Wildlife Service is the first ever not to voluntarily list a single
species as endangered or threatened. Her officials have blackballed scientists and
savaged studies to avoid listing the trumpeter swan, revoke the listing of the
grizzly bear and shrink the remnant habitat for the Florida panther. She disbanded
the service's oldest scientific advisory committee in order to halt protection of
desert fish in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas that are headed for extinction.
Interior career staffers and scientists say they are monitored by Norton's industry
appointees to ensure that future studies do not conflict with industry profit-making.
Cooking the Books on Global Warming
There is no scientific debate in which the White House has cooked the books more
than that of global warming. In the past two years the Bush administration has
altered, suppressed or attempted to discredit close to a dozen major reports on
the subject. These include a ten-year peer-reviewed study by the International
Panel on Climate Change, commissioned by the president's father in 1993 in his
own efforts to dodge what was already a virtual scientific consensus blaming
industrial emissions for global warming.
After disavowing the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration commissioned the
federal government's National Academy of Sciences to find holes in the IPCC
analysis. But this ploy backfired. The NAS not only confirmed the existence of
global warming and its connection to industrial greenhouse gases, it also predicted
that the effects of climate change would be worse than previously believed,
estimating that global temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.4 degrees by
2100.
A May 2002 report by scientists from the EPA, NASA and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, approved by Bush appointees at the Council on
Environmental Quality and submitted to the United Nations by the U.S., predicted
similarly catastrophic impacts. When confronted with the findings, Bush dismissed
it with his smirking condemnation: "I've read the report put out by the
bureaucracy. . . ."
Afterward, the White House acknowledged that, in fact, he hadn't. Having failed to
discredit the report with this untruth, George W. did what his father had done: He
promised to study the problem some more. Last fall, the White House announced
the creation of the Climate Research Initiative to study global warming. The earliest
results are due next fall. But the White House's draft plan for CRI was derided by
the NAS in February as a rehash of old studies and established science lacking
"most elements of a strategic plan."
In September 2002, administration censors released the annual EPA report on air
pollution without the agency's usual update on global warming, that section having
been deleted by Bush appointees at the White House. On June 19th, 2003, a
"State of the Environment" report commissioned by the EPA in 2001 was released
after language about global warming was excised by flat-earthers in the White
House. The redacted studies had included a 2001 report by the National Research
Council, commissioned by the White House. In their place was a piece of
propaganda financed by the American Petroleum Institute challenging these
conclusions.
This past July, EPA scientists leaked a study, which the agency had ordered
suppressed in May, showing that a Senate plan -- co-sponsored by Republican
Sen. John McCain -- to reduce the pollution that causes global warming could
achieve its goal at very small cost. Bush reacted by launching a $100 million
ten-year effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact, occurred
naturally, another delay tactic for the fossil-fuel barons at taxpayer expense.
Princeton geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer told me, "This administration likes to
emphasize what we don't know while ignoring or minimizing what we do know,
which is a prescription for paralysis on policy. It's hard to imagine what kind of
scientific evidence would suffice to convince the White House to take firm action on
global warming."
Across the board, the administration yields to Big Energy. At the request of
ExxonMobil, and with the help of a lobbying group working for coal-burning utility
Southern Co., the Bush administration orchestrated the removal of U.S. scientist
Robert Watson, the world-renowned former NASA atmospheric chemist who
headed the United Nations' IPCC. He was replaced by a little-known scientist from
New Delhi, India, who would be generally unavailable for congressional hearings.
The Bush administration now plans to contract out thousands of
environmental-science jobs to compliant industry consultants already in the habit
of massaging data to support corporate profit-taking, effectively making federal
science an arm of Karl Rove's political machine. The very ideologues who derided Bill
Clinton as a liar have institutionalized dishonesty and made it the reigning culture
of America's federal agencies. "At its worst," Oppenheimer says, "this approach
represents a serious erosion in the way a democracy deals with science."
Inside the Cheney Task Force
There is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking American
democracy than the White House's cozy relationship with the energy industry. It's
hard to find anyone on Bush's staff who does not have extensive corporate
connections, but fossil-fuel executives rule the roost. The energy industry
contributed more than $48.3 million to Republicans in the 2000 election cycle, with
$3 million to Bush. Now the investment has matured. Both Bush and Cheney came
out of the oil patch. Thirty-one of the Bush transition team's forty-eight members
had energy-industry ties. Bush's cabinet and White House staff is an
energy-industry dream team -- four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful
White House officials and more than twenty high-level appointees are alumni of the
industry and its allies.
The potential for corruption is staggering. Take the case of J. Steven Griles, deputy
secretary of the Interior Department. During the first Reagan administration, Griles
worked directly under James Watt at Interior, where he helped the coal industry
evade prohibitions against mountaintop-removal strip mining. In 1989, Griles left
government to work as a mining executive and then as a lobbyist with National
Environmental Strategies, a Washington, D.C., firm that represented the National
Mining Association and Dominion Resources, one of the nation's largest power
producers. When Griles got his new job at Interior, the National Mining Association
hailed him as "an ally of the industry." It's bad enough that a former mining
lobbyist was put in charge of regulating mining on public land. But it turns out that
Griles is still on the industry's payroll. In 2001, he sold his client base to his
partner Marc Himmelstein for four annual payments of $284,000, making Griles, in
effect, a continuing partner in the firm.
Because Griles was an oil and mining lobbyist, the Senate made him agree in writing
that he would avoid contact with his former clients as a condition of his
confirmation. Griles has nevertheless repeatedly met with former coal clients to
discuss new rules allowing mountaintop mining in Appalachia and destructive
coal-bed methane drilling in Wyoming. He also met with his former oil clients about
offshore leases. These meetings prompted Sen. Joseph Lieberman to ask the
Interior Department to investigate Griles. With Republicans in control of
congressional committees, no subpoenas have interrupted the Griles scandals.
With its operatives in place, the Bush energy plan became an orgy of industry
plunder. Days after his inauguration, Bush launched the National Energy Policy
Development Group, chaired by Cheney. For three months, the task force held
closed-door meetings with energy-industry representatives - then refused to
disclose the names of the participants.
For the first time in history, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office sued the
executive branch, for access to these records. NRDC put in a Freedom of
Information Act request, and when Cheney did not respond, we also sued. On
February 21st, 2002, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham and other agency officials to turn over the records relating to
their participation in the work of the energy task force. Under this court order,
NRDC has obtained some 20,000 documents. Although none of the logs on the
vice president's meetings have been released yet and the pages were heavily
redacted to prevent disclosure of useful information, the documents still allow
glimpses of the process.
The task force comprised Cabinet secretaries and other high-level administration
officials with energy-industry pedigrees. The undisputed leader was Cheney, who
hails from Wyoming, the nation's largest coal producer, and who, for six previous
years, was CEO of Halliburton, the oil-service company. Treasury Secretary Paul
O'Neill was chairman of the Aluminum Company of America for thirteen years.
Aluminum-industry profits are directly related to energy prices. O'Neill promised to
immediately sell his extensive stock holdings in his former company (worth more
than $100 million) to avoid conflicts of interest, but he delayed the sale until after
the energy plan was released. By then, thanks partly to the administration's energy
policies, Alcoa's stock had risen thirty percent. Energy Secretary Abraham, a
former one-term senator from Michigan, received $700,000 from the auto industry
in his losing 2000 campaign, more than any other Senate candidate. At Energy,
Abraham led the administration effort to scuttle fuel-economy standards, allow
SUVs to escape fuel-efficiency minimums and create obscene tax incentives for
Americans to buy the largest gas guzzlers.
Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, sat next to
Abraham on the task force. Allbaugh's wife, Diane, is an energy-industry lobbyist
and represents three firms -- Reliant Energy, Entergy and TXU, each of which paid
her $20,000 in the three months of the task force's deliberation. Joe Allbaugh
participated in task-force meetings on issues directly affecting those companies,
including debates about environmental rules for power plants and -- his wife's
specialty -- electricity deregulation.
Commerce Secretary Don Evans, an old friend of the president from their early
days in the oil business, was CEO of Tom Brown Inc., a Denver oil-and-gas
company, and a trustee of another drilling firm. Interior Secretary Gale Norton, a
mining-industry lawyer, accepted nearly $800,000 from the energy industry during
her 1996 run in Colorado for the U.S. Senate.
In the winter and spring of 2001, executives and lobbyists from the oil, coal,
electric-utility and nuclear industries tramped in and out of the Cabinet room and
Cheney's office. Many of the lobbyists had just left posts inside Bush's presidential
campaign to work for companies that had donated lavishly to that effort.
Companies that made large contributions were given special access. Executives
from Enron Corp., which contributed $2.5 million to the GOP from 1999 to 2002,
had contact with the task force at least ten times, including six face-to-face
meetings between top officials and Cheney.
After one meeting with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Cheney dismissed California Gov.
Gray Davis' request to cap the state's energy prices. That denial would enrich
Enron and nearly bankrupt California. It has since emerged that the state's energy
crisis was largely engineered by Enron. According to the New York Times, the
task-force staff circulated a memo that suggested "utilizing" the crisis to justify
expanded oil and gas drilling. President Bush and others would cite the California
crisis to call for drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Energy companies that
had not ponied up remained under pressure to give to Republicans. When Westar
Energy's chief executive was indicted for fraud, investigators found an e-mail
written by Westar executives describing solicitations by Republican politicians for a
political action committee controlled by Tom DeLay as the price for a "seat at the
table" with the task force.
Task-force members began each meeting with industry lobbyists by announcing
that the session was off the record and that participants were to share no
documents. A National Mining Association official told reporters that the industry
managed to control the energy plan by keeping the process secret. "We've
probably had as much input as anybody else in town," he said. "I have to take my
hat off to them -- they've been able to keep a lid on it."
When it was suggested that access to the administration was for sale, Cheney
hardly apologized. "Just because somebody makes a campaign contribution doesn't
mean that they should be denied the opportunity to express their view to
government officials," he said. Although they met with hundreds of industry
officials, Cheney and Abraham refused to meet with any environmental groups.
Cheney made one exception to the secrecy policy: On May 15th, 2001, the day
before the task force sent its plan to the president, CEOs from wind-, solar- and
geothermal-energy companies were granted a short meeting with Cheney.
Afterward, they were led into the Rose Garden for a press conference and a photo
op.
While peddling influence to energy tycoons, the White House quietly dropped
criminal and civil charges against Koch Industries, America's largest privately held
oil company. Koch faced a ninety-seven-count federal felony indictment and $357
million in fines for knowingly releasing ninety metric tons of carcinogenic benzene
and concealing the releases from federal regulators. Koch executives contributed
$800,000 to Bush's presidential campaign and to other top Republicans.
Last March, the Federal Trade Commission dropped a Clinton-era investigation of
price gouging by the oil and gas industries, even as Duke Energy, a principal target
of the probe, admitted to selling electricity in California for more than double the
highest previously reported price. The Bush administration said that the industry
deserved a "gentler approach." Administration officials also winked at a scam
involving a half-dozen oil companies cheating the government out of $100 million
per year in royalty payments.
Southern Co. was among the most adept advocates for its own self-interest. The
company, which contributed $1.6 million to Republicans from 1999 to 2002, met
with Cheney's task force seven times. Faced with a series of EPA prosecutions at
power plants violating air-quality standards, the company retained Haley Barbour,
former Republican National Committee chairman and now governor-elect of
Mississippi, to lobby the administration to ignore Southern's violations. The White
House then forced the Justice Department to drop the prosecution. Justice lawyers
were "astounded" that the administration would interfere in a law-enforcement
matter that was "supposed to be out of bounds from politics." The EPA's chief
enforcement officer, Eric Schaeffer, resigned. "With the Bush administration,
whether or not environmental laws are enforced depends on who you know,"
Schaeffer told me. "If you've got a good lobbyist, you can just buy your way out of
trouble."
Along with Barbour, Southern retained current Republican National Committee
chairman and former Montana Gov. Marc Racicot. Barbour and Racicot repeatedly
conferred with Abraham and Cheney, urging them to ease limits on carbon-dioxide
pollution from power plants and to gut the Clean Air Act. On May 17th, 2001, the
White House released its energy plan. Among the recommendations were
exempting old power plants from Clean Air Act compliance and adopting Barbour's
arguments about carbon-dioxide restrictions. Barbour repaid the favor that week
by raising $250,000 at a May 21st GOP gala honoring Bush. Southern donated
$150,000 to the effort.
Cheney's task force had at least nineteen contacts with officials from the
nuclear-energy industry -- whose trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute,
donated $100,000 to the Bush inauguration gala and $437,000 to Republicans
from 1999 to 2002. The report recommended loosening environmental controls on
the industry, reducing public participation in the siting of nuclear plants and adding
billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry. Cheney wasn't embarrassed
to reward his old cronies at Halliburton, either. The final draft of the task-force
report praises a gas-recovery technique controlled by Halliburton - even though an
earlier draft had criticized the technology. The technique, which has been linked to
the contamination of aquifers, is currently being investigated by the EPA.
Somehow, that got edited out of the report.
Big Coal and the Destruction of Appalachia
Coal companies enjoyed perhaps the biggest payoff. At the West Virginia Coal
Association's annual conference in May 2002, president William D. Raney assured
150 industry moguls, "You did everything you could to elect a Republican
president." Now, he said, "you are already seeing in his actions the payback."
Peabody Energy, the world's largest coal company and a major contributor to the
Bush campaign, was one of the first to cash in. Immediately after his inauguration,
Bush appointed two executives from Peabody and one from its Black Beauty
subsidiary to his energy advisory team.
When the task force released its final report, it recommended accelerating coal
production and spending $2 billion in federal subsidies for research to make
coal-fired electricity cleaner. Five days later, Peabody issued a public-stock offering,
raising $60 million more than analysts had predicted. Company vice president Fred
Palmer credited the Bush administration. "I am sure it affected the valuation of the
stock," he told the Los Angeles Times.
Peabody also wanted to build the largest coal-fired power plant in thirty years
upwind of Mammoth Cave National Park in Kentucky, a designated UNESCO World
Heritage site and International Biosphere Reserve. With arm-twisting from Deputy
Interior Secretary Steven Griles and another $450,000 in GOP contributions,
Peabody got what it wanted. A study on the air impacts was suppressed, and park
scientists who feared that several endangered might go extinct due to mercury and
acid-rain deposits were silenced.
At the Senate's request, Griles had signed a "statement of disqualification" on
August 1st, 2001, committing himself to avoiding issues affecting his former
clients. Three days later, he nevertheless appeared before the West Virginia Coal
Association and promised executives that "we will fix the federal rules very soon on
water and soil placement." That was fancy language for pushing whole
mountaintops into valleys, a practice worth billions to the industry. As a Reagan
official, Griles helped devise the practice, which a federal court declared illegal in
2002, after 1,200 miles of streambeds had been filled and 380,000 acres of
Appalachian forestlands had been rendered barren moonscapes.
Now Griles was promising his former coal clients he would fix these rules. In May
2002, the EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers adopted the language
recommended by his former client, the National Mining Association. Had Griles not
intervened, the practice of mountaintop-removal mining would have been severely
restricted. Griles also pushed EPA deputy administrator Linda Fisher to overrule
career personnel in the agency's Denver office who had given a devastating
assessment to a proposal to produce coal-bed methane gas in the Powder River
basin in Wyoming. Although Griles had recused himself from any discussion of this
subject because it would directly enrich his former clients, he worked aggressively
behind the scenes on behalf of a proposal to build 51,000 wells. The project will
require 26,000 miles of new roads and 48,000 miles of pipeline, and will foul
pristine landscapes with trillions of gallons of toxic wastewater.
Blueprint for Plunder
The energy-task-force plan is a $20 billion subsidy to the oil, coal and nuclear
industries, which are already swimming in record revenues. In May 2003, as the
House passed the plan and as the rest of the nation stagnated in a recession
abetted by high oil prices, Exxon announced that its profits had tripled from the
previous quarter's record earnings. The energy plan recommends opening
protected lands and waters to oil and gas drilling and building up to 1,900
electric-power plants. National treasures such as the California and Florida coasts,
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the areas around Yellowstone Park will be
opened for plunder for the trivial amounts of fossil fuels that they contain. While
increasing reliance on oil, coal and nuclear power, the plan cuts the budget for
research into energy efficiency and alternative power sources by nearly a third.
"Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue," Cheney explained, but it should
not be the basis of "comprehensive energy policy."
As if to prove that point, Republicans simultaneously eliminated the tax credit that
had encouraged Americans to buy gas-saving hybrid cars, and weakened efficiency
standards for everything from air conditioners to automobiles. They also created
an obscene $100,000 tax break for Hummers and the thirty-eight biggest gas
guzzlers. Then, adding insult to injury, the Energy Department robbed $135,615
from the anemic solar, renewables and energy-conservation budget to produce
10,000 copies of the White House's energy plan.
To lobby for the plan, more than 400 industry groups enlisted in the Alliance for
Energy and Economic Growth, a coalition created by oil, mining and nuclear
interests and guided by the White House. It cost $5,000 to join, "a very low price,"
according to Republican lobbyist Wayne Valis. The prerequisite for joining, he wrote
in a memo, was that members "must agree to support the Bush energy proposal in
its entirety and not lobby for changes." Within two months, members had
contributed more than $1 million. The price for disloyalty was expulsion from the
coalition and possible reprisal by the administration. "I have been advised," wrote
Valis, "that this White House 'will have a long memory.' "
The plan represents a massive transfer of wealth from the public to the energy
sector. Indeed, Bush views his massive tax cuts as a way of helping Americans pay
for inflated energy bills. "If I had my way," he declared, "I'd have [the tax cuts] in
place tomorrow so that people would have money in their pockets to deal with high
energy prices."
Looting the Commons
Although congress will have its final vote on the plan in November, the White
House has already devised ways to implement most of its worst provisions without
congressional interference. In October 2001, the administration removed the
Interior Department's power to veto mining permits, even if the mining would
cause "substantial and irreparable harm" to the environment. That December, Bush
and congressional Republicans passed an "economic-stimulus package" that
proposed $2.4 billion worth of tax breaks, credits and loopholes for Chevron,
Texaco, Enron and General Electric. The following February, the White House
announced it would abandon regulations for three major pollutants -- mercury,
sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide.
Early in the Bush administration, Vice President Cheney had solicited an industry
wish list from the United States Energy Association, the lobbying arm for trade
associations including the American Petroleum Institute, the National Mining
Association, the Nuclear Energy Institute and the Edison Institute. The USEA
responded by providing 105 specific recommendations from its members for
plundering our natural resources and polluting America's air and water. In a speech
to the group in June 2002, Energy Secretary Abraham reported that the
administration had already implemented three-quarters of the industry's
recommendations and predicted the rest would pass through Congress shortly.
On August 27th, 2002 - while most of America was heading off for a Labor Day
weekend -- the administration announced that it would redefine carbon dioxide, the
primary cause of global warming, so that it would no longer be considered a
pollutant and would therefore not be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.
The next day, the White House repealed the act's "new source review" provision,
which requires companies to modernize pollution control when they modify their
plants.
According to the National Academy of Sciences, the White House rollback will cause
30,000 Americans to die prematurely each year. Although the regulation will
probably be reversed in the courts, the damage will have been done, and power
utilities such as Southern Co. will escape criminal prosecution. As soon as the new
regulations were announced, John Pemberton, chief of staff to the EPA's assistant
administrator for air, left the agency to work for Southern. The EPA's congressional
office chief also left, to join Southern's lobbying shop, Bracewell, Patterson.
By summer 2003, the White House had become a virtual pi-ata for energy moguls.
In August, the administration proposed limiting the authority of states to object to
offshore-drilling decisions, and it ordered federal land managers across the West to
ease environmental restrictions for oil and gas drilling in national forests. The White
House also proposed removing federal protections for most American wetlands and
streams. As an astounded Republican, Rep. Christopher Shays, told me, "It's
almost like they want to alienate people who care about the environment, as if they
believe that this will help them with their core."
EPA: From Bad to Worse
On August 30th, president bush nominated Utah's three-term Republican Gov.
Mike Leavitt to replace his beleaguered EPA head, Christine Todd Whitman, who
was driven from office, humiliated in even her paltry efforts to moderate the pillage.
In October, Leavitt was confirmed by the Senate.
Like Gale Norton, Leavitt has a winning personality and a disastrous environmental
record. Under his leadership, Utah tied for last as the state with the worst
environmental enforcement record and ranked second-worst (behind Texas) for
both air quality and toxic releases. As governor, Leavitt displayed the same
contempt for science that has characterized the Bush administration. He fired more
than seventy scientists employed by state agencies for producing studies that
challenged his political agenda. He fired a state enforcement officer who penalized
one of Leavitt's family fish farms for introducing whirling disease into Utah,
devastating the state's wild-trout populations.
Leavitt has a penchant for backdoor deals to please corporate polluters. Last year
he resurrected a frivolous and moribund Utah lawsuit against the Interior
Department and then settled the suit behind closed doors without public
involvement, stripping 6 million acres of wilderness protections. This track record
does not reflect the independence, sense of stewardship and respect for science
and law that most Americans have the right to expect in our nation's chief
environmental guardian.
The Threat to Democracy
Generations of Americans will pay the Republican campaign debt to the energy
industry with global instability, depleted national coffers and increased vulnerability
to price shocks in the oil market.
They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. Pollution from
power plants and traffic smog will continue to skyrocket. Carbon-dioxide emissions
will aggravate global warming. Acid rain from Midwestern coal plants has already
sterilized half the lakes in the Adirondacks and destroyed the forest cover in the
high peaks of the Appalachian range up into Canada. The administration's attacks
on science and the law have put something even greater at risk. Americans need to
recognize that we are facing not just a threat to our environment but to our
values, and to our democracy.
Growing up, I was taught that communism leads to dictatorship and capitalism to
democracy. But as we've seen from the the Bush administration, the latter
proposition does not always hold. While free markets tend to democratize a
society, unfettered capitalism leads invariably to corporate control of government.
America's most visionary leaders have long warned against allowing corporate
power to dominate the political landscape. In 1863, in the depths of the Civil War,
Abraham Lincoln lamented, "I have the Confederacy before me and the bankers
behind me, and I fear the bankers most." Franklin Roosevelt echoed that sentiment
when he warned that "the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate
the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their
democratic state itself. That, in its essence, is fascism -- ownership of government
by an individual, by a group or by any controlling power."
Today, more than ever, it is critical for American citizens to understand the
difference between the free-market capitalism that made our country great and the
corporate cronyism that is now corrupting our political process, strangling
democracy and devouring our national treasures.
Corporate capitalists do not want free markets, they want dependable profits, and
their surest route is to crush competition by controlling government. The rise of
fascism across Europe in the 1930s offers many informative lessons on how
corporate power can undermine a democracy. In Spain, Germany and Italy,
industrialists allied themselves with right-wing leaders who used the provocation of
terrorist attacks, continual wars, and invocations of patriotism and homeland
security to tame the press, muzzle criticism by opponents and turn government
over to corporate control. Those governments tapped industrial executives to run
ministries and poured government money into corporate coffers with lucrative
contracts to prosecute wars and build infrastructure. They encouraged friendly
corporations to swallow media outlets, and they enriched the wealthiest classes,
privatized the commons and pared down constitutional rights, creating short-term
prosperity through pollution-based profits and constant wars. Benito Mussolini's
inside view of this process led him to complain that "fascism should really be called
'corporatism.' "
While the European democracies unraveled into fascism, America confronted the
same devastating Depression by reaffirming its democracy. It enacted
minimum-wage and Social Security laws to foster a middle class, passed income
taxes and anti-trust legislation to limit the power of corporations and the wealthy,
and commissioned parks, public lands and museums to create employment and
safeguard the commons.
The best way to judge the effectiveness of a democracy is to measure how it
allocates the goods of the land: Does the government protect the commonwealth
on behalf of all the community members, or does it allow wealth and political clout
to steal the commons from the people?
Today, George W. Bush and his court are treating our country as a grab bag for
the robber barons, doling out the commons to large polluters. Last year, as the
calamitous rollbacks multiplied, the corporate-owned TV networks devoted less
than four percent of their news minutes to environmental stories. If they knew the
truth, most Americans would share my fury that this president is allowing his
corporate cronies to steal America from our children.
For more information on the Bush administration's environmental actions, see The
Bush Record from NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council
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