Keith Epstein

The Other War

Iraq overshadows dismantled environmental protection

August 31, 2003

By KEITH EPSTEIN and JAN HOLLINGSWORTH
The Tampa Tribune/Media General

WASHINGTON – On the third Tuesday in May, the Bush administration scheduled two news events: One became the lead story of the day. The other was buried inside newspapers and newscasts – if it was reported at all.

The first elevated the nation’s terrorism threat index to level orange, or high risk.

The other touted the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative, a plan that would open some 30 million acres of protected forests to logging.

It was not the first time a critical homeland security development coincided with the unveiling of a controversial environmental policy decision.

Nor will it be the last, predict conservationists who accuse the Bush administration of using the war on terrorism to divert public attention from the systematic dismantling of laws and regulations that have for three decades protected the nation’s air, water and wild spaces.

“People are scared, people are depressed. This crew is taking advantage of that and I think that’s wrong,” said Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club.

Pope and others point to a series of national crises they say the administration has parlayed into opportunities to undermine environmental protections.

The California electricity crisis paved the way for a national energy policy that relies heavily on coal, oil and natural gas.

Western wildfires sparked the initiative to expand commercial logging on public lands.

Turmoil in the Middle East served as a rationale for drilling and mining in protected wilderness areas.

But it was the Sept. 11 attacks that provided a distraction for what conservationists call a sweeping and unprecedented assault on many of the nation’s landmark environmental laws.

The past two years have seen a flurry of initiatives that go to the heart of critical regulations meant to protect everything from the majestic sequoias of the Pacific Northwest to the asthmatic lungs of the youngest U.S. citizens.

This war, like the one waged on terrorists and Saddam Hussein’s government in Iraq, is not without casualties, said Greg Wetstone of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“This is about your children’s health, lead levels in blood, sewage spills in water where you swim, whether the air will aggravate emphysema and other lung problems, the availability of water,” he said.

“This is about quality of life.”

Homeland Insecurity

The Bush administration argues its actions and motives have been widely misinterpreted.

Top officials say they are merely bringing balance to regulations that have grown too cumbersome, too susceptible to legal challenges and that fail to take into account the need to encourage economic growth, to allow local control over local issues and to meet increasing energy demands.

They say they are, for the first time, imposing discipline on the highly emotional process of weighing competing interests.

“I’m not surprised that what we do isn’t always popular,” said John Graham, a regulatory administrator with the federal Office of Management and Budget. “The role of cost-benefit analysis has always been controversial in the eyes of the greens,” or environmental activists.

And, of course, there is the compelling question of national security, which President Bush has cited as a driving force behind the administration’s quest for oil and gas on federal lands.

“We need an energy policy that helps our national security, an energy policy which makes us less reliant on foreign sources of energy,” Bush said this summer in a speech to employees of a Minnesota electronics company.

Theodore Roosevelt IV, great-grandson of the president who founded the national park system, called the administration’s national security arguments “wholly specious.”

“What is relevant is we haven’t used the opportunity we’ve had in the past to address excessive dependence on oil,” said Roosevelt, a conservationist who sits on the board of The Wilderness Society.

Indeed, the push to remove barriers to drilling, mining and logging in the nation’s parks, forests and wilderness began long before terrorists turned jetliners into guided missiles on U.S. soil.

Seventeen days before his inauguration in January 2001, the president-elect announced plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling.

By late February that year, the administration was working to redraw the boundaries of 22 national monuments designated under the federal Antiquities Act in the last months of the Clinton administration.

The stated purpose was to allow the drilling and mining environmentalists had urged President Clinton to block in granting the monument protections.

At the same time, the White House was pursuing oil and gas exploration in long-protected lands between two national parks in Utah.

On March 14, 2001, Bush announced his administration intended to look at “all public lands” for energy development.

Bush also was retreating from campaign promises to regulate power plant pollution and address global warming.

But by summer, public outcry had forced the administration to reverse some policies, including proposals that would have lowered the standard for arsenic in drinking water and eliminated the testing of school lunch meat for deadly bacteria.

“There was a sufficiently public spotlight on what they were doing that members of Congress were not inclined to go along with them,” Pope said.

Then came Sept. 11 and the prospect of a threat more compelling than tainted food and water.

“While you were weeping, the Justice Department stopped enforcing environmental laws,” Pope said.

Behind Closed Doors

Cloaked by the tears of a mourning nation, federal agencies quietly curtailed enforcement of environmental regulations, rolled back pollution laws, and relinquished public lands and resources to private enterprises.

The focus has been on identifying and expanding regulatory loopholes and forging quiet settlements to industry lawsuits, outside the legislative process and largely unnoticed by the media.

Some of the more controversial policies have been implemented near holidays or weekends.

A plan that significantly weakened provisions of the Clean Air Act was announced last year on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving and finalized on New Year’s Eve.

A rule that made national parks and other federal land vulnerable to development was published in the Federal Register on Christmas Day.

A permit to excavate a mine in the Montana wilderness was issued the day after Christmas; a ban on awarding federal contracts to repeat environmental offenders was scrapped the day after that.

Numerous other decisions were rendered just before 5 p.m. on Fridays as reporters and bureaucrats were headed out the door.

“We see a wholesale effort to shut the American public out of the process in many cases,” Wetstone said.

Administration spokesman Taylor Gross dismisses the allegation.

“The White House does not control what the media is reporting on,” Gross said. Nor, he added, does the timing of policy decisions reflect any particular agenda.

“A holiday or whatever other charge critics may put forward doesn’t play into White House policy with regards to protecting our environment.”

Meanwhile, Sylvia Lowrance and Eric Schaeffer – the two top enforcement officials at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency – resigned in 2002, with Schaeffer charging that the agency was failing to enforce federal laws.

Other agencies, such as the U.S. Forest Service and Department of the Interior, were engaged in out-of-court settlements, forfeiting federal protections for Utah’s wilderness, Yellowstone National Park’s air quality and the nation’s old-growth forests.

The strategy allowed the government to dramatically weaken environmental programs without undertaking the public comment periods required under traditional rule-making, Wetstone said.

In June, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a settlement in which Alaska’s Tongass National Forest would become exempt from the federal Roadless Rule, the subject of six years of rule-making and public hearings in which an unprecedented 2 million comments supported a ban on the construction of roads in wilderness areas.

The Tongass settlement opened the door to mining, logging and drilling in the largest remaining wilderness in the United States.

Congress had rejected the exemption just weeks before, when Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, tacked it onto the federal spending bill.

Mark Rey, an Agriculture Department undersecretary and former timber industry lobbyist who oversees the U.S. Forest Service, has promised in published reports that critics of some forest policy changes – and there are many – will be heard during a public comment period. He noted, too, that environmentalists can sue.

The same settlement strategy was first employed in Utah, where administration officials agreed in April not to enforce federal laws protecting that state’s wilderness.

“That’s not how the law gets changed in this country,” said Pope, of the Sierra Club. “It gets changed by Congress.”

The Department of the Interior maintains it is trying to apply common sense to managing public lands.

Utah Gov. Mike Leavitt, who was instrumental in forging the agreement that opens millions of acres to gas, oil and coal development, was named this month as Bush’s pick to head the EPA. The position was vacated by the moderate and embattled former governor of New Jersey, Christine Todd Whitman, in June.

Bush told reporters that Leavitt, “a trusted friend,” will come to the EPA “with a strong environmental record, a strong desire to improve what has taken place in the last three decades.”

Lauded by business and industry as “a consensus-builder” who has provided leadership on clean air issues in his state, the three-term Republican governor draws less favorable reviews from environmentalists. They point to Leavitt’s resistance to federal regulations on power plant pollution and protections for the wilderness.

Republican Legacy

Nearly a century has passed since President Theodore Roosevelt fixed the nation’s moral compass on conservation as a patriotic duty.

“He realized that protecting our natural resources is not a luxury – it’s essential,” said Jim DiPeso, policy director of Republicans for Environmental Protection, based in Albuquerque, N.M.

The moderate grass-roots organization sprouted in 1995, when its founders decided the party “had gone off the deep end” in its antienvironmental stance.

“Historically, the Republican party has been pro-conservation,” DiPeso said.

It was a Republican president – Richard Nixon – who in 1970 established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the landmark measures that mandated clean air and clean water would be the law of the land.

Although that environmental commitment faltered during President Reagan’s years, former President Bush, received generally good marks, especially on air quality issues.

During the 2000 campaign, some environmentalists expressed optimism that his son would carry out the ambitious environmental agenda he promoted.

“I think many people were hoping that once in office, he would carry on a tradition first set by his father,” said Frank O’Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust.

Those hopes were bolstered by Whitman, who echoed Bush’s campaign promises when she unveiled the EPA’s agenda in March 2001.

“She had the rug pulled out from her when some of the industries screamed bloody murder and called upon Vice President [Dick] Cheney to call off the cops,” O’Donnell said.

“I think that push became the starting point for a number of things that have become serious rollbacks.”

Two months ago, Whitman stepped down, saying she wanted to spend more time with her family.

In the Name of Science

Meanwhile, many of the environmental rollbacks were originating not in the EPA, but in the Office of Management and Budget, where Bush’s “regulatory czar,” Graham, was crunching cost-benefit numbers.

Graham’s office targeted 13 rules it deemed a “top priority” for change or elimination. The rules it wanted to change prevented mining public lands, building roads through national forests and other measures that stood between corporate America and the untouched wilderness.

Environmentalists have found the administration less than rigorous in its commitment to scientific integrity to achieve its goals.

The Interior Department, for example, set aside environmental studies and public comment to allow snowmobiles into Yellowstone despite EPA warnings air quality and human health could be impaired.

The criticism has come even from within. Former U.S. Forest Service Deputy Administrator Jim Furnish resigned last year as the administration was revising a forest management plan that was years in the making.

Although the original rule to govern logging and wildlife preservation underwent a “very rigorous and science-based process,” Furnish said, the proposed replacement did not.

Furnish, a 34-year veteran of the Forest Service, now works with Defenders of Wildlife.

Members of the scientific community also have complained the administration made appointments to health-related advisory committees based on ideology rather than scientific credentials.

Noting that Enron’s manipulation of the California power market and other controversies over environmental policy have created an image problem, O’Donnell, of the Clean Air Trust, said, “There is a public perception they are too close to polluters.”

A protracted legal battle between Congress and the administration threw a spotlight on the secrecy involved in forging the nation’s energy policy.

The administration refused to turn over pertinent documents requested by the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress. The GAO last week reported that Vice President Cheney met privately with and relied heavily upon representatives and lobbyists for petroleum, coal, nuclear, natural gas and power industries in shaping the plan.

The Power Of Words

Republican pollster Frank Luntz, architect of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Contract with America in the mid-1990s, offered Republican candidates and leaders advice on how to deal with the environmental image “problem” in a confidential memo distributed before November’s midterm elections.

Luntz advised the candidates to refer to themselves as “conservationists.” He urged them to adopt language that would place unpopular policies in a more positive light.

Thus a plan to open public lands to commercial logging as a way to prevent forest fires became the Healthy Forests Initiative. A major rollback of Clean Air Act provisions, which prompted several states to join in a lawsuit against the federal government, carries the name Clear Skies.

While students of Luntz donned the mantle of conservationists, their critics were anointed with another label: environmental extremists.

Leading the charge within the Bush administration was James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. He asserted, “The sharpest criticism comes from those who are entirely uncompromising.”

Connaughton, a former lobbyist for corporations that have created some of the largest Superfund toxic waste sites, said regulations aren’t always the best solution to environmental problems.

“I know that Americans understand the need for balance because that’s how they lead their own lives – not by being extremist but by constantly balancing work and play and taking care of the future for their children,” he said.

DiPeso, of Republicans for Environmental Protection, calls the extremist label “just plain insulting.”

“We don’t think it’s extreme to be concerned about keeping the air and water clean, or protecting heritage lands,” he said. “If anything, policies that would roll back protections we’ve had for the past 30 years are extreme.”

Economic Rationale

The object should be to strike “a good balance between our economic appetites, social aspirations and environmental aspirations,” Connaughton said.

The environmental community agrees.

It could not be more clear that economic and environmental viability are very much in sync, said Wetstone, of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

“We’ve seen huge progress on the environmental front as the economy continued to grow.”

Conversely, he said, the economy and the environment have both been on the decline.

“The history of the law has shown we can be aggressive in enforcing the law and still have a healthy economy,” he said. “But few companies are going to volunteer to clean up unless they think the law is going to be applied equitably.”

Undaunted by the rising tide of resistance from the environmentalists, the administration and some in Congress continue to press an agenda that elicited widespread protest less than two years earlier.

For the most part, environmental groups were silenced by the prospect of criticizing the policies of a president whose popularity soared as he waged a global war on terrorism.

“The only reason the environmental assault has been sustained as long as it has is by sustaining a crisis atmosphere around national security,” Wetstone said.

But the environmental community is fighting back in court, in televised advertisements and through petition drives.

Last month, more than 100 former park service officials signed a letter calling on Bush to end what they say are destructive park policies.

Also in July, nearly 200 members of the House, including 20 Republicans, unsuccessfully tried to block the administration’s forest policies, which included a proposal to eliminate public and scientific review.

However, a week later the lawmakers successfully blocked another Bush plan to put the jobs of 100 park service archaeologists up for bid in the private sector.

Recent court decisions also have gone against the administration.

On July 2, a federal district judge ruled the Department of Energy violated the law by granting itself authority to dodge costly cleanups of radioactive waste at U.S. weapons facilities.

Another court ruled earlier that the public has the right to enforce wilderness protections on public lands.

“We find ourselves struggling, using every resource we have, to hold onto the basic programs that have been broadly successful in improving the quality of life we have in this country,” Wetstone said.

“The good news is, there’s still time to turn the tide,” Pope said.

“But the longer we wait to pay attention to these things, the harder it will be to reverse the damage.”

(CHART) (C) WHO GUARDS THE ENVIRONMENT

Key posts in forging and enforcing the Bush administration’s environmental and public health policies are held by former lobbyists and lawyers with strong ties to industries that have long sought to weaken regulations.

Mike Leavitt, Nominated by President Bush to head the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency

Task: Directs implementation and enforcement of laws that protect human health and the natural environment.

The three-term governor of Utah was instrumental in forging an agreement last year with the Interior Department which lifted federal protections from millions of acres of that state’s wilderness.

John Ashcroft, Attorney General

Task: Enforces all federal laws, including those for environment and public health.

As a U.S. senator, Ashcroft’s opposition to environmental legislation earned him an overall score of 3.7 out of a possible 100 from the League of Conservation Voters.

Resources Division

Task: Enforces environmental law, defends against challenges.

A member of the Federalist Society, which opposes many environmental laws, Sansonetti served as chief legal adviser to the Department of the Interior during the first Bush administration. He went on to lobby for mining interests, including two major coal companies.

Dick Cheney, Vice President

Task: Constructs U.S. energy policy.

Cheney is former chief executive officer of Halliburton Co., an oil services company. It was awarded exclusive rights to about $7 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq, which were rescinded when criticism mounted, forcing the company to bid. The Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root helped construct Enron Field in Houston, and contributions linked to Enron helped pay for the Bush/Cheney 2000 presidential campaign and the fight against the Florida recount.

Task: Advises on environmental matters.

Connaughton represented General Electric and ASARCO, a minerals conglomerate, in past Superfund struggles with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. He lobbied on environmental issues for Alcoa and the Chemical Manufacturers Association.

Gale Norton, Secretary, Department of the Interior

Task: Administers policies and regulations for conservation of wildlife, natural resources and the management of public lands.

Norton was the lead attorney for the Mountain States Legal Foundation, founded by her mentor, ousted Interior Secretary James Watt, who aggressively sought to privatize public lands during the Reagan administration. She also is a founder of the Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy, a group funded by the National Mining Association, the Chemical Manufacturers Association and other major corporate interests.

Task: Second in command to Norton.

Griles is a James Watt protege who lobbied for the coal and oil industry. He voiced support for oil drilling off the coasts of California and Florida.

Donald Schregardus, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Environment, U.S. Navy, Environment and Installations Division.

Task: Oversees cleanups at contaminated Navy sites.

While Schregardus was director of the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, enforcement of cleanup at contaminated sites fell by more than 50 percent. Failures of the Ohio EPA under Schregardus were noted in a U.S. environmental report.

John Graham, Administrator, Office of Management and Budget, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs

Task: Advises on regulatory actions, does cost/benefit analysis of environmental regulations.

Graham was founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, which obtains much of its funding from Monsanto, Dow Chemical and other producers of dioxin. He devised a cost-benefit calculation related to air pollution which rates the life of each person 71 and older as having 38 percent less value than younger Americans.

Mark Rey, Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Department of Agriculture

Task: Oversees the management of 200 million acres of national forests and grasslands.

Rey worked for timber industry trade associations such as the National Forest Products Association and the American Paper Institute. He supported the “salvage rider” which suspended environmental laws to allow clear-cutting of old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

Source: Tribune researcher Buddy Jaudon

(CHART) CHANGING COURSE

Conservationists say since coming to office in January 2001, the Bush administration has engaged in an unprecedented retreat from environmental laws intended to protect public health, natural resources and heritage lands.

Public Lands

Nearly a third of the land in the United States is owned by the federal government, maintained by taxpayers and held in trust for all citizens. A number of Bush administration initiatives pave the way for roads, development, mining, logging, gas and oil exploration, and other commercial enterprises in the nation’s parks, forests and wilderness.

Air

The Clean Air Act, a critical public health statute, is under fire from industries faced with paying the costs of curbing pollution. Critics fault administration officials for announcing rollbacks last year on the days before Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day, when they were less likely to receive public attention and media scrutiny.

Water

Pollutants flowing into oceans, rivers, streams and underground aquifers contaminate drinking water and aquatic food supplies. Among actions that would weaken the Clean Water Act were a decision not to set standards for new pollutants and a retreat from federal protections for wetlands, which filter drinking water and serve as breeding and feeding grounds for migratory birds.

Energy

Vice President Dick Cheney’s national energy policy calls for extracting coal, oil and gas from public lands and relaxing environmental safeguards. Conservation is not a significant component of the plan. Federal agencies have balked at recommending or imposing rules opposed by industry, such as higher efficiency standards for vehicles and air conditioners.

Security

The Department of Defense is seeking exemptions from environmental laws in the name of national security. Congress is contemplating exemptions for the government from the Endangered Species Act. Not yet addressed are proposals that would suspend protections for air quality, cleanups at military Superfund sites and water contamination from nuclear weapons.

HOW IT’S CHANGED

Altered policies, subtle changes in enforcement, suspension of rules and private settlements are among tools chipping at earlier environmental safeguards. There are few frontal assaults that make headlines.

The Bush administration’s competitive sourcing plan would put control of national parks, forests, monuments, wilderness and other open spaces in the hands of private companies and individuals not bound by federal ethics rules. The House has rejected the plan and the White House has threatened to veto the Department of the Interior’s budget without it. The Senate has not taken it up.

People 71 and older are 38 percent less valuable under an emerging approach to the cost-benefit analysis of environmental actions. Critics say policy-makers could allow more deaths by pollution because those older than 71 aren’t worth as much and thus keep down industry costs.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s two top enforcement officers resigned last year, one citing the administration’s failure to support regulatory action against polluters. The most recent federal budget proposal significantly cuts into enforcement positions at the agency.

In private settlements with states, administration officials are bypassing the legislative and regulatory rule-making process. In one, federal officials agreed not to enforce wilderness regulations in Utah. Another exempts Alaska’s Tongass National Forest from the federal roadless rule, action originally voted down by Congress and opposed by 2 million Americans who offered public comment.

When the Department of Energy granted itself authority to reclassify high-level radioactive waste to avoid costly cleanup at U.S. weapons facilities, a federal district judge ruled the agency violated the law. The agency has asked Congress for a new law that would allow it to abandon nuclear waste stored in tanks that are leaking into groundwater. The legislation has not been introduced.