Crimes Against Nature

[Guest guest]

http://www.rollingstone.com/features/nationalaffairs/featuregen.asp?pid=2154

 

Crimes Against Nature

 

Bush is sabotaging the laws that have protected America's environment for more

than thirty years

 

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 Food and Drug Administration has stopped work on

fifty-seven 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 (see " Bush's Energy-Industry All-Stars, " on Page

183).

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 species 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.

(From RS 937, December 11, 2003)

 

For more information on the Bush administration's environmental actions, see The

Bush Record from NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council

 

 

http://www.nrdc.org/bushrecord/default.asp

 

 

 

 

 

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