George W. and the Fossil Fuel Posse

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/envirohealth/19072/

 

George W. and the Fossil Fuel Posse

 

By David Helvarg, AlterNet

 

Posted on June 28, 2004,

http://www.alternet.org/story/19072/

Editor's Note: The following is an excerpt from the revised and updated edition

of David Helvarg's 'The War Against the Greens' (Johnson Books, June 2004).

 

When I wrote the first edition of " The War Against the Greens " in 1994 I

predicted that the violent " Wise Use " backlash against environmentalists created

by public lands industries like mining and timber might someday be superceded by

a more powerful force. I thought the threat of climate change might see the

emergence of a reactionary backlash supported by the largest industrial combine

in human history, the fossil fuel industry. Still I failed to predict they'd be

able to place one of their own in the Oval Office.

 

Today not only the President, but his father, his vice-president, his Secretary

of Commerce and National Security advisor are all petroleum industry alumnae.

Condoleezza Rice even had an oil tanker named after her. Chevron changed its

name after she was appointed to the White House. The story of the energy

industry's dollar-fueled ascent to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is one full of

drama, both high and low. There is also no lack of Oedipal irony -- not the

least of which is that the Wise Use backlash of the 1990s, which helped define

George W. Bush's hostile attitude toward the environment, is in large measure

the product of Western conservatives' loathing for his father.

 

" He [bush Sr.] had big shoes to fill (Reagan's) and the truth is we had no

access, so we were pissed, " recalls Ron Arnold a founding ideologue of Wise Use

and vice-president at the Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise.

 

" Not greatly enamored of him, " is how Grant Gerber, Arnold's early competitor on

the anti-enviro right remembers it. Today Gerber is involved in the Elko, Nevada

based Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, a Wise Use cowboy posse that illegally reopened a

Forest Service road closed to protect an endangered species of bull trout. This

bit of Fed-bashing didn't prevent the Bush administration from naming Demar

Dahl, president of the Shovel Brigade, to a Department of Interior advisory

panel on land use.

 

Intro To Nature 101

 

Certainly George W. identifies himself with the rugged cowboy image that Wise

Use has learned to cultivate and market. When President Putin of Russia came to

visit Bush at his 1,600-acre hobby ranch in Crawford, Texas back in 2001, he was

excited about the prospect of riding horses with America's Commander-in-Chief.

 

But he soon learned that, unlike Ronald Reagan, W. doesn't actually ride horses.

He prefers to drive around his ranch in a white Ford F-150 pick-up truck (Putin

got to ride shotgun). Bush also enjoys " clearing brush " with a chainsaw. His

ranch work, along with Dick Cheney's bird hunting and fly fishing, may be what

the President means when he speaks of his " appreciation of America's nature. "

 

If the personal is political, then Midland, Texas, where Bush spent his

formative years, could be thought of as his introduction to nature. Midland is a

Lone Star Eden much like Yellowstone National Park; if you took away

Yellowstone's bears, wolves, trees, mountains, lakes, rivers and geysers.

Midland is of course a flat, once dusty (since paved) Texas oil town closer to

gushers than geysers.

 

Although George W., unlike his father, failed to make any money in oil, he did

work in the industry in the years before he stopped drinking and found Jesus

(and either providentially or through insider trading, made $848,000 dollars

selling off his oil stock just before his former company went bankrupt). It was

also Texas oil money that helped win him elected office as Governor of Texas and

later helped fund his campaign for President of the United States.

 

Lack of Energy

 

Within weeks of Bush taking office California began experiencing energy

shortages and blackouts, the result of deregulation of its energy market that

made the state vulnerable to supply manipulations by Enron and other

out-of-state companies. It was only after the feds -- reluctantly -- capped

wholesale energy prices that the shortages went away.

 

Deregulation and long-distance energy-trading of electricity across a

dilapidated power grid would also contribute to the massive Northeast power

blackout of August 2003. FirstEnergy, the nation's fifth largest utility that

set off the cascading power failure had a long history of neglect, including a

shut-down of its nuclear power plant and a major air pollution conviction days

before the blackout. Still it managed to remain well plugged in to Washington,

contributing over $640,000 to the Republican Party in 2000.

 

In early 2001 Bush claimed the country was facing an energy supply crisis and

established a White House taskforce under Vice President Dick Cheney to

formulate an oil production plan. The taskforce was filled with Bush " Pioneers "

-- industry folks like Enron CEO (and Bush family friend) Ken Lay, who'd raised

over $100,000 in individual contributions for Bush's election campaign.

FirstEnergy CEO Anthony Alexander was another Pioneer who met with Cheney to

discuss energy policy.

 

Although the Vice President's office denied the General Accounting Office, the

investigative arm of Congress, access to taskforce records, or even a list of

who participated, one corporate figure known to be behind the administration's

energy plan was Cheney himself. In 1999, as CEO of Halliburton, the oil supply

(and now war contracting) company, he'd been a member of the Petroleum Council,

an advisory group to the Department of Energy.

 

That year Cheney and his colleagues issued a report calling for the opening of

the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and wilderness areas of the West to fossil

fuel development, proposals incorporated into the White House plan. The first

point of the 25-point Wise Use Agenda also calls for opening up the Arctic

National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. This is followed by proposals to log

the Tongass National Forest of Alaska (which the Bush administration approved in

late 2003), and all other old-growth trees on public lands (with a flip

suggestion that replacing " decadent " old trees with carbon-dioxide-absorbing

young tree farms will reduce global warming).

 

The Agenda also calls for gutting the Endangered Species Act, opening wilderness

to commercial development and motorized recreation, and giving management of

National Parks over to private firms, which the administration is promoting as

" outsourcing. "

 

Like Father, Like Son -- Only More

 

It's worth remembering that when the Wise Use Agenda came out in 1988 it was

seen as an extractive industry wish list, one that the first Bush White House

would never have openly embraced. However, returning to the Oedipal theme, while

the father raised taxes, the son carried out the most extensive tax-cuts in US

history; while the father chased Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait, the son finished

off Saddam's regime and began a war of occupation. While the father was

distrusted by the hard right of his party, the son is seen as one of their own;

and while the first Bush was rated as having a mixed record on the environment,

the same can not be said for his son.

 

In his 2004 State of the Union address President Bush failed to mention the

environment. In his 2003 State of the Union address he called for investing in

hydrogen powered cars. After initial reluctance the administration also

implemented Clinton-era proposals to reduce arsenic in drinking water and reduce

air pollution from diesel trucks and bulldozers. And it ordered GE to clean up

PCB contaminants in the Hudson River.

 

The Washington press corps liked to portray Bush's first EPA administrator,

former New Jersey Governor Christie Todd Whitman, as the administration's token

environmentalist. This goes back to her mistaken assumption early on that the

President would stick to his 2000 campaign pledge to reduce global warming CO2

emissions.

 

In fact within two months of taking office the President reneged on that pledge,

some of his defenders arguing that he hadn't understood what he was saying. He

also withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Accord on Climate Change signed

by over 160 nations.

 

In the face of firm scientific consensus that human-enhanced climate change

constitutes a clear and present danger, the President insisted there was still

" an incomplete state of scientific knowledge of the causes of, and solutions to,

global climate change. "

 

In arguing this he quoted discredited statistics from the Greening Earth

Society, a front group created by the coal-powered Western Fuels Association

that argues the benefits of global warming. He then ordered the prestigious

National Academies of Science to review the state of the science. Like dozens of

previous assessments their report concluded that human activities were, " causing

surface air temperature and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise. "

 

'Clear Skies,' Dirty Air

 

In 2002 the EPA put out another report identifying how the United States will

experience dramatic changes in the coming decades resulting from climate change,

including water shortages, extreme weather events, and infestations of

disease-bearing insects (mosquito-borne Dengue fever and West Nile virus being

two examples).

 

" I read the report put out by the bureaucracy, " Bush then told reporters at a

press conference, assuring them he remained skeptical about the whole business.

His former spokesman Ari Fleischer later admitted that the president hadn't

actually " read " the report, but had been briefed on it.

 

One of the conclusions of the EPA's " Climate Action Report, " is that global

warming will contribute to an increase in US air pollution.

 

Still, by the time Whitman left the EPA in June 2003, pollution enforcement at

the agency had dropped 40%. " We were all thrilled when she left, " an EPA

enforcement attorney told me shortly after her departure. " We were cheering. "

 

Whitman also backed away from clean air standards she had endorsed as Governor

of New Jersey, instead touting a White House " Clear Skies " initiative of market

trading in airborne pollutants such as nitrous oxide and mercury. If approved by

Congress " Clear Skies " would do less to clean up the air than pre-existing

programs that the administration has gutted. One of those programs, called " New

Source Review " required thousands of older, coal-fired power plants, oil

refineries and industrial plants to install new " smoke-stack scrubbers, " when

they expanded production.

 

In late 2003 the EPA announced it would no longer be required to install

anti-pollution devices. Voluntary action would be sufficient. The EPA next

announced it would drop legal investigations of 10 utility companies that (like

FirstEnergy) had previously violated the program. Though the air would be

dirtier, industry would save billions.

 

Whitman was replaced by States' Rights champion Governor Mike Leavitt of Utah.

Leavitt is a self-described " moderate " who favors the " devolution of federal

power " to the states. Leavitt's first major initiative as head of EPA was to

propose that mercury emitted from coal-fired power plants, although a known

neurotoxin, be removed from the most stringent regulations under the Clean Air

Act.

 

Earlier he and the Bush administration had settled a lawsuit in a sweetheart

deal that opened 2.6 million acres of Utah wilderness to mining, oil and gas

development. Taking a page from the state of Utah, the Bureau of Land Management

later directed its staff to investigate ways to expedite coal, oil and gas

development on over 250 million acres of public lands.

 

Pretext For Pillage

 

While Christy Whitman proved herself a loyal trooper (going on CBS's David

Letterman to praise Bush's " environmental accomplishments, " before stepping

down), it is Secretary of Interior Gail Norton who remains the President's

point-woman in promoting " common-sense solutions to environmental policy, " that

function as a pretext for pillage.

 

When George W. Bush stood in front of a giant sequoia in California in May of

2001 and spoke of " a new environmentalism for the 21st century, " that would,

" protect the claims of nature while also protecting the legal rights of property

owners, " Gail Norton was by his side nodding approvingly. In August 2003 she was

again by his side as he toured the West burnishing his environmental image with

talk of " protecting healthy forests " and " caring for National Parks. "

 

A Wise Use veteran, Norton helped Bush through his environmental tutorial as a

presidential candidate, providing the intellectual arguments that deregulation,

devolution and free-markets are the best way to achieve environmental goals.

 

Two decades after Ronald Reagan's Secretary of Interior James Watt used these

arguments to push for the privatization and industrialization of federal lands,

pledging to " mine more, drill more, cut more timber, " his agenda was again

government policy. " Twenty years later it sounds like they've just dusted off

the old work, " confirms the now-retired Watt.

 

Today Gail Norton argues that opening the Arctic Refuge to drilling will provide

the equivalent of 80 years of Iraqi oil imports (pre-invasion). She's also

pursuing energy development, logging for " forest health " and motorized

recreation on public lands, mountain top removal for coal mining in Appalachia,

and captive breeding of endangered species in lieu of habitat protection. She's

reversed a plan that would have banned snowmobiles from Yellowstone and Grand

Teton National Parks, and promoted a plan to " outsource " National Park jobs to

private firms.

 

" Dick Cheney sits on our board of directors but he's no pen pal...Gail is a

friend, " says Wise Use leader Ron Arnold.

 

Still, with the elections looming and his ratings headed in the opposite

direction of gasoline prices even George W. needs to appear to care about the

environment if he hopes to hang on to " suburban swing-voters " (i.e., women who

do care about clean air and water). He recently went to Florida to tout wetlands

protection and accuse John Kerry of promoting offshore oil drilling (as does his

administration).

 

Bush political advisor Karl Rove recently claimed that the president is

following in the " environmentalist tradition of Teddy Roosevelt. " The same Teddy

Roosevelt who condemned " the land grabbers and great special interests " of the

coal, timber and oil cartels, and insisted that " the rights of the public to the

nation's natural resources outweigh all private rights. " ?

 

Right.

© 2004 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

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