Crimes Against Nature
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., Natural Resources Defense Council
November 24, 2003
George W. Bush will go down in history as America's worst environmental
president. In a ferocious three-year attack, the Bush administration has
initiated more than 200 major rollbacks of America's environmental laws,
weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and
wildlife. Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to deceive the
public, the administration intends to eliminate the nation's most important
environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the guidance of Republican
pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush White House has actively hidden its anti-
environmental program behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople,
secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats. The Bush attack was
not entirely unexpected. George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record
of any governor during his tenure in Texas. Texas became number one in air and
water pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his six years in
Austin, he championed a short-term pollution-based prosperity, which enriched
his political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of
life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do the same to America.
After three years, his policies are already bearing fruit, diminishing
standards of living for millions of Americans.
I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and I
watch them struggle to breathe on bad-air days. And they're comparatively
lucky: One in four African-American children in New York shares this
affliction; their suffering is often unrelieved because they lack the insurance
and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive. My kids are among the
millions of Americans who cannot enjoy the seminal American experience of
fishing locally with their dad and eating their catch. Most freshwater fish in
New York and all in Connecticut are now under consumption advisories. A main
source of mercury pollution in America, as well as asthma-provoking ozone and
particulates, is the coal-burning power plants that President Bush recently
excused from complying with the Clean Air Act.
Furthermore, the deadly addiction to fossil fuels that White House policies
encourage has squandered our treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished
our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks and
increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy
and are hated by their own people.
When the Republican right managed to install George W. Bush as president in
2000, movement leaders once again set about doing what they had attempted to do
since the Reagan years: eviscerate the infrastructure of laws and regulations
that protect the environment. For twenty-five years it has been like the zombie
that keeps coming back from the grave.
The attacks began on Inauguration Day, when President Bush's chief of staff and
former General Motors lobbyist Andrew Card quietly initiated a moratorium on
all recently adopted regulations. Since then, the White House has enlisted
every federal agency that oversees environmental programs in a coordinated
effort to relax rules aimed at the oil, coal, logging, mining and chemical
industries as well as automakers, real estate developers, corporate
agribusiness and other industries.
Bush's Environmental Protection Agency has halted work on sixty-two
environmental standards, the federal Department of Agriculture has stopped work
on fifty-seven standards, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration
has halted twenty-one new standards. The EPA completed just two major rules --
both under court order and both watered down at industry request -- compared to
twenty-three completed by the Clinton administration and fourteen by the Bush
Sr. administration in their first two years.
This onslaught is being coordinated through the White House Office of
Management and Budget -- or, more precisely, OMB's Office of Information and
Regulatory Affairs, under the direction of John Graham, the engine-room
mechanic of the Bush stealth strategy. Graham's specialty is promoting changes
in scientific and economic assumptions that underlie government regulations --
such as recalculating cost-benefit analyses to favor polluters. Before coming
to the White House, Graham was the founding director of the Harvard Center for
Risk Analysis, where he received funding from America's champion corporate
polluters: Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, Alcoa, Exxon, General Electric and
General Motors.
Under the White House's guidance, the very agencies entrusted to protect
Americans from polluters are laboring to destroy environmental laws. Or they've
simply stopped enforcing them. Penalties imposed for environmental violations
have plummeted under Bush. The EPA has proposed eliminating 270 enforcement
staffers, which would drop staff levels to the lowest level ever. Inspections
of polluting businesses have dipped fifteen percent. Criminal cases referred
for federal prosecution have dropped forty percent. The EPA measures its
success by the amount of pollution reduced or prevented as a result of its own
actions. Last year, the EPA's two most senior career enforcement officials
resigned after decades of service. They cited the administration's refusal to
carry out environmental laws.
The White House has masked its attacks with euphemisms that would have
embarrassed George Orwell. George W. Bush's "Healthy Forests" initiative
promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His "Clear Skies" program,
which repealed key provisions of the Clean Air Act, allows more emissions. The
administration uses misleading code words such as streamlining or reforming
instead of weakening, and thinning instead of logging.
In a March 2003 memo to Republican leadership, pollster Frank Luntz frankly
outlined the White House strategy on energy and the environment: "The
environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general and
President Bush in particular are most vulnerable," he wrote, cautioning that
the public views Republicans as being "in the pockets of corporate fat cats who
rub their hands together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute America
for fun and profit." Luntz warned, "Not only do we risk losing the swing vote,
but our suburban female base could abandon us as well." He recommended that
Republicans don the sheep's clothing of environmental rhetoric while
dismantling environmental laws.
I prosecute polluters on behalf of the Natural Resources Defense Council,
Riverkeeper and Waterkeeper Alliance. As George W. Bush began his presidency, I
was involved in litigation against the factory-pork industry, which is a large
source of air and water pollution in America. Corporate pork factories cannot
produce more efficiently than traditional family farmers without violating
several federal environmental statutes. Industrial farms illegally dump
millions of tons of untreated fecal and toxic waste onto land and into the air
and water. Factory farms have contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways, put
tens of thousands of family farmers and fishermen out of work, killed billions
of fish, sickened consumers and subjected millions of farm animals to
unspeakable cruelty.
On behalf of several farm groups and fishermen, we sued Smithfield Foods and
won a decision that suggested that almost all of American factory farms were
violating the Clean Water Act. The Clinton EPA had also brought its own
parallel suits addressing chronic air and water violations by hog factories.
But almost immediately after taking office, the Bush administration ordered the
EPA to halt its Clean Air Act investigations of animal factories and weaken the
water rules to allow them to continue polluting indefinitely.
Several of my other national cases were similarly derailed. Eleven years ago, I
sued the EPA to stop massive fish kills at power plants. Using antiquated
technology, power plants often suck up the entire fresh water volume of large
rivers, killing obscene numbers of fish. Just one facility, the Salem nuclear
plant in New Jersey, kills more than 3 billion Delaware River fish each year,
according to Martin Marietta, the plant's own consultant. These fish kills are
illegal, and in 2001 we finally won our case. A federal judge ordered the EPA
to issue regulations restricting power-plant fish kills. But soon after
President Bush's inauguration, the administration replaced the proposed new
rule with clever regulations designed to allow the slaughter to continue
unabated. The new administration also trumped court decisions that would have
enforced greater degrees of wetlands protection and forbidden coal moguls from
blasting off whole mountaintops to get at the coal beneath.
The fishermen I represent are traditionally Republican. But, without exception,
they see this administration as the largest threat not just to their
livelihoods but to their values and their idea of what it means to be American.
"Why," they'll ask, "is the president allowing coal, oil, power and automotive
interests to fix the game?"
Back to the Dark Ages
George w. Bush seems to be trying to take us all the way back to the Dark Ages
by undermining the very principles of our environmental rights, which civilized
nations have always recognized. Ancient Rome's Code of Justinian guaranteed the
use to all citizens of the "public trust" or commons -- those shared resources
that cannot be reduced to private property -- the air, flowing water, public
lands, wandering animals, fisheries, wetlands and aquifers.
When Roman law broke down in Europe during the Dark Ages, feudal kings began to
privatize the commons. In the early thirteenth century, when King John also
attempted to sell off England's fisheries and erect navigational tolls on the
Thames, his subjects rose up and confronted him at Runnymede, forcing him to
sign the Magna Carta, which includes provisions guaranteeing the rights of free
access to fisheries and waters.
Clean-air laws in England, passed in the fourteenth century, made it a capital
offense to burn coal in London, and violators were executed for the crime.
These "public trust" rights to unspoiled air, water and wildlife descended to
the people of the United States following the American Revolution. Until 1870,
a factory releasing even small amounts of smoke onto public or private property
was operating illegally.
But during the Gilded Age, when the corporate robber barons captured the
political and judicial systems, those rights were stolen from the American
people. As the Industrial Revolution morphed into the postwar industrial boom,
Americans found themselves paying a high price for the resulting pollution. The
wake-up call came in the late Sixties, when Lake Erie was declared dead and
Cleveland's Cuyahoga River exploded in colossal infernos.
In 1970, more than 20 million Americans took to the streets protesting the
state of the environment on the first Earth Day. Whether they knew it or not,
they were demanding a return of ancient rights.
During the next few years, Congress passed twenty-eight major environmental
statutes, including the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered
Species Act, and it created the Environmental Protection Agency to apply and
enforce these new laws. Polluters would be held accountable; those planning to
use the commons would have to compile environmental-impact statements and hold
public hearings; citizens were given the power to prosecute environmental
crimes. Right-to-know and toxic-inventory laws made government and industry
more transparent on the local level and our nation more democratic. Even the
most vulnerable Americans could now participate in the dialogue that determines
the destinies of their communities.
Earth Day caught polluters off guard. But in the next thirty years, they
mounted an increasingly sophisticated and aggressive counterattack to undermine
these laws. The Bush administration is a culmination of their three-decade
campaign.
Strangling the Environment
In 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan declared, "I am a Sagebrush Rebel," marking a
major turning point of the modern anti-environmental movement. In the early
1980s, the Western extractive industries, led by one of Colorado's worst
polluters, brewer Joseph Coors, organized the Sagebrush Rebellion, a coalition
of industry money and right-wing ideologues that helped elect Reagan
president.
The big polluters who started the Sagebrush Rebellion were successful because
they managed to broaden their constituency with anti-regulatory, anti-labor and
anti-environmental rhetoric that had great appeal both among Christian
fundamentalist leaders such as Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, and in certain
Western communities where hostility to government is deeply rooted. Big
polluters found that they could organize this discontent into a potent
political force that possessed the two ingredients of power in American
democracy: money and intensity. Meanwhile, innovations in direct-mail and
computer technologies gave this alliance of dark populists and polluters a
deafening voice in American government.
Coors founded the Mountain States Legal Foundation in 1976 to bring lawsuits
designed to enrich giant corporations, limit civil rights and attack unions,
homosexuals and minorities. He also founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation,
to provide a philosophical underpinning for the anti-environmental movement.
While the foundation and its imitators -- the Competitive Enterprise Institute,
the American Enterprise Institute, the Reason Foundation, the Federalist
Society, the Marshall Institute and others -- claim to advocate free markets
and property rights, their agenda is more pro-pollution than anything else.
From its conception, the Heritage Foundation and its neoconservative cronies
urged followers to "strangle the environmental movement," which Heritage named
"the greatest single threat to the American economy." Ronald Reagan's victory
gave Heritage Foundation and the Mountain States Legal Foundation immeasurable
clout. Heritage became known as Reagan's "shadow government," and its 2,000-
page manifesto, "Mandate for Change," became a blueprint for his
administration. Coors handpicked his Colorado associates: Anne Gorsuch became
the EPA administrator; her husband, Robert Burford, a cattle baron who had
vowed to destroy the Bureau of Land Management, was selected to head that very
agency. Most notorious, Coors chose James Watt, president of the Mountain
States Legal Foundation, as the secretary of the interior. Watt was a proponent
of "dominion theology," an authoritarian Christian heresy that advocates man's
duty to "subdue" nature. His deep faith in laissez-faire capitalism and
apocalyptic Christianity led Secretary Watt to set about dismantling his
department and distributing its assets rather than managing them for future
generations. During a Senate hearing, he cited the approaching Apocalypse to
explain why he was giving away America's sacred places at fire-sale prices: "I
do not know how many future generations we can count on before the Lord
returns."
Meanwhile, Anne Gorsuch enthusiastically gutted EPA's budget by sixty percent,
crippling its ability to write regulations or enforce the law. She appointed
lobbyists fresh from their hitches with the paper, asbestos, chemical and oil
companies to run each of the principal agency departments. Her chief counsel
was an Exxon lawyer; her head of enforcement was from General Motors.
These attacks on the environment precipitated a public revolt. By 1983, more
than a million Americans and all 125 American-Indian tribes had signed a
petition demanding Watt's removal. After being forced out of office, Watt was
indicted on twenty-five felony counts of influence-pedaling. Gorsuch and twenty-
three of her cronies were forced to resign following a congressional
investigation of sweetheart deals with polluters, including Coors. Her first
deputy, Rita Lavelle, was jailed for perjury.
The indictments and resignations put a temporary damper on the Sagebrush
Rebels, but they quickly regrouped as the "Wise Use" movement. Wise Use
founder, the timber-industry flack Ron Arnold, said, "Our goal is to destroy,
to eradicate the environmental movement. We want to be able to exploit the
environment for private gain, absolutely."
By 1994, Wise Use helped propel Newt Gingrich to the speaker's chair of the U.
S. House of Representatives and turn his anti-environmental manifesto, "The
Contract With America," into law. Gingrich's chief of environmental policy was
Rep. Tom DeLay, the one-time Houston exterminator who was determined to rid the
world of pesky pesticide regulations and to promote a biblical worldview. He
targeted the Endangered Species Act as the second-greatest threat to Texas
after illegal aliens. He also wanted to legalize the deadly pesticide DDT, and
he routinely referred to the EPA as "the Gestapo of government." In January
1995, DeLay invited a group of 350 lobbyists representing some of America's
biggest polluters to collaborate in drafting legislation to dismantle federal
health, safety and environmental laws.
Gingrich and DeLay had learned from the James Watt debacle that they had to
conceal their radical agenda. Carefully eschewing public debates on their
initiatives, they mounted a stealth attack on America's environmental laws.
Rather than pursue a frontal assault against popular statutes such as the
Endangered Species, Clean Water and Clean Air acts, they tried to undermine
these laws by attaching silent riders to must-pass budget bills.
But the public got wise. Moderate Republicans teamed up with the Clinton
administration to block the worst of it. My group, the NRDC, as well as the
Sierra Club and the U.S. Public Interest Research Group, generated more than 1
million letters to Congress. When President Clinton shut down the government in
December 1995 rather than pass a budget bill spangled with anti-environmental
riders, the tide turned against Gingrich and DeLay. By the end of that month,
even conservatives disavowed the attack. "We lost the battle on the
environment," DeLay conceded.
Undermining the Scientists
Today, with the presidency and both houses of Congress under the anti-
environmentalists' control, they are set to eviscerate the despised laws. White
House strategy is to promote its unpopular policies by lying about its agenda,
cheating on the science and stealing the language and rhetoric of the
environmental movement.
Even as Republican pollster Luntz acknowledged that the scientific evidence is
against the Republicans on issues like global warming, he advised them to find
scientists willing to hoodwink the public. "You need to continue to make the
lack of scientific certainty a primary issue," he told Republicans, "by
becoming even more active in recruiting experts sympathetic to your view."
In the meantime, he urged them to change their rhetoric. "'Climate change,' "
he said, "is less threatening than 'global warming.' While global warming has
catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more
controllable and less emotional challenge."
The EPA's inspector general received broad attention for his August 21st, 2003,
finding that the White House pressured the agency to conceal the public-health
risks from poisoned air following the September 11th World Trade Center
attacks. But this 2001 deception is only one example of the administration's
pattern of strategic distortion. Earlier this year, it suppressed an EPA report
warning that millions of Americans, especially children, are being poisoned by
mercury from industrial sources.
This behavior is consistent throughout the Bush government. Consider the story
of James Zahn, a scientist at the Department of Agriculture who resigned after
the Bush administration suppressed his taxpayer-funded study proving that
billions of antibiotic-resistant bacteria can be carried daily across property
lines from meat factories into neighboring homes and farms. In March 2002, Zahn
accepted my invitation to present his findings to a convention of family-farm
advocates in Iowa. Several weeks before the April conference, pork-industry
lobbyists learned of his appearance and persuaded the Department of Agriculture
to forbid him from appearing. Zahn told me he had been ordered to cancel a
dozen appearances at county health departments and similar venues.
In May, the White House blocked the EPA staff from publicly discussing
contamination by the chemical perchlorate -- the main ingredient in solid
rocket fuel. The administration froze federal regulations on perchlorate, even
as new research reveals alarmingly high levels of the chemical in the nation's
drinking water and food supply, including many grocery-store lettuces.
Perchlorate pollution has been linked to neurological problems, cancer and
other life-threatening illnesses in some twenty states. The Pentagon and
several defense contractors face billions of dollars in potential cleanup
liability.
The administration's leading expert in manipulating scientific data is Interior
Secretary Gale Norton. During her nomination hearings, Norton promised not to
ideologically slant agency science. But as her friend Thomas Sansonetti, a coal-
industry lobbyist who is now assistant attorney general, predicted, "There
won't be any biologists or botanists to come in and pull the wool over her
eyes."
In autumn 2001, Secretary Norton provided the Senate Committee on Energy and
Natural Resources with her agency's scientific assessment that Arctic oil
drilling would not harm hundreds of thousands of caribou. Not long afterward,
Fish and Wildlife Service biologists contacted the Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility, which defends scientists and other professionals
working in state and federal environmental agencies. "The scientists provided
us the science that they had submitted to Norton and the altered version that
she had given to Congress a week later," said the group's executive director,
Jeff Ruch. There were seventeen major substantive changes, all of them
minimizing the reported impacts. When Norton was asked about the alterations in
October 2001, she dismissed them as typographical errors.
Later, she and White House political adviser Karl Rove forced National Marine
Fisheries scientists to alter findings on the amount of water required for the
survival of salmon in Oregon's Klamath River, to ensure that large corporate
farms got a bigger share of the river water. As a result, more than 33,000
chinook and coho salmon died -- the largest fish kill in the history of
America. Mike Kelly, the biologist who drafted the original opinion (and who
has since been awarded federal whistle-blower status), told me that the coho
salmon is probably headed for extinction. "Morale is low among scientists
here," Kelly says. "We are under pressure to get the right results. This
administration is putting the species at risk for political gain -- and not
just in the Klamath."
Norton has also ordered the rewriting of an exhaustive twelve-year study by
federal biologists detailing the effects that Arctic drilling would have on
populations of musk oxen and snow geese. She reissued the biologists' report
two weeks later as a two-page paper showing no negative impact to wildlife. She
also ordered suppression of two studies by the Fish and Wildlife Service
concluding that the drilling would threaten polar-bear populations and violate
the international treaty protecting bears. She then instructed the Fish and
Wildlife Service to redo the report to "reflect the Interior Department's
position." She suppressed findings that mountaintop mining would cause
"tremendous destruction of aquatic and terrestrial habitat" and a Park Service
report that found that snowmobiles were hurting Yellowstone's air quality,
wildlife and the health of its visitors and employees.
Norton's Fish and Wildlife Service is the first ever not to voluntarily list a
single species as endangered or threatened. Her officials have blackballed
scientists and savaged studies to avoid listing the trumpeter swan, revoke the
listing of the grizzly bear and shrink the remnant habitat for the Florida
panther. She disbanded the service's oldest scientific advisory committee in
order to halt protection of desert fish in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas that
are headed for extinction. Interior career staffers and scientists say they are
monitored by Norton's industry appointees to ensure that future studies do not
conflict with industry profit-making.
Cooking the Books on Global Warming
There is no scientific debate in which the White House has cooked the books
more than that of global warming. In the past two years the Bush administration
has altered, suppressed or attempted to discredit close to a dozen major
reports on the subject. These include a ten-year peer-reviewed study by the
International Panel on Climate Change, commissioned by the president's father
in 1993 in his own efforts to dodge what was already a virtual scientific
consensus blaming industrial emissions for global warming.
After disavowing the Kyoto Protocol, the Bush administration commissioned the
federal government's National Academy of Sciences to find holes in the IPCC
analysis. But this ploy backfired. The NAS not only confirmed the existence of
global warming and its connection to industrial greenhouse gases, it also
predicted that the effects of climate change would be worse than previously
believed, estimating that global temperatures will rise between 2.5 and 10.4
degrees by 2100.
A May 2002 report by scientists from the EPA, NASA and the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration, approved by Bush appointees at the Council on
Environmental Quality and submitted to the United Nations by the U.S.,
predicted similarly catastrophic impacts. When confronted with the findings,
Bush dismissed it with his smirking condemnation: "I've read the report put out
by the bureaucracy. . . ."
Afterward, the White House acknowledged that, in fact, he hadn't. Having failed
to discredit the report with this untruth, George W. did what his father had
done: He promised to study the problem some more. Last fall, the White House
announced the creation of the Climate Research Initiative to study global
warming. The earliest results are due next fall. But the White House's draft
plan for CRI was derided by the NAS in February as a rehash of old studies and
established science lacking "most elements of a strategic plan."
In September 2002, administration censors released the annual EPA report on air
pollution without the agency's usual update on global warming, that section
having been deleted by Bush appointees at the White House. On June 19th, 2003,
a "State of the Environment" report commissioned by the EPA in 2001 was
released after language about global warming was excised by flat-earthers in
the White House. The redacted studies had included a 2001 report by the
National Research Council, commissioned by the White House. In their place was
a piece of propaganda financed by the American Petroleum Institute challenging
these conclusions.
This past July, EPA scientists leaked a study, which the agency had ordered
suppressed in May, showing that a Senate plan -- co-sponsored by Republican
Sen. John McCain -- to reduce the pollution that causes global warming could
achieve its goal at very small cost. Bush reacted by launching a $100 million
ten-year effort to prove that global temperature changes have, in fact,
occurred naturally, another delay tactic for the fossil-fuel barons at taxpayer
expense.
Princeton geo-scientist Michael Oppenheimer told me, "This administration likes
to emphasize what we don't know while ignoring or minimizing what we do know,
which is a prescription for paralysis on policy. It's hard to imagine what kind
of scientific evidence would suffice to convince the White House to take firm
action on global warming."
Across the board, the administration yields to Big Energy. At the request of
ExxonMobil, and with the help of a lobbying group working for coal-burning
utility Southern Co., the Bush administration orchestrated the removal of U.S.
scientist Robert Watson, the world-renowned former NASA atmospheric chemist who
headed the United Nations' IPCC. He was replaced by a little-known scientist
from New Delhi, India, who would be generally unavailable for congressional
hearings.
The Bush administration now plans to contract out thousands of environmental-
science jobs to compliant industry consultants already in the habit of
massaging data to support corporate profit-taking, effectively making federal
science an arm of Karl Rove's political machine. The very ideologues who
derided Bill Clinton as a liar have institutionalized dishonesty and made it
the reigning culture of America's federal agencies. "At its worst," Oppenheimer
says, "this approach represents a serious erosion in the way a democracy deals
with science."
Inside the Cheney Task Force
There is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking American
democracy than the White House's cozy relationship with the energy industry.
It's hard to find anyone on Bush's staff who does not have extensive corporate
connections, but fossil-fuel executives rule the roost. The energy industry
contributed more than $48.3 million to Republicans in the 2000 election cycle,
with $3 million to Bush. Now the investment has matured. Both Bush and Cheney
came out of the oil patch. Thirty-one of the Bush transition team's forty-eight
members had energy-industry ties. Bush's cabinet and White House staff is an
energy-industry dream team -- four cabinet secretaries, the six most powerful
White House officials and more than twenty high-level appointees are alumni of
the industry and its allies (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.
For more information on the Bush administration's environmental actions, see
The Bush Record from NRDC, the Natural Resources Defense Council.
