Campaign 2004: Bush's environmental record polarizes debate
White House policies reversed many from Clinton era
Tuesday, September 14, 2004
Every fall, after raising their young near Teshekpuk Lake and the Colville River, tens of thousands of geese and tundra swans leave the North Slope of Alaska for more southerly shores. Some end their journey at the Pocosin Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in the flatlands of North Carolina.
Both habitats could be transformed if current Bush administration initiatives come to pass. The birds would have oil rigs as neighbors in Alaska and be greeted by a swarm of Navy jets simulating carrier takeoffs and landings in North Carolina.
That such projects could bracket the birds' path is not surprising, in light of the priorities of the administration. Over the last 3 1/2 years, federal officials have accelerated resource development on public lands. They also have pushed to eliminate regulatory hurdles for military and industrial projects.
From the start, Bush officials challenged the status quo and revised the traditional public-policy calculus on environmental decisions. They put an instant hold on many Clinton administration regulations, and the debates about those issues and others are intensely polarized.
The administration has sought to increase the harvesting of energy and other resources on public lands, to seek cooperative ways to reduce pollution, to free the military from environmental restrictions and to streamline -- opponents say gut -- regulatory and enforcement processes.
In a recent interview, Michael Leavitt, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, summed up the Bush administration's philosophy. "There is no environmental progress without economic prosperity," Leavitt said. "Once our competitiveness erodes, our capacity to make environmental gains is gone. There is nothing that promotes pollution like poverty."
The administration's approach has provoked a passionate response. Asked about his expectations in the event of Bush's re-election, Sen. James Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is the ranking minority member on the Environment and Public Works Committee, wrote in an e-mail message: "I expect the Bush administration to continue their assault on regulations designed to protect public health and the environment. I expect the Bush administration to continue underfunding compliance and enforcement activities."
Jeffords concluded, "I expect the Bush administration will go down in history as the greatest disaster for public health and the environment in the history of the United States."
For many environmental groups, Bush's legacy was assured in his first year, thanks to a series of highly publicized decisions that effectively repudiated Clinton administration positions.
Bush backed off a campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide and abandoned the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.
Then the administration pushed, unsuccessfully, for a law allowing oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It scrapped the phase-out of snowmobiles in Yellowstone National Park and temporarily dropped a Clinton proposal to cut the permissible level of arsenic in drinking water by 80 percent.
The cumulative effect was striking.
The decisions sought to reverse environmental victories for which there was widespread support. Polls by The New York Times in mid-2001 and late 2002 consistently showed public opposition to drilling in the Arctic refuge. A CBS survey in the same period showed that, by ratios of better than 2-to-1, those polled said that environmental protection was more important than energy production.
The outcry ensured that some Bush administration initiatives favorable to the cause of environmental groups got little notice.
They include the EPA's decision to force General Electric to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to remove PCBs in the Hudson River; legislation speeding the cleanup of urban industrial sites known as brownfields; increases in financing for private land set aside for conservation of animals and their habitat; and the first limits for diesel emissions in trucks and off-road vehicles.
The diesel regulations, said James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would have as much impact on air quality as the rules that eliminated leaded gasoline. The clamor over the reversals, he said, "grossly overshadowed the accomplishments, which in scope and scale were of far greater consequence to environmental protection and natural resource conservation than anything people were complaining about."
The administration contends that free markets often provide the best solution to pollution. That belief underlies regulatory proposals to allow power plants that exceed their goals in reducing pollutants to sell cleanup credits to plants that fall short.
The failed "Clear Skies" act, incorporating this approach, was in many ways reborn in a pending regulation that Bush officials say would offer significant pollution reductions and that critics dismiss as a retreat from the mandates of the Clean Air Act.
Leavitt called the reasoning simple. "Rather than spend decades and millions litigating" to ensure power plants' compliance one at a time, "let's require everyone to do it essentially at the same time," he said. "And create incentives for them to do more as opposed to incentives to try to avoid."
Jeffords countered, "The relaxed Bush approach will produce more illness, disease and premature deaths than simply putting the federal government's full resources into achieving compliance with the Clean Air Act and pushing the development of cleaner, more efficient electricity generation."
