www.salon.com
Republicans' dirty air act
Taxpayers -- not trucking-industry polluters -- could
get stuck with the tab for new, GOP-backed diesel
regulations.
From
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By Amanda Griscom
April 15, 2004 | When the Bush administration wants
to cook up some environmental credibility, it cites
efforts underway to slash diesel emissions by
requiring trucking companies to switch to cleaner
engines. But the untold story is that it may be the
taxpayers -- not the polluters -- who end up footing
much of the bill.
The trucking industry has long been a leading opponent
of federal clean-air regulations, and since 1993 it
has had a relentless advocate in Rep. Mac Collins,
R-Ga., former owner of Collins Trucking Co. -- a
business that is now run by the representative's
family and that continues to pay him $21,600 a year as
an advisor. U.S. EPA regulations will require truck
fleets to switch to cleaner-burning diesel engines by
2007, and Collins, who's running for the Senate this
year, wants tax breaks to help companies like his
defray the cost.
Claiming that the diesel regulations would financially
hamstring the industry, 19 GOP members of the House,
including Collins, recently asked the General
Accounting Office -- the watchdog arm of Congress
responsible for scrutinizing the activities of federal
agencies -- to examine the diesel regulations.
The regs were proposed by the EPA in 2000 and put in
place by the Clinton administration just before it
left office in 2001. Just days later, the new Bush
administration froze the regulations to give it time
to determine whether their health benefits justified
their costs to the American economy.
Premium Benefits
One year subscription to Granta, Wired, National
Geographic Adventure and U.S. News and World Report
magazines. Plus a six month subscription to the New
York Review of Books
Salon's latest music mix
Listen to 16 tracks from artists like June Carter
Cash, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle.
Get Premium on your PDA or Wireless device
Free one month audio subscription to the New York
Times or Wall Street Journal
Get a free month of Premium when you refer a friend
Get Salon's headlines delivered to your e-mail address
Download Salon as plain text or PDF
Satisfied that they did -- with overwhelming
scientific data to prove it -- the Bush EPA then
reinstated the Clinton rules with much tough-guy
fanfare.
It's hard to argue with the numbers: Cleaner diesel
engines will prevent an estimated 8,300 deaths from
respiratory disease per year, according to EPA
research, and result in 17,600 fewer cases of acute
bronchitis and 360,000 fewer asthma attacks in kids.
Today, the administration's move to "aggressively
tackle" diesel emissions is advertised as one of
President Bush's top environmental accomplishments on
his 2004 campaign Web site.
The trucking industry didn't take well to the news
that the diesel regs were going forward, but it may
still get off the hook. Officials in the Bush EPA and
in the GAO seem inclined to help the industry keep on
truckin' happily along -- free of financial
responsibility for the deadly pollution it creates.
The GAO report [PDF] on the diesel regulations,
released on March 11, "openly endorses recommendations
truckers have been making for years and explicitly
parrots the industry's arguments behind these
recommendations," said Frank O'Donnell, executive
director of Clean Air Trust. The report not only
recommends that the agency consider "economic
incentives" to help industry comply, but suggests that
the EPA failed to give due consideration to industry
concerns in drafting the regulations.
Even the Bush administration found this allegation
absurd. Assistant EPA administrator for air and
radiation, Jeffrey Holmstead, wrote an indignant
letter to the GAO that challenged the report's
integrity and accuracy and implied that it was biased
in favor of the trucking industry: "[T]he report
simply appears to accept the views of one set of
stakeholders ... it leaves the reader with the
impression that challenges are overly daunting and
that industry is unable to address them. This is
simply wrong," he wrote.
Holmstead took particular umbrage at the report's
implication that the EPA did not adequately consider
industry concerns: "Especially troubling are the
suggestions in the report that the agency failed to
engage the trucking industry in the 2007 rulemaking
process. ... I personally take the agency's
responsibility to engage stakeholders very seriously."
The lead author of the GAO report, John Stephenson,
was not available for comment.
Soon after the report was released, Holmstead
accompanied EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt to a
trucking industry meeting titled "Diesel Engine
Emissions Summit II" in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., to
address the report's findings and assure the industry
that the EPA is on its team.
"I am prepared to say, 'Let's work together,'"
Leavitt announced to a round of applause from the
audience of more than 900 industry representatives. He
stressed that he is amenable to the idea of tax breaks
to help trucking companies comply with the rules,
saying it's the government's job to give businesses
the incentive "to do the right thing," and that the
EPA is "dependent on all of you to figure out how to
do that."
The EPA, though, does not typically ask taxpayers to
shoulder the costs industry incurs when meeting new
pollution standards. The health benefits of the diesel
regs are supposed to justify their costs, and if the
financial burden is heavy for industry, the costs get
passed along to consumers anyway.
According to John Millett, an EPA spokesperson, the
diesel emissions-reduction technology that will be
required on new trucks by 2007 is expected to raise
the cost of a truck by $1,200 to $1,900 -- an increase
of less than 1 percent on the truck's total cost of
between $150,000 to $200,000.
But the costs will be markedly higher -- between
$5,000 and $10,000 per truck, according to Glen
Kedzie, environmental counsel to the American Trucking
Associations. "Already the trucking industry is buying
up trucks in the pre-2007 fleet so they don't have to
face the additional costs that they expect will be
posed by the post-2007 fleet," he said.
Premium Benefits
One year subscription to Granta, Wired, National
Geographic Adventure and U.S. News and World Report
magazines. Plus a six month subscription to the New
York Review of Books
Salon's latest music mix
Listen to 16 tracks from artists like June Carter
Cash, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle.
Get Premium on your PDA or Wireless device
Free one month audio subscription to the New York
Times or Wall Street Journal
Get a free month of Premium when you refer a friend
Get Salon's headlines delivered to your e-mail address
Download Salon as plain text or PDF
Environmentalists say the trucking industry's fears
are grossly exaggerated. But the larger point, they
say, is that taxpayers shouldn't be forced to
underwrite the costs, no matter what they are. A
precedent like that would spark similar demands from
every other regulated industry, eventually rendering
pollution controls impracticable.
Still, Leavitt and Holmstead seem to see merit in
abandoning the "polluter pays" principle. So concerned
are they with the trucking industry's financial health
that they've invited Collins to help write legislation
that will line his own pockets: At the industry
meeting last month, Holmstead vowed to work with the
Georgia representative to develop financial incentives
to soften any blow to the trucking industry from the
diesel regulations.
Block the Vote
Asserting that he was confronting "truly
life-and-death matters," Sen. Jim Jeffords, I-Vt.,
announced last week that as ranking member of the
Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works
he would exercise his powers to put a hold on four
high-level appointments to the U.S. EPA.
"I'm sorry it has come to this sad state, but I
believe I am left with no other recourse," he
proclaimed dramatically in a statement to the
committee.
It wasn't the appointments themselves that he believed
posed mortal dangers -- in fact, Jeffords had just
voted in favor of sending the nominations to the full
Senate. Rather, the Vermont senator was taking the
nominees hostage in order to exact a ransom from the
EPA in the form of documents he has unsuccessfully
requested over the last three years about the agency's
controversial policies.
Between May 2001, when Jeffords defected from the GOP,
and January 2004, he made 12 formal requests for
documents from the EPA on issues ranging from
President Bush's much-criticized mercury proposal to
global-warming research to rollbacks of new
source-review regulations under the Clean Air Act.
Jeffords believes the documents will help paint a more
complete picture of what went on within the
administration prior to significant environmental
policy changes -- in particular, changes on mercury
and new-source review. And he believes the files could
be fodder for people fighting those changes. "We think
these documents could result in better protections for
public health than the rules provide now," said Chris
Miller, a minority staffer at the EPW Committee.
Until now, Jeffords' requests have been mostly or
totally ignored by the EPA. "I am afraid this is yet
another example of how the Bush administration acts in
secrecy," Jeffords told the committee. "I have bent
over backwards to try to accommodate the EPA, but my
patience is now worn out."
So cold has the EPA's shoulder been, in fact, that the
EPW Committee's chairman, Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla.
-- a man who once compared the EPA to the Gestapo --
has not only refrained from criticizing Jeffords for
playing hardball but has supported him. In a March 4
letter to EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt, Inhofe
joined Jeffords in asking that the EPA comply with
Jeffords' requests, noting that "the agency is
obligated to respond to requests from [both] the chair
and ranking member."
Though on previous occasions Jeffords has made and
withdrawn threats to interrupt Senate business in
order to extract his requested documents (he
threatened to filibuster Leavitt's own nomination, for
example), word is that this time he means business.
"Jeffords' hold is firm," said Miller. "We fully
expect to get everything that we have requested."
The EPA seems to recognize that this is not a
boy-who-cried-wolf scenario. Spokesperson Cynthia
Bergman insists that the agency is taking Jeffords'
request seriously: "We're doing everything we can to
review his request and get the problem resolved
swiftly," she told Muckraker.
Premium Benefits
One year subscription to Granta, Wired, National
Geographic Adventure and U.S. News and World Report
magazines. Plus a six month subscription to the New
York Review of Books
Salon's latest music mix
Listen to 16 tracks from artists like June Carter
Cash, Warren Zevon and Steve Earle.
Get Premium on your PDA or Wireless device
Free one month audio subscription to the New York
Times or Wall Street Journal
Get a free month of Premium when you refer a friend
Get Salon's headlines delivered to your e-mail address
Download Salon as plain text or PDF
Jeffords has no particular objections to any of the
nominees, said Miller.
But one of the four nominees-in-waiting, Ann Klee, in
line to serve as general counsel to Leavitt, has
particularly rankled enviros.
Klee formerly served as a senior advisor to Sen. Dirk
Kempthorne, R-Idaho, chair of the EPW's Drinking
Water, Fisheries, and Wildlife Subcommittee, with whom
she worked on efforts to significantly rewrite the
Endangered Species Act -- much to the dismay of the
environmental community. In 1997, she joined the
majority staff of the EPW Committee and eventually
rose to become its chief counsel.
But enviros' strongest objections to Klee's work stem
from her three years as general counsel to Interior
Secretary Gale Norton.
Klee has been charged with editing out critical
scientific data from DOI reports on the environmental
impacts of drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge.
Also, according to Sharon Buccino, a senior attorney
at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Klee was one
of the top DOI staffers involved in Vice President
Dick Cheney's energy task force, and was among the
select participants in clandestine meetings between
White House and administration officials and
energy-industry representatives. NRDC sought evidence
of such meetings under the Freedom of Information Act
and obtained calendar records from Klee showing that
she had a number of meetings with energy-industry
executives and lobbyists, and comparatively few with
members of the environmental community.
"Ann Klee is one of the key decision makers within the
department on energy issues. The meetings [on her
calendar] reflect an agenda for promoting a single use
of the land -- energy development," said Buccino.
Former colleagues, in contrast, have high praise for
Klee. "My impression was that Klee is a very capable
lawyer," said Jo-Ellen Darcy, who worked with her as
an EPW Committee staffer.
"Ann Klee was an outstanding leader at the Department
of the Interior," DOI assistant secretary Lynn
Scarlett told Muckraker. "Her knowledge of the
Endangered Species Act, among many other issues, is
unparalleled."
But given environmentalists' vehement objections to
DOI's recent efforts related to endangered species and
other environmental matters, it's safe to say that
Klee is not on the green team. She seems likely to go
with the flow at the Bush EPA.
So as far as enviros are concerned, Klee is better off
in bureaucratic limbo than in the agency charged with
protecting the nation's environmental health. The
Jeffords case may be the first in which EPA
intransigence proves to be a boon to
environmentalists.
salon.com
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer
Amanda Griscom is a columnist for Grist Magazine. Her
articles on energy, technology and the environment
have appeared in publications ranging from Rolling
Stone to the New York Times Magazine.
---
__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th
http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
To get off the IOWA-TOPICS list, send any message to:
[log in to unmask]
|
