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Mercury uprising
Bush's mercury proposal is drawing heat from both
sides of the congressional aisle.
From
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By Amanda Griscom
April 1, 2004 | A handful of Beltway wags are
contending that mercury is the new arsenic, the latest
symbol of official disregard for environmental health.
Their claim is lent credence by an ongoing flurry of
controversies surrounding the Bush administration's
plan for dealing with the toxic pollutant.
A revealing article published in the Los Angeles Times
two weeks ago contributed markedly to the commotion.
According to reporters Tom Hamburger and Alan C.
Miller, five career U.S. EPA employees charge that
President Bush's political appointees railroaded the
administration's much-criticized mercury plan through
by neglecting technical studies and ignoring the
advice of a federal advisory panel. The plan would
regulate mercury emissions from coal-burning power
plants, but critics say it's far too lax and would
take far too long to achieve significant results.
More embarrassing to the Bushies was the article's
revelation that the EPA lifted some of the proposal's
language directly out of lobbyist memos from the law
firm Latham and Watkins (the former employer of the
EPA's assistant administrator for air and radiation,
Jeffrey Holmstead) and from the advocacy group West
Associates, both of which represent large utility
companies.
Galled by the L.A. Times report, Sen. Jim Jeffords,
I-Vt., sent a letter to EPA administrator Michael
Leavitt demanding that he call on the agency's
inspector general to investigate allegations of undue
industry influence in the "poisoned process" of
rulemaking, and that he reassess the "gross
inadequacies in controlling mercury to ... levels
necessary to protect the public's health."
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The EPA responded with its usual insouciance: Leavitt
admitted in a public statement that "it does not seem
to be the normal course of business" to incorporate
outside information into an EPA proposal without
noting the source, but he made no move to launch an
investigation, insisting that the mercury proposal was
a work in progress and that he was continually asking
for further analysis.
"Why investigate a process that is not finished?" EPA
spokesperson Cynthia Bergman asked Muckraker.
But that's not good enough for Jeffords, nor for
nearly 40 of his Senate colleagues from both sides of
the aisle. This Thursday, those senators -- led by
Jeffords, Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, Patrick Leahy,
D-Vt., and Mark Dayton, D-Minn. -- plan to submit
another letter to Leavitt demanding that he withdraw
the mercury proposal.
The letter has been in development for several months,
according to Susanne Fleek, environmental policy
advisor to Leahy. Fleek and other staffers in Leahy's
office have been quietly investigating many of the
allegations in the L.A. Times article. With the help
of Martha Keating, an environmental scientist for the
nonprofit Clean Air Task Force, they found some 20
instances in which language was lifted more or less
verbatim from the Latham and Watkins and West
Associates memos.
Keating originally discovered cribbed language back in
December, as reported in a Washington Post article by
Eric Pianin in late January. "I'm looking at the
proposal and thinking, wait a minute, I've read this
research before," Keating told Muckraker. "And then I
[cross-referenced] and realized, wow, this really is
plagiarized."
The duplicated language relates to technical research
about how coal-fired power plants, the worst culprits
in mercury pollution, function and operate; more
damning, borrowed sections also give a rationale for
lax emissions limits.
"Letting industry lobbyists write so much of the
mercury plan is bad enough," Leahy told Muckraker,
"but even worse is the Bush administration's refusal
to treat mercury as the toxic pollutant that it is.
That's the primal failure from which all else follows.
The Bush proposal on mercury is one of the worst
examples I have ever seen in this administration's
long pattern of catering to industry interests at the
expense of the public interest. No wonder we are
finding so much bipartisan support in fighting it."
The issue certainly is hot, agrees Chris Miller, a
staffer at the Senate Environment and Public Works
Committee. "Mercury is rising in the Beltway -- just
like arsenic did," he said. "The evidence of its
health hazards is escalating while the Bush
administration continues to defend its defenseless
policies, and public outrage is increasing in volume."
Those health hazards are becoming a point of
controversy too, in addition to disagreements over
proposed regulations on power plants.
On March 19, the EPA and the Food and Drug
Administration released a national health advisory
that warned of high mercury levels in certain
varieties of fish and recommended that kids and women
of childbearing age eat no more than six ounces of
albacore tuna a week to avoid possible adverse effects
on children's brain development.
Soon after the warning was released, Vas Aposhian, a
professor at the University of Arizona and a member of
a federal advisory panel on fish-consumption
guidelines, criticized the government warning as too
lenient. Aposhian alleged that mercury levels in
albacore are so dangerous that the fish should be
avoided altogether, and told his local paper, the
Arizona Daily Star, that the panel he served on had
been stacked with people sympathetic to the food
industry.
Meanwhile, the administration argues that there's no
conclusive evidence of a connection between fish
contamination and mercury emissions from power plants
-- though a number of scientists disagree.
"EPA officials have been dishing out their usual
baloney about how there's not enough science to show a
definite link between coal-plant emissions and mercury
in fish," said a staffer at the Senate Environment
Committee who asked to remain anonymous.
The staffer told Muckraker that a group of scientists
"in the bowels of the EPA" have developed a scientific
model showing just such a direct link. The model is in
the last stages of peer review but, said the staffer,
the scientists are concerned that it's not going to
see the light of day.
Next page |
It seemed oddly off-message: John Kerry stood before
an audience of thousands of California liberals
yesterday at a rally at the University of California
at San Diego, roasting the petroleum-hungry Bush
administration for letting gas prices escalate.
"I'll use real diplomacy to do what George Bush hasn't
-- pressure OPEC to start providing more oil! We'll
stop diverting oil to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
until gas prices get back to normal," said the
Democratic presidential contender, who in 1993 voted
for a gas-tax hike and in 1994 spoke in favor of a
50-cent increase in the gas tax as a method for
reducing the federal debt and America's oil demands.
President Bush's campaign team has been quick to
pounce on this seeming contradiction; they've launched
a TV attack ad on the issue that begins running today
in 18 battleground states: "Some people have wacky
ideas, like taxing gasoline more so people drive less.
That's John Kerry," says the advertisement.
Wacky as the Bushies may consider the notion of a gas
tax, the president's own top economic advisor, Gregory
Mankiw, backed a 50-cent gas-tax increase in 1999.
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Still, the Kerry campaign says such a tax is not part
of its program: "Even though the senator considered
the 50-cent gas tax as a possibility, he declined to
vote for it on the grounds that it may be potentially
too damaging for the economy and pose too much of a
challenge for the working families that would have to
struggle to fill their tanks," said Beth Viola, an
environmental strategist for the Kerry campaign.
But while advocates of the gas tax may be distressed
that Kerry's support has, uh, run out of gas, they
will be heartened to hear that the candidate is
sticking to his guns on another proposal dear to the
hearts of enviros: Cranking up automobile fuel-economy
standards by 50 percent over the next decade. In fact,
this plan itself may be a good long-term mechanism for
lowering gas prices: When Americans reduce their oil
demands and lower imports, the result is generally a
greater surplus of oil on the global market and lower
prices. Plus, on an individual level, the owner of a
fuel-efficient car spends a lot less money at the gas
pump.
But Kerry's plan for revamping Corporate Average Fuel
Economy standards -- which would require auto
companies' fleets to get an average of 36 miles per
gallon by 2015, up from 24 mpg today -- has thrown
Democratic leaders in Michigan, a critical swing
state, into a twitter.
Wolverine state pols and industry bigwigs in Detroit
have argued for years that tighter CAFE standards
would trigger epidemic job loss in the automotive
sector. As Danny Hakim reported last week in the New
York Times, Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, a
Democrat, has been talking with the Kerry team,
pressing it to scale back its CAFE plan.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., has also been an outspoken
critic of Kerry's belief that Congress should boost
CAFE standards. In a Senate hearing on a proposed CAFE
amendment to the energy bill in July 2003, he argued,
"The senator from Massachusetts ... is simply wrong."
Levin was concerned that a tightening of CAFE
standards would result in car safety hazards and job
losses, and would discriminate against American auto
manufacturers who produce and sell a full line of
vehicles compared to European and Japanese
manufacturers who sell primarily lighter vehicles.
Not surprisingly, Granholm and Levin emphasize tax
incentives as a good way to spur development and sales
of more efficient vehicles.
Such incentives in fact are a key component of the
Kerry platform. He proposes to invest $1 billion a
year to help the auto industry gear up to build more
efficient vehicles, and he wants to give tax
incentives to buyers of cleaner cars.
But Kerry has no plans to capitulate on stricter
fuel-economy standards: "Look, he's certainly willing
to hear them out, but he's not going to walk into
Michigan and say he doesn't support the kind of
stronger CAFE standards he's been arguing for
decades," said Viola. "He owns his record, he's proud
of it, and he'll defend it."
Viola adds that Kerry is trying emphasize a
longer-term view: "Simply put, Kerry is trying to
strike a balance between Detroit's short-term economic
concerns and the longer-term reality" that the U.S.
auto industry will soon be losing jobs to the Japanese
and European manufacturers leading the global race to
develop fuel-efficient cars.
Indeed, Kerry was one of the only presidential primary
candidates to argue for CAFE standards in Iowa, where
a strong United Auto Workers base might be expected to
offer resistance.
"You have to tell the truth and let the chips fall
where they may," he told Grist in an interview during
the lead-up to the primaries. "But the truth, in this
case, should be appealing to UAW's workers: I believe
I can put them to work. I believe I can have them
working making cars; they can just make cars that are
more efficient."
One of Kerry's senior campaign strategists, who spoke
to Muckraker on condition of anonymity, said, "There
is a lot of closed-door conversation going on right
now about fuel economy -- clearly it's one of the top
issues, given concerns about spiking gasoline prices,
national security, energy independence, global
warming, you name it." But Kerry is trying to address
the issue in a way that emphasizes the advantages to
industry, not the threats. "We understand why Governor
Granholm and others are getting pressured by industry
to resist plans like this, but still we're determined
to help them understand why it's necessary in the long
view," said the strategist.
According to Dan Becker, a global-warming expert at
the Sierra Club, Kerry's CAFE plan may not cause him
much electoral trouble. The Sierra Club commissioned a
poll of 650 likely voters in Michigan in 2002 and
found that a surprising 77 percent supported ramping
up CAFE standards to 40 mpg over 10 years. And of 150
United Auto Workers households polled, a whopping 84
percent supported such standards.
"Clearly the voters and autoworkers seem to understand
the simple premise that Michigan's industry leaders
and politicians do not: Better technology is better
for jobs than old technology," said Becker.
Still, the issue reverberates well beyond Michigan:
The Bush administration has made it very clear that it
plans to use Kerry's CAFE proposal as proof that a
Kerry administration would sabotage the economy. Scott
Stanzel, press secretary for Bush's reelection
campaign, told the New York Times last week that
Kerry's fuel-economy plan would lead to 450,000 lost
jobs and $170 billion in "lost economic output"
between 2003 and 2020, citing figures from the federal
Energy Information Administration.
The Kerry campaign counters that these statistics are
entirely off-base, citing a recent joint study by the
20/20 Vision Education Fund and Management Information
Services, which concluded that raising CAFE standards
to higher levels could create up to 300,000 jobs.
"We absolutely believe that investing in new
technologies and building the cars of the future will
not only create jobs, but keep those jobs at home,"
said Viola.
The Bush team wants the electorate to believe that
strict CAFE standards will export American jobs
overseas. The Kerry team argues that lax
fuel-efficiency standards essentially outsource the
clean-energy industry to America's global competitors
and that the full energy and ingenuity of U.S. workers
should be marshaled behind the industry of the future.
That's an argument enviros think Kerry can win.
Muck it up
We welcome rumors, whistleblowing, classified
documents, or other useful tips on environmental
policies, Beltway shenanigans and the people behind
them. Please send 'em to [log in to unmask]
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