However, as with everything that Karl Rove directs within the White House,
Inc., battle plan, there's an insidious twist: as I reported last fall,
following the national SC political training event in DC, Sierra Club's
national polls reveal that Americans are almost completely ignorant of
Bush's machinations against our environment. What's more, because a
majority of voters believe that Bush has good personal qualities, they
also choose to believe that he "would do good for the environment, if he
had the time to focus on it."
Republicans like ex-cabinet secretaries Christine Whitman and Paul O'Neill
are speaking out. As early as last April, Nixon's old White House
Counsel, John Dean, published an article warning that Bush's actions in
several areas could be impeachable. It's vital that rank-and-file
Republicans, who place citizenship first, speak out, too. Otherwise, Rove
and his Orwellian media manipulators will knock responsible critics off
the public radar screens. (How many of you read John Dean's article? How
many people even heard about it?)
Bill Witt
> I have no idea how widespread this phenomenon is, but
> I know more than one Republican who has switched
> his/her party affiliation since Bush took office, and
> environmental policy is part of the reason. It is a
> real shame that the GOP decided to make protecting the
> environment a partisan issue, which it was not in the
> 1970s.
>
> Laurie Belin
>
> www.salon.com
>
> The green elephant in the room
>
> A growing chasm divides moderate and
> right-wing Republicans over a broad range of issues --
> environmental policy
>
> chief among them.
>
>
> From
>
>
> - - - - - - - - - - - -
>
> By Amanda Griscom
>
>
>
>
> Jan. 15, 2004 | On Monday, former U.S.
> EPA administrator Christie Todd Whitman published an
> uncharacteristically
>
> opinionated commentary in the New York
> Times lamenting the Bush administration's disregard
> for moderate
>
> Republican viewpoints. Though gently
> worded, the Op-Ed stands as the closest thing Whitman
> has made to a
>
> confession that she abandoned her post
> over an ideological clash with her superiors -- not
> because of homesickness,
>
> as she claimed in her resignation
> letter. More important, Whitman identified the fault
> line of radicalism that has begun
>
> to rupture the GOP -- a growing chasm
> dividing moderate and right-wing Republicans over a
> broad range of issues,
>
> environmental policy chief among them.
>
>
> "President Bush [is] arguably one of the
> more conservative presidents in recent history,"
> Whitman writes. These
>
> days, under his administration, "many
> moderate Republicans feel ... less certain of their
> place in the party."
>
> Meanwhile, "many conservatives act as if
> they wish we moderates would just disappear." She goes
> on to chide the
>
> administration for appealing to an
> ever-smaller votership and alienating moderate voters.
> "We too often follow the
>
> advice of political consultants to
> appeal not to a majority of the electorate but only to
> the most motivated voters --
>
> those with the most zealous, ideological
> beliefs." Whitman did not hesitate to fault Democrats
> and environmentalists
>
> for engaging in similarly exaggerated
> polemic for the same calculated political reasons, but
> implied that as the party in
>
> power, the GOP has more to lose than the
> Dems in alienating its majority.
>
>
> Whitman is not alone in her concern over
> this rift between middle-of-the-road and far-right
> Republicans. A growing
>
> number of prominent party members --
> including Sens. John McCain, R-Ariz., Lincoln Chafee,
> R-R.I., and Olympia
>
> Snowe, R-Maine -- have squared off
> against the Bush administration on its environmental
> policies, casting votes on
>
> issues ranging from the Bush energy plan
> and Superfund to global warming and CAFE standards
> that directly
>
> challenge the administration's
> pro-industry, anti-regulation attitude.
>
>
> Many fear that the Republican Party as a
> whole might pay dearly for the Bush administration's
> radical approach to
>
> environmental issues. "The irony is that
> while the Bush administration's environmental policy
> is designed largely to
>
> strengthen their campaign strategy, it
> could do just the opposite," Chafee told Muckraker.
> "Look at a map of all the
>
> states Bush won in 2000 -- the red
> states are mining states, they are timber-producing
> states, they are ranching states,
>
> many of which have a very strong
> opposition to environmental laws. But that doesn't
> represent the interests of most
>
> of the swing states. And even the
> mentality in the traditionally Republican states is
> changing -- states like Idaho,
>
> where people are beginning to understand
> that there has to be a balance."
>
>
>
> Chafee also cautioned Republicans to
> remember that Green Party presidential
>
> candidate Ralph Nader took more than 2
> percent of the popular vote in the 2000
>
> election; assuming those voters -- many
> of them rabid enviros -- go for the
>
> Democratic candidate this time around,
> Republicans will get even more of a run
>
> for their money.
>
>
> Theodore Roosevelt IV -- great grandson
> and namesake of the president who is
>
> often hailed by environmentalists and
> Republicans alike as the godfather of
>
> conservation -- also voiced concerns
> that Bush's radical environmental policies
>
> could threaten his reelection in 2004.
> "If you look at the elections, between 40
>
> and 45 percent of the people are
> Republicans and Democrats that vote
>
> consistently, but the swing vote is
> getting larger and larger," said Roosevelt.
>
> "We're losing out on that swing vote for
> a number of reasons -- one's the
>
> environment, another's the economy, and
> they're both interlinked. Bush's
>
> environmental policy undermines a
> sustainable economic program. It's brilliant
>
> short-term, but in the long term it
> won't work."
>
>
> Martha Marks, president of Republicans
> for Environmental Protection, argues
>
> that the Bush administration has
> "totally blown it" on environmental issues. "All
>
> my life I never thought there was
> anything oxymoronic about being a
>
> Republican who supports the protection
> of the environment, but today that
>
> notion is derided as a joke," said
> Marks. "Most Republicans call themselves
> conservatives, but a true conservative
>
> must inherently conserve. "
>
>
> Marks added that it's not just the
> moderate swing vote she's worried about; a substantial
> segment of her members are
>
> the devout Christians to whom Bush is
> trying to appeal. "We have a growing number of
> extremely religious men and
>
> women who are very dedicated to the
> Republican Party but who believe that government must
> help protect -- not
>
> destroy -- God's natural creation," she
> said. Like Whitman, even they are increasingly
> disenfranchised and alienated
>
> from the party leadership. "Many of our
> members feel that the Bush administration's approach
> to environmental
>
> policy doesn't just damage the common
> good, it's immoral," she said.
>
>
>
> The green elephant in the room | 1, 2
>
>
>
> Dropping science
>
> The White House Office of Management and
> Budget is the powerful watchdog agency responsible for
> screening
>
> each rule change that passes through
> federal agencies to ensure that its costs do not
> outweigh its advantages to the
>
> U.S. economy. Indeed, on President
> Bush's first day in office, the OMB manifested its
> wide reach by freezing more
>
> than 50 Clinton-era regulations -- at
> least a dozen of which were environmental -- on the
> grounds that their costs
>
> might prove unacceptable.
>
>
> Now it seems that the Bush
> administration has confounded the office's mastery of
> economics with a mastery of
>
> science; it recently proposed that the
> OMB not only review the economic impact of rule
> changes, but also appoint its
>
> own experts to peer-review the
> scientific accuracy of any government-issued warnings
> related to public heath, safety
>
> and the environment. The absurdity of
> this notion was called out on Friday, when 20 former
> top agency officials
>
> delivered an outraged letter to the OMB
> asking the office to withdraw its proposal, saying it
> "could damage the
>
> federal system for protecting public
> health and the environment."
>
>
> Wesley Warren, one of the signatories
> and a former senior official in the Clinton
> administration's OMB, explained it
>
> this way: "This proposal puts the OMB
> into the position of a kind of super-science
> supervisor -- and yet the agency
>
> is completely lacking in the personnel,
> expertise, and knowledge necessary to be that sort of
> judge and jury. This
>
> would essentially allow them to
> second-guess all the science coming out of all the
> federal agencies. Think about how
>
> many science disciplines there are in
> the government, and how many specialties within that
> science! There's no way
>
> that from one central office they can
> replicate the scientific understanding and mastery of
> the issues that the expert
>
> federal agencies can. It's an
> extraordinary act of hubris on their part to presume
> [as much]."
>
>
>
> According to Warren, the motivation for
> this proposed rule is, of course,
>
> economics. You don't need to look past
> the recent example of the mad cow
>
> debacle, which plunged cattle markets
> into despair, to understand the kind of
>
> economic ripple effect that can come out
> of a national public-health warning.
>
> And you don't need to look past the
> example of the EPA's ground zero
>
> air-quality coverup to recognize that
> the Bush administration is willing to soften
>
> or even conceal important public health
> information in order to avoid public
>
> panic.
>
>
> What's most concerning about this
> situation, according to David Michaels,
>
> another signatory and a former assistant
> secretary for environment, safety, and
>
> health at the Department of Energy, is
> the vastness of the domain of information
>
> that the OMB would oversee. "It would
> control any information disseminated
>
> by any public official related to public
> health and security," he said. "The EPA
>
> will likely be the agency most affected
> [by the OMB peer reviews], but the
>
> proposal was written in such a way -- so
> broadly -- that it could even force
>
> statements by Alan Greenspan to be
> reviewed by OMB-appointed authorities
>
> before they go public."
>
>
> Furthermore, OMB has proposed clear
> stipulations about which scientists
>
> would be qualified to do their peer
> reviews. "They say that no scientist who has
>
> ever received funding from an agency is
> qualified to perform a peer review," said Sean
> Moulton, senior information
>
> policy analyst at the D.C.-based
> organization OMB Watch. But a high proportion of
> academic experts have received
>
> research grants from government, so this
> stipulation essentially narrows the pool down to
> industry scientists who
>
> have never needed to apply for
> government funding.
>
>
> Not much flexing of the imagination is
> needed to come up with scenarios in which
> OMB-controlled scientific
>
> reviews might interfere with the release
> of important environmental and public-health
> information. "The list is
>
> endless," according to Moulton. "And
> climate change is at the top of it. Any studies or
> announcements related to
>
> global warming would obviously be at
> risk given that the Bush administration generally does
> not consider this
>
> phenomenon as a scientific fact."
>
>
> The Bush administration has also
> questioned the scientific facts underlying dozens of
> other hot-button public-health
>
> issues: the effects of endocrine
> disruptors on the human hormonal system, for instance,
> and the effects of particulate
>
> matter on the lungs. Administration
> officials have also questioned the levels of dioxin,
> mercury and arsenic that are
>
> hazardous in the human body. They've
> even questioned the public-health benefits of
> fuel-economy standards, arguing
>
> that the health costs of auto emissions
> are outweighed by mortalities caused by collisions in
> lighter, smaller cars.
>
>
> Questioning scientific foundations is
> reasonable, of course, but creating a federal
> mechanism to delay the release of
>
> breaking scientific information would
> have environmental and public-health costs that
> America simply can't afford.
>
>
> Lucky SEER 13
>
> While the Bush administration is making
> efforts to ramp up the OMB's authority, a D.C. circuit
> court judgment on
>
> Tuesday cut it down to size. The court
> overruled the agency's effort to weaken one of the
> very Clinton-era rules it
>
> froze on Day 1 of the Bush
> administration. The rule set a standard (known as SEER
> 13) that would require new
>
> air-conditioners and heat pumps to be 30
> percent more energy-efficient as of January 2006. The
> Bush administration
>
> had proposed a softer standard known as
> SEER 12, which would have reduced the energy savings
> of the Clinton-era
>
> standard by more than a third.
>
>
> The victors in Tuesday's decision
> include the Natural Resources Defense Council and the
> 10 state attorneys general,
>
> led by New York's Eliot Spitzer, who
> sued the Bush administration over this rollback. The
> court's decision was
>
> based on a provision of the 1989
> National Appliance Energy Conservation Act, which
> stipulates that no
>
> energy-efficiency requirements passed
> under federal law can later be weakened.
>
>
> "The DOE initially tried to argue that
> the SEER 12 standard was actually not weakening the
> SEER 13 standard --
>
> patently absurd!" said Katherine
> Kennedy, a senior attorney at NRDC who helped
> prosecute the case. "When that
>
> didn't fly, they tried to argue that the
> SEER 13 standard never made it onto the federal
> register. Again, it didn't fly."
>
>
> The court concluded, in no uncertain
> terms, "It is inconceivable that Congress intended to
> allow such unfettered
>
> agency discretion to amend standards,
> given the appliance program's goal of steadily
> increasing the energy efficiency
>
> of covered products."
>
>
> According to Kennedy, the savings in
> both air emissions and energy bills from SEER 13 will
> be enormous: "By
>
> 2020, the difference between energy
> saved by SEER 12 and SEER 13 will be 14,000 megawatts
> -- enough to avoid
>
> the need to build 48 average-size power
> plants," she said. "And by 2020, consumers will save
> $1 billion a year in
>
> energy bills due to these efficiency
> improvements." The American Council for an
> Energy-Efficient Economy also
>
> calculated that by 2030, the energy
> saved will prevent the emission of more than 50
> million metric tons of carbon
>
> dioxide -- the equivalent of taking 34
> million cars off the road for one year. How 'bout that
> for a cost-benefit
>
> analysis?
>
>
> Muck it up
>
>
> Here at Muckraker, we always try to keep
> our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground (a real
> physiognomic
>
> challenge). The more sources we have,
> the better -- so if you are a fellow lantern-bearer in
> the dark caverns of the
>
> Bush administration's environmental
> policy, let us know. We welcome rumors, tips,
> whistleblowing, insider info,
>
> top-secret documents, or other useful
> tidbits on developments in environmental policy and
> the people behind them.
>
> Please send 'em along to
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
> -------------------
>
>
> For more environmental news, sign up for
> Grist Magazine's free e-mail service.
>
>
>
> salon.com
>
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