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
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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
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