NEWS: ‘A Stealth Attack’
msnbc.com
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slams the Bush administration’s environmental policies
By Brian Braiker
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
Nov. 17 — In a Rolling Stone magazine piece called “Crimes Against Nature,” scheduled to hit newsstands Nov. 21, conservationist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. argues that since taking office, President George W. Bush has gone to unprecedented lengths to undo 30 years of environmental law.
LEVELING CHARGES OF corporate cronyism at the current administration, the son of Attorney General Bobby Kennedy claims Bush’s policy is to put polluters first, in order to pay back contributors at the expense of America’s air, water, land and children. His broadsides come as Republicans are fighting to pass a new energy bill before Congress breaks for Thanksgiving recess at the end of this week.
Negotiators from a bipartisan House-Senate conference committee will vote Monday on the proposed legislation—the first major energy bill in a decade. Critics consider the proposal, which would provide $20 billion in tax incentives to boost oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear production and prevent future power blackouts, as too generous to the oil and gas industry.
Kennedy, who boasts impressive environmental credentials—he serves as chief prosecuting attorney for the Hudson Riverkeeper, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, president of the Waterkeeper Alliance and as clinical professor and supervising attorney at the Environmental Litigation Clinic at Pace University School of Law in New York—claims that Bush uses beneficent-sounding initiatives like “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests” to deliberately mislead Americans. In a recent conversation with NEWSWEEK, he asserts that the way the administration developed its energy policy, behind closed doors and without input from environmentalists, betrays its true disdain for the environment. Excerpts:
NEWSWEEK: You claim that Bush has the worst environmental record of any president in history. That’s a bold statement.
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. : All of our major environmental statutes are being eviscerated. This is the first administration in history to not voluntarily list a species under the Endangered Species Act. The Superfund Program [created to eliminate health and environmental threats posed by hazardous waste sites] is now bankrupt because the administration doesn’t want polluters to have to clean up after themselves but wants the tax payers to pay for it. The Clean Water Act is being altered so that it will no longer protect most water in the United States. The fundamental compromise in the Clean Air Act, which was the requirement that old sources at some point upgrade to remove pollutants at the same level as new plants, has now been compromised.
You’ve made some allegations that there’s corporate cronyism going on here.
The energy industry contributed $48 million to the Republican Party in the 2000 election. Now they’re getting billions of dollars in payback from this administration. The American people are going to be paying that campaign debt for generations with bad air, with lower quality of life. The large corporations, mainly from the energy industry—but also Big Agriculture, the big real-estate developers, timber and mining industries—are rewriting all of our environmental statutes and cashing in. I have three children with asthma. One survey recently showed that one out of every four black children in New York City have asthma.
How is that related to Bush’s environmental policy?
We don’t know why there’s an epidemic of asthma, but we do know that asthma attacks are triggered by ozone and particulates and the largest source of those, about 45 percent of those pollutants, are being emitted by these coal-fired power plants that were supposed to clean up under the Clean Air Act. I live in New York state and now most of the fish in New York state cannot be safely eaten. Every fish in Connecticut is now unsafe to eat because of mercury contamination. The largest source of mercury is from those same power plants. Those plants were supposed to clean up, but the president has just changed the law and will allow them to pollute forever. The National Academy of Sciences says that compromise will result in 30,000 deaths of Americans every year.
This cronyism, this direct link between industry and policy, if you can corroborate it, is—
If I can corroborate what? This is not a secret. [Vice President Dick] Cheney’s task force, which rewrote the energy laws in this country, met for 106 days; they didn’t meet with a single environmental group. They had 709 meetings, all of them with industry. And the energy policy came out of those meetings, behind closed doors, came from cabinet officials who are all from the energy industry: [Secretary of Energy] Spencer Abrahams, [former Treasury secretary] Paul O’Neill, Don Evans, who is the CEO of an oil company, [Secretary of the Interior] Gail Norton, who’s been a lobbyist for the energy industry.
What are you doing about it?
One of the problems is that the Americans, when they hear about this, they don’t believe it. I speak to Republican groups all the time. I spoke to a petroleum trade association three weeks ago and I got a standing ovation. Republicans and Democrats are outraged at what’s going on when they hear it. Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster, has warned the White House that if word gets out about what they’re doing, they could lose the election. We win this debate if the public understands the debate.
If Americans are so outraged, why don’t we hear more about it?
The attack is a stealth attack. Any news announcements are done on Friday afternoons when the press won’t cover [them]. And the press has just been asleep on these issues. Of 15,000 minutes of network news in the last year, only 4 percent were devoted to the environment, and this is at a time where we are facing a global environmental crisis ... Oceangoing fish, according to a Pew report, [are] down to 10 percent of the [number of] fish that were in the oceans in 1950. Fuel efficiency is the lowest level in two decades, the polar ice caps are melting, the glaciers are withdrawing, the ocean levels are rising and we have a president who is eviscerating 30 years of environmental law. None of this is being covered on the network news.
Why do you think that is?
The reason for that is the same reason the networks wouldn’t criticize [the war on] Iraq. You have a news media that’s now controlled by a small number of corporations and news divisions have become profit centers. They’ve liquidated their foreign bureaus; they’ve liquidated their investigative reporters. If Americans want to hear international news, you’ve got to go to BBC or to one of the Canadian broadcasting systems. The networks are covering celebrities and notorious crimes.
So you’re describing a broad attack on the environment by this administration. Are there one or two issues that are the most pressing?
There’s over 200 environmental rollbacks that are planned or have been implemented by the Bush administration, and they’re listed on NRDC’s Web site. Name a statute and that statute has been dramatically weakened since the Bush administration took office.
But many of these Bush initiatives that have such beneficent sounding names, like for example Healthy Forests.
Clinton had conducted a timber summit in the Pacific Northwest because there was a crisis in the northwest. The old-growth timber had been cut to a point where species were going extinct. The environmental community came out with a settlement that everybody agreed on. It allowed cutting on certain parts of the forest and continued to protect large enough amounts to sustain some of our endangered species, like the spotted owl. The Healthy Forests Initiative throws out that timber settlement and all of the work that went into reconstructing these communities out there. It allows the timber industry to go right back into those forests and cut them down under the guise of fire protection. Of course, it’s not the old growth that is burning. The stuff that’s burning is the sagebrush in southern California.
Isn’t Bush trying to wean America off its dependence on oil by pledging to spend $1 billion on producing a hydrogen-powered car.
If you really wanted to wean our dependence from oil, the obvious and most instantaneous solution is corporate average fuel-efficiency standards, which impose fuel efficiency on the automobile industry. If we raise the fuel efficiency in our automobiles by one mile per gallon, we save more oil than would be in two Arctic National Wildlife Refuges. If we raise it by 2.6 miles per gallon, we save more oil than we get from Iraq and Kuwait combined. If we raise it seven miles per gallon, we eliminate all the need for any imports from the Persian Gulf. The president has instead embraced hydrogen fuels, but the way that he’s done it is deceptive. The environmental community likes hydrogen because it can be extracted from water and it’s a clean fuel. But the money the president has put aside for hydrogen fuel development uses another method that extracts hydrogen from coal and oil, so you get the same amount of pollutants that you do from burning the coal and oil.
You’ve described John Kerry as the environmental movement’s Democrat.
John has the best credentials of any of the candidates that are running. But all of the Democrats are strong on this issue compared to the president. John organized Earth Day in 1970 in Massachusetts before he was senator. He’s been the chief champion of fuel efficiency standards in the Senate.
Your name has been mentioned as an environmental consultant to your cousin-in-law, California governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger. Will you be giving advice to the governor?
Well, Arnold has just appointed [executive director of Environment Now in Santa Monica] Terry Tamminen head of Cal-EPA. And of course Terry Tamminen is a very, very strong environmentalist. To the extent that Arnold wants my advice, yes. My advice is available to any politician who wants it, Republican or Democrat.
Speaking of politicians, what’s your take on Michael O. Leavitt, former Utah governor and newly confirmed nominee to head the Environmental Protection Agency?
He’s a catastrophe for EPA. He’s an extremely charming person but Utah under his leadership has become the second most-polluted state in the country after Texas. He has made a practice of suppressing science and blackballing and punishing scientists whose findings do not support his political agenda. He fired an enforcement officer who had penalized his family trout farms for releasing whirling disease into the state, which has now devastated the wild trout populations across Utah.
Some of your detractors have called you a NIMBY environmentalist, pointing to your opposition of a wind energy project on Nantucket Sound.
I’ve have always supported wind energy, and I support in the water and the territorial seas. But I wouldn’t put a wind farm in Central Park or Yosemite or the Everglades. And I wouldn’t put one in Nantucket Sound. The worst trap for an environmentalist to fall into is in believing that the only wildernesses that are worth protecting are in the Rocky Mountains. The most important wildernesses we have in America are close to our cities. Human beings need the experience of wilderness and for most people in New England, they’re going to get that experience by being out on Nantucket Sound. It should be moved four or five miles out into the ocean, that’s all.
Changing the subject—your mother is selling your family’s historic Hickory Hill estate. What does the estate mean to you? I’m sure history buffs everywhere would like to have been a fly on the wall there.
The house is part of American history. It was [a] Union headquarters during the Civil War. Many of the most important decisions of the Kennedy administration were debated formally and informally at Hickory Hill. Heads of state from dozens of nations visited there at various times to confer with my father and my uncle and others. It’s a sad loss for my family but I think it’s the best decision by my mother—it’s a large house and it’s not heavily used by family members any more. |
