One GW Bush being the worst environmental president ever, from interview with RFK Jr...
You charge in your Rolling Stone article that Bush is the worst environmental president in American history.
Yes, that's true. And he's far worse than No. 2, who's Warren Harding. Based upon the fact that we have 30 major environmental laws that are now being eviscerated. All of the investment we have made in our environmental infrastructure since Earth Day 1970 is now being undermined in a three-year period of astonishing activity.
The NRDC Web site lists over 200 environmental rollbacks by the White House in the last two years. If even a fraction of those are actually implemented, we will effectively have no significant federal environmental law left in our country by this time next year. That's not exaggeration, it's not hyperbole, it is a fact.
As I say in the Rolling Stone article, many of our laws will remain on the books in one form or another. But we'll be Mexico, which has these wonderful, even poetic, environmental laws, but nobody knows about them and nobody complies with them because they can't be enforced.
You also point out that the Bush administration has been very careful in how they've gone about rolling back environmental progress. You write that, unlike the Reagan administration's more confrontational approach, they operate in a stealth manner. Exactly how does this work?
Well, unlike Reagan, they control both houses of Congress, so they can attach stealthy, anti-environmental riders to must-pass budget bills. In that way they can alter statutes without debate or public scrutiny. Furthermore, a lot of the environmental regulations are arcane and highly technical and require strict enforcement by the various agencies. The Bush administration is suspending enforcement or changing agency policies without altering the regulations. A lot of the changes are illegal, and groups like the NRDC will sue them and we will win the lawsuits -- but that litigation process takes 10 or 12 years, and by that time the damage will be done.
So how are they getting away with it?
Because they've taken control of the agencies that are supposed to be protecting us. And Congress doesn't scrutinize them because, as I said, the Republicans control Capitol Hill. The people running Congress these days, particularly Tom DeLay, are among the strongest advocates for dismantling our environmental infrastructure. There are no hearings on Capitol Hill, no public scrutiny.
Why isn't the media being more of a watchdog on this?
The consolidation of American media over the past decade or so has dramatically diminished the inquisitiveness of our national press. There are now only 11 companies that control virtually every radio outlet, every TV outlet and every newspaper in our country. And because of that media consolidation, the news bureaus are no longer run by newspeople. They are now corporate profit centers. Most of these companies have liquidated their foreign bureaus, because they're expensive to run. That's why you can't get foreign news in this country; you have to go to the BBC. And they've liquidated their investigative journalism units, because that kind of reporting is also expensive. So news has become the lowest common denominator, which is why you see sensational crime coverage, you see Laci Peterson and Kobe Bryant all the time, you see celebrity gossip, which is really just a form of pornography. And you see murders, which is really just another form of pornography. You just see notorious crimes, and you don't really see much substantive news anymore.
The Tyndall Report, which is the service that analyzes what's on TV, recently surveyed the environmental content on TV news and of the 15,000 minutes of network news that aired last year only 4 percent of them were devoted to the environment. And this is at a time when we have a president who is dismantling 30 years of environmental law, and when we are going through a global environmental crisis, including mass extinctions comparable to the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Global fisheries have dropped to 10 percent of their 1950s levels, the ice caps and glaciers are melting, sea levels are rising, and one out of every four black children in New York has asthma.
Your own children have asthma too, don't they?
Yes, three of my six children, three of my boys, have asthma. We don't know why there's this epidemic of asthma, but we do know that asthma attacks are triggered by bad air days, especially by high levels of particulates and ozone. And just a couple weeks ago, the Bush administration abandoned the new source performance standards (that regulate industrial pollution), which means that the amount of junk in our air is actually going to increase. The energy industry contributed $48 million to Bush and the Republicans in the 2000 campaign. And this is one of their big payoffs -- it will mean billions of dollars in extra profits for the industry. But the public is going to be paying that debt for generations -- with children, American children, who are gasping for breath and people literally dying. The National Academy of Sciences predicts that 30,000 Americans a year will die because of the Bush decision. And that's just one of the impacts.
Another is that airborne mercury contamination has made it dangerous to eat any freshwater fish in 28 states and the fish in most of our coastal waters. And that mercury is coming from those same power plants. Fifty percent of the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized from acid rain that's coming from those same power plants. The forest cover all the way up the Appalachians from Georgia to Canada is now deteriorating, again because of acid rain from those same power plants. And in order to provide the fuel for those power plants, we're cutting down the Appalachian mountains. It's illegal what they're doing, for coal companies to blast off the mountaintops and dump them into the adjoining rivers and streams. But the Bush administration has announced that it will no longer enforce those laws. And that's what's happening at the White House these days.
If we're looking at an environmental wasteland under Bush, why aren't there people in the streets the way they were on Earth Day 1970, which launched the modern environmental movement?
Well, it's not because people aren't interested. The primary reason is it's not being covered in the news. I asked [Fox News chief] Roger Ailes about this recently, and he said, "We just don't cover it because it's not fast-breaking. If you release toxics into the air, people don't get sick for 20 years. We need something that is happening this afternoon. The polar ice caps melting -- that's just too slow for us to cover."
And of course the tampering with the regulations you're seeing in Washington is happening in back corridors, and the networks can't be bothered to investigate, much less explain to the public the connection between these regulatory rollbacks, even though the outcomes will be dramatic and will affect America for generations.
But I'll say this -- every poll shows that both Republicans and Democrats want strong environmental laws, up around 75 percent of the public, and there's almost no difference between the parties. Those polls are confirmed by my own anecdotal evidence. I speak all around the country on environmental issues. Three weeks ago I spoke at a petroleum and gas industry conference, and I got a standing ovation from the audience when I told them about Bush's environmental record. And I'll give you another example: I was recently in Richmond, Va., speaking to the Women's Club, which is solidly Republican -- I was told that none of its members had voted for a Democrat since Jefferson Davis. And I got a standing ovation there, too. It's because most Republicans are actually Democrats; they just don't know it. If they knew what was happening in the White House, they would be angry, they would be furious. And when they are told what is happening, they get angry. And that's the reaction I get all around the country. If we get the message out, we win.
You don't think people who belong to an energy trade association understand what's happening on the environment in Washington?
Well, the people who actually work in the petroleum industry, many of them are hunters and fishermen and they care about the outdoors and the environment. And no, I don't think they realize in many cases what their trade association is doing, what their lobbying groups are doing in Washington. These groups always take the most radical, ultraright-wing positions on every issue. But that doesn't necessarily reflect the views of their membership. And most Americans care about this country and the outdoors, and they understand that we have to practice some self-restraint. And over the long term what is good economic policy is identical to what is good environmental policy.
So why isn't the environmental movement giving Roger Ailes the visuals he needs by getting out in the streets and practicing the kind of civil disobedience and spectacular protest that would make the media take notice? Let me put it another way: Has the environmental movement lost its political fire and become too legalistic?
It's true that in its early years, the environmental movement was driven by former labor organizers who knew how to do grass-roots organizing. And they were able to bring 20 million people out on the streets of America on Earth Day 1970. But since then it has become less activist. Between then and 1995, because of the success of the movement, a lot of the leadership was focused on inside-the-Beltway concerns, about how to push through maximum contaminant levels for drinking water and water-quality standards, and issues that were arcane and technical that lost touch with the parables that gave the environmental movement its original power. The Cuyahoga River burning, Lake Erie being declared dead, Love Canal, and Three Mile Island. These were the dramatic stories -- where people suffered obvious environmental injury -- that once animated the movement.
At the same time, you had an extremely sophisticated industry effort to discredit the environmental movement, to dismiss them as tree huggers, as unrealistic, as anti-job, as elitist. And they have been very successful at it. They've put huge amounts of money into it. The Heritage Foundation is a creation of this industry movement, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute -- all of those type of think tanks in Washington are funded by industry to promote its views. That there is no such thing as global warming, that DDT is good for you, that caribou love the Alaska pipeline. And they stock these phony think tanks with marginalized scientists, who we call "biostitutes," whose whole job is to do the industry's bidding and to persuade the public that environmental injury doesn't exist, that it's an illusion, that it's henny-penny-ism.
In most Americans' hearts, the investment in our environmental infrastructure is well worth making. They want our children to have clean air and clean water to drink, and they want to preserve the wild places that make America special, the places that are sacred to Americans.
But there is a marriage between the pollution interests and these right-wing paranoid movements led by people like Rush Limbaugh, Paul Weyrich, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell. They got a huge infusion of money in the 1980s from big industrial polluters like Joseph Coors, and it suddenly gave them an enormous voice. This wing has come to dominate the Republican Party. And the central platform of all these groups is their anti-environmentalism. They're against any regulations that interfere with corporate profit-taking.
What about the Democratic Party? Isn't it part of the problem too? Democratic politicians receive money from many of these same corporate polluters. And Al Gore certainly failed to make the environment a major issue in the last presidential race, even though he was supposedly Mr. Environment.
Yeah, absolutely. And I think it's because most of the candidates do not know how to explain these issues in a way that makes them relevant to the average voter. And in fact they have extraordinary relevance to average people. We're not protecting the environment for the sake of the fishes and the birds; we're doing it because it enriches us. It's the basis of our economy, and we ignore that at our peril. The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of our environment. It also enriches us aesthetically and recreationally and culturally and historically -- and spiritually. Human beings have other appetites besides money, and if we don't feed them, we're not going to become the beings that our Creator intended us to become.
When we destroy the environment, we are diminishing ourselves and we're impoverishing our children. And our obligation as a generation -- as Americans, as a civilization -- is to create communities that give our children the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as the communities that our parents gave us. And we cannot do that if we don't protect our environmental infrastructure. And that's really what this is all about.
So why didn't Al Gore go near this issue in the 2000 race?
That was a great disappointment to me. I urged him to do it. And I believe he would be president if he had.
Have you talked with him about it since the race?
No, not since the race. But I talked to him and to [key Gore advisor] Bob Shrum during the race.
And what was their explanation at the time -- that it wouldn't get him swing votes?
Their rationale was, No. 1, that they were talking about the environment, but that it wasn't getting traction with the press, and No. 2, that everyone knew that Gore was an environmentalist and he needed to establish his credentials in other areas.
But it was my feeling that Americans don't vote for a politician because he's mastered the issues -- they vote for a politician who they believe shares values with them. And is passionate about those values, and will fight for those values. And I think Gore's challenge was to explain the environment in ways that made Americans understand it was intertwined with all the other issues they cared about, and all their basic values.
Gore's failure was he didn't embrace the thing he genuinely cared about -- he didn't have the confidence to do that. Instead, he felt he had to prove his competence in all these other areas, to master the minutiae of every other issue. And Americans don't care about that.
I mean, look at George W. Bush -- he knows nothing about any issue. He doesn't seem to have a single complex thought in his head or shred of curiosity. I mean, he claims he doesn't even watch the news or read newspapers. But people find something kind of charming and trustworthy about his manner -- and that's all they need.
Ironically, the environment -- because he did care so strongly about it -- might have been the one issue that humanized Gore as a candidate.
Exactly. And make people trust him. Make them feel he's not just a guy who's following the polls and consumed by ambition. That he's running because he has a core value that he considers worth fighting for. That's the challenge that every politician has. Instead, people just saw him as a phony, that he didn't really believe in anything, aside from getting elected. And that his campaign wasn't about a vision for America and for the world -- it was just about ambition.
You've endorsed John Kerry in the 2004 race. Do you think he'll champion the environment more boldly than Gore in his campaign?
I think he already is; he's already framed this as his issue. I like all of the Democratic candidates and they're all relatively good on the environment. Actually, I don't know anything about Wes Clark on this issue, I haven't talked to him. But I have good friends who have and they say he's expressed strong feelings on the environment. So I think all the Democratic candidates are in the right place.
But Kerry has the best record of any senator; he has a 96 percent lifetime rating with the League of Conservation Voters. This has been a passion for him since he got into public life. He was the Massachusetts organizer for Earth Day in 1970, and he has fought hard for fuel efficiency standards, which is now the holy grail of the environmental movement. He's been the one consistent champion on that issue.
I've known Kerry almost all my life and he's an outdoorsman, he loves being on the water, he loves fishing. I've spent a lot of time on Nantucket Sound with him. Last summer he called my brother Max and asked him to come to Wood's Hole to go windsurfing with him, and they ended up windsurfing all the way from Wood's Hole to Nantucket, which is 45 miles, over open ocean. And that's pretty good for a 56-year-old guy. And he wasn't calling a press conference or anything. He just did it because they got into the water. It's genuine. |
