The destroyer
George Bush's war on terror may have made the
world a more dangerous place. But it is his atrocious
record on the environment that poses the greatest
threat, says Graydon Carter, in the second exclusive
extract from his new book
Wednesday September 1, 2004
The Guardian
'Prosperity will mean little," declared George W Bush while on
the stump as presidential candidate, "if we leave to future
generations a world of polluted air, toxic lakes and rivers, and
vanished forests." By the time Bush departed his job as
governor of Texas in December 2000, Texas had - according to a
report from within the ranks of his own party - become the
number-one state in the nation in manufacturing-plant emissions
of toxic chemicals, in the release of industrial airborne toxins, in
violations of clean water discharge standards and the release of
toxic waste into underground wells. Under Bush's governorship,
Houston had even passed Los Angeles to become the city with
the worst air quality in America.
The Republicans for
Environmental Protection (REP) study could find not a single
initiative by Bush during his term as governor that sought to
improve either the state's air or its water. What would he do as
president?
On January 20 2001 - Bush's first day in office - he called in the
chief of staff, Andrew Card, and told him to send directives to
every executive department with authority over environmental
issues, ordering them to put on hold more than a dozen
regulations left over from the Clinton administration. The
regulations covered everything from lowering arsenic levels in
drinking water to reducing releases of raw sewage.
Big Republican donors expected a return on their investment
following the 2000 presidential election, and Bush was more
than willing to deliver. Bush convened his National Energy Policy
Development Group nine days after taking office. This was the
panel that came to be known as the vice president's Energy
Task Force. For four months, Dick Cheney, energy secretary
Abraham, other cabinet secretaries and their deputies
formulated the nation's energy policy behind the closed doors of
the vice president's office and the cabinet room. Eighteen of the
Republicans' top 25 donors from the energy industry were invited
in and asked to contribute to the plan.
Kenneth Lay of Enron, who had loaned Bush his company jet
during his presidential campaign, met the group numerous
times. Executives from such companies and organisations as
Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Nuclear Energy Institute,
Westinghouse, Edison Electric Institute and the American
Petroleum Institute consulted with the committee between six
and 19 times. Upwards of 400 executives from 150 corporations
and trade associations met with the taskforce from February to
May 2001.
The Cheney group did not speak to a single environmentalist
during the hearings. Abraham said he didn't have time to meet
them, and Cheney's office denied their requests for inclusion.
Cheney and his colleagues emerged with a National Energy
Plan in May 2001, which included 100 proposals and led to a
massive energy bill with tax breaks for US energy interests
estimated by Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation at
$23.5bn (£13bn) - a pretty good return on the $44m (£24.5bn) it
had donated to the Republicans during the previous year's
election.
There wasn't a single line in the energy bill requiring an increase
in the fuel efficiency of the nation's 204m passenger vehicles.
(Nor, for that matter, was there any mention of global warming.)
The plan did include proposals that would have a new power
plant built every week for the next 20 years, however. Senator
John McCain, the Arizona Republican who joined the Democrats
in eventually getting the legislation watered down, called the bill
the "Leave-No-Lobbyist-Behind Act". After its passage, McCain
said: "With a half-trillion dollar deficit, we're giving tax credits, for
guess who, the [oil] industry in America, which last time I
checked was doing really well."
The Bush White House has produced its assault on the
environment with little in the way of public scrutiny, which is
especially remarkable considering the devastating effects its
initiatives will have on America's land, air and water for
generations to come. Reports or programmes that the
administration must by law announce, but would rather go
unnoticed, it gives to low-level officials to deliver.
Environmental enforcement at the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) has plunged under Bush. Since 2001, monthly
violation notices - the most important tool against polluters - are
down 58% compared with Clinton's monthly average.
Partly as a result, three decades after the passage of the Clean
Air Act, almost one in three Americans still breathe air filled with
nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, coal dust,
mercury, and hundreds of other toxic pollutants. The pollution
comes from myriad sources, but within the energy business, the
prime culprit is coal, which powers half of the US's electricity
and causes 90% of the electric power industry's pollution. Two
years after Bush took office, the rollbacks of pollution
regulations meant that dirty coal plants that upgraded their
facilities would not necessarily have also to upgrade their
pollution-control equipment.
This easing of controls has been calculated to cause the release
of an additional 1.4m tonnes of air pollution. The National
Academy of Sciences estimates that the change in the law will
result in 30,000 American deaths.
In December 2002, an alliance of attorneys general from 24
states and attorneys from 30 cities and municipalities sued the
EPA, arguing that the new rules would violate the Clean Air Act.
A year later, the DC circuit court agreed, for now, and issued a
temporary injunction preventing the EPA from implementing the
new laws until the case is settled.
Undeterred, Bush announced in 2002 that his Clear Skies
initiative would lower most power plant emissions by 70% by the
year 2018. In fact, environmental groups all say that Clear Skies
targets are dramatically lower than those of the existing Clean
Air Act. The EPA produced its own programme for reducing
power plant emissions that was much tougher than the White
House's plan. The White House rejected this proposal. And
Congress rejected the Bush administration's plan. The Clear
Skies legislation remains stalled in Congress.
The other major source of air pollution, of course, is motor
vehicles. The US has 5% of the world's population and uses
between 25% and 30% of the world's oil. (The UK, by
comparison, has less than 2% of the world's population and
uses 2% of the world's oil.) The US imports 63% of that oil, and
more than two-thirds of that foreign oil is burned as
transportation fuel. Incredibly, overall fuel economy ratings in the
US are worse now than in 1988. By comparison, in Europe,
petrol mileage in 1998 was already close to 30 miles per gallon,
and now averages almost 35mpg. Japan, by 2002, was
averaging more than 34mpg, fast approaching its 2010 goal of
35.5 mpg. Even the Republican-controlled EPA estimates that a
three-mile per gallon increase in overall fuel efficiency standards
would save Americans $25bn a year in oil costs and reduce
annual CO2emissions by 140m tonnes. Why is America so far
behind? Simple: the 2.5m SUVs sold every year.
SUVs produce almost 45% more air pollution than average cars.
The federal government sets fuel economy standards for new
passenger cars at 27.5mpg. But this excludes SUVs, which are
not even categorised as "cars"; they are on the books as "light
trucks" and therefore only have to average 20.7 mpg. Because of
the complexities of the regulations, it is technically possible for
SUVs to have fuel efficiency standards as low as 12mpg.
Not only did the White House energy bill not set fuel standards
for SUVs, the Republican-led Congress maintained a bill offering
a tax benefit that encourages the purchase of the largest,
least-efficient brands. If you're in the 35% tax bracket, and you
buy a $106,000 Hummer for "business" use, the IRS gives you a
refund of $35,000 on the purchase in the first year.
Another of Bush's first-day-in-office moves was to order a
moratorium on Clinton-era Clean Water Act regulations
controlling the discharge of raw sewage from what the waste
industry likes to call "sanitary sewers". By November 2003, the
administration took the moratorium a step further when the EPA
announced a plan to allow sewage treatment plants to release
biologically untreated waste into rivers and other waterways. But
only on rainy days.
Clean water has been under systematic attack by the Bush
administration, whose policies have sought to remove protection
from 20m acres of wetlands and allow mountaintop mining
companies to dump their waste directly into waterways.
(Continued) |
