Great article on the Bush Administration and the Environment in today's Times....
New Priorities in Environment
September 14, 2004
By FELICITY BARRINGER
Every fall, after raising their young near Teshekpuk Lake
and the Colville River, tens of thousands of geese and
tundra swans leave the North Slope of Alaska for more
southerly shores. Some end their journey at the Pocosin
Lakes National Wildlife Refuge in the flatlands of North
Carolina.
Both habitats could be transformed if current Bush
administration initiatives come to pass. The birds would
have oil rigs as neighbors in Alaska and be greeted by Navy
jets simulating carrier takeoffs and landings in North
Carolina.
That such projects could bracket the birds' path is not
surprising in light of the priorities of the
administration. Over the last three and a half years,
federal officials have accelerated resource development on
public lands. They have also pushed to eliminate regulatory
hurdles for military and industrial projects.
From the start, Bush officials challenged the status quo
and revised the traditional public-policy calculus on
environmental decisions. They put an instant hold on many
Clinton administration regulations, and the debates over
those issues and others are intensely polarized.
The administration has sought to increase the harvesting of
energy and other resources on public lands, to seek
cooperative ways to reduce pollution, to free the military
from environmental restrictions and to streamline -
opponents say gut - regulatory and enforcement processes.
In a recent interview, Michael O. Leavitt, the
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency,
summed up the Bush administration's philosophy. "There is
no environmental progress without economic prosperity," Mr.
Leavitt said. "Once our competitiveness erodes, our
capacity to make environmental gains is gone. There is
nothing that promotes pollution like poverty."
The administration's approach has provoked a passionate
response. Asked about his expectations in the event of
President Bush's re-election, Senator James M. Jeffords,
the Vermont independent who is the ranking minority member
on the Environment and Public Works Committee, wrote in an
e-mail message: "I expect the Bush administration to
continue their assault on regulations designed to protect
public health and the environment. I expect the Bush
administration to continue underfunding compliance and
enforcement activities."
Mr. Jeffords concluded, "I expect the Bush administration
will go down in history as the greatest disaster for public
health and the environment in the history of the United
States."
For many environmental groups, Mr. Bush's legacy was
assured in his first year, thanks to highly publicized
decisions that effectively repudiated Clinton
administration positions. Mr. Bush backed off a campaign
pledge to regulate carbon dioxide and abandoned the 1997
Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement to reduce
heat-trapping gases linked to global warming. Then the
administration pushed, unsuccessfully, for a law allowing
oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. It
scrapped the phaseout of snowmobiles in Yellowstone
National Park and briefly dropped a Clinton proposal to cut
the permissible level of arsenic in drinking water by 80
percent.
The cumulative effect was striking. The decisions sought to
reverse environmental action for which there was broad
support. Polls by The New York Times in mid-2001 and late
2002 consistently showed public opposition to drilling in
the Arctic refuge. A CBS poll in the same period showed
that, by ratios of better than two to one, those polled
said that environmental protection was more important than
energy production.
The outcry ensured that some Bush administration
initiatives favorable to the cause of environmental groups
received little notice. They include the E.P.A.'s decision
to force General Electric to spend hundreds of millions of
dollars to remove PCB's in the Hudson River, a cleanup that
has been delayed; legislation speeding the cleanup of urban
industrial sites known as brownfields; increases in
financing for private land set aside for conservation of
animals and their habitats; and the first limits for diesel
emissions in trucks and off-road vehicles.
The diesel regulations, said James F. Connaughton, chairman
of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, would
have as much impact on air quality as the rules that
eliminated leaded gasoline. The clamor over the reversals,
he said, "grossly overshadowed the accomplishments, which
in scope and scale were of far greater consequence to
environmental protection and natural resource conservation
than anything people were complaining about."
The administration contends that free markets often provide
the best solution to pollution. That belief underlies
regulatory proposals to allow power plants that exceed
their goals in reducing pollutants to sell cleanup credits
to plants that fall short.
The failed "Clear Skies" act, incorporating this approach,
was in many ways reborn in a pending regulation that Bush
officials say would offer significant pollution reductions
and that critics dismiss as a retreat from the mandates of
the Clean Air Act.
Mr. Leavitt called the reasoning simple. "Rather than spend
decades and millions litigating" to ensure power plants'
compliance one at a time, "let's require everyone to do it
essentially at the same time," he said. "And create
incentives for them to do more as opposed to incentives to
try to avoid."
Mr. Jeffords countered, "The relaxed Bush approach will
produce more illness, disease and premature deaths than
simply putting the federal government's full resources into
achieving compliance with the Clean Air Act and pushing the
development of cleaner, more efficient electricity
generation."
The recent proposals for Alaska and North Carolina reflect
some of the themes of the administration's overhaul of
environmental policies.
In 1998, Bruce Babbitt, President Bill Clinton's interior
secretary, opened to oil drilling four million acres of the
National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska. That is 87 percent of
the landmass of the reserve's northeast quadrant. The
580,000 acres held back, including Teshekpuk Lake, were
considered crucial wetlands habitat for molting and nesting
fowl - swans, geese, peregrine falcons and other species -
and for caribou and the hunters who live off them. But
geological surveys show that large volumes of oil lie
beneath much of that area. In June, the Interior Department
proposed opening the lake and most of the remaining acreage
to drilling, because, Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton
said recently, "that's where the resource is."
Well before that proposal, a panel of the National Research
Council, a private, nonprofit institution, issued a mixed
report on the cumulative effects of 40 years of oil
development on the North Slope. Bird populations, it found,
dwindled as the numbers of predators like foxes and brown
bears grew unnaturally large. The predators were drawn to
the area by oil-field garbage.
Edward Porter, research manager for the American Petroleum
Institute, said the situation was unlikely to recur around
Teshekpuk Lake because the exploration envisioned would
have few permanent facilities.
At the birds' other way station, in North Carolina, the
prospective disturbances would be the latest F/A-18 E/F
Super Hornet jet fighters, which would touch down and take
off from a new airfield 31,650 times each year.
A Fish and Wildlife Service advisory in March raised
concern; the noise of a jet taking off is two to four times
greater than the level that startles such birds into
flight. During their winter sojourn, the birds accumulate
the fat that fuels their next migration. The more jets
startle them into flight, the more they burn fat needed for
the journey.
The Navy's review concluded that the birds "would not be
affected." Navy officers also argued that the risk of
collisions between birds and planes - which is estimated to
be higher than at any other airfield in the country - could
be mitigated.
When local North Carolinians and the Audubon Society went
to court to block the project, the administration closed
ranks, and the Interior Department, the parent agency of
the Fish and Wildlife Service, supported the Navy. A United
States District Court judge has temporarily blocked the
Navy from proceeding.
In many ways, the issues in the birds' neighborhoods speak
to the aims, tactics and results of the Bush environmental
strategy as much as the better-known inventory of
decisions, like the scuttling of the Clinton ban on new
roads in 58.5 million acres of roadless national forests.
Environmentalists, for example, accuse the administration
of trying to pressure or ignore its scientists, from those
of the Pocosin biologists in North Carolina to
Environmental Protection Agency scientists working on
global warming. In several instances at the agency and at
the Fish and Wildlife Service, political appointees
aggressively policed agency scientific work that could form
the basis of new regulations.
Administration officials, some of whom were lobbyists for
the industries they now regulate, say the crucial factors
in their thinking are scientific rigor and economic logic.
Such priorities were cited in the proposal to expand
drilling in Alaska.
The effort to offer the set-aside section of the Alaska
petroleum reserve for leasing parallels moves across the
West. Bureau of Land Management offices and their land-use
plans have been re-engineered to streamline leasing and
drilling decisions. From the beginning of the fiscal year,
the number of drilling permits has increased to 5,222, the
bureau reported. If that pace continues, the annual total
will be more than 50 percent higher than the average in the
previous three years.
Ms. Norton says that "less than one percent of the surface
acres of the Bureau of Land Management have any disturbance
for oil and gas production." With new safeguards for
wildlife and technologies allowing several wells to branch
underground from one well pad, both energy and
environmental needs can be satisfied, she said.
The means by which energy development accelerated, like the
revamping of land-use planning guidelines, is pretty dry
stuff. So are procedural questions; for example, when a
local office should clear decisions with headquarters. In
the Bush years, officials have relied more on less-visible
administrative action than on legislation to advance their
agenda. For instance, local Army Corps of Engineers offices
have been instructed to check with headquarters before
taking jurisdiction over wetlands slated for development, a
process that critics say discourages wetlands protection.
The administration had developed a draft proposal to
curtail federal wetlands jurisdiction but had to back off
after it was disclosed last fall and conservative hunters
and fishermen blanched. At a White House meeting, leaders
of fishing and hunting groups argued that the plan would
degrade large tracts of wetlands and diminish nearby
wildlife. Mr. Leavitt quickly repudiated the draft. Last
Earth Day, President Bush, standing by salt marshes in
Maine, called for a net gain in wetland acreage.
Last fall, Mr. Leavitt, the former governor of Utah, took
over from Christie Whitman. She had resigned as E.P.A.
administrator after two years as what Secretary of State
Colin L. Powell called a "wind dummy" - a reference to the
buffeting she took for the administration's unpopular
initiatives.
The portfolio of issues Mr. Leavitt inherited is not in the
same stage it was in in January 2001, at the start of the
Bush administration. Many of the administration's
environmental policies have laid a foundation for more
comprehensive actions in a second term. Critics are
convinced that efforts to increase oil and gas drilling on
federal lands will accelerate, as will efforts to change
laws like the Endangered Species Act.
Ms. Norton acknowledged that the issue of opening the
Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, for example, would
resurface because "that it is our largest prospect for
onshore oil." She added, "There will be extensive
environmental protections."
Asked if she would have done anything different in the last
few years, she said: "I would have spent more time talking
about our successes. Because we've accomplished a lot more
than we've ever gotten credit for."
