Bush Record: New Priorities in Environment

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http://www.nytimes.com/2004/09/14/politics/campaign/14enviro.html?th

 

September 14, 2004

THE ISSUES

 

Bush Record: New Priorities in Environment

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. "

 

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company