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Bush Claims Clean Air Progress While Weakening Future Rules
Mike Magner's Column
10/15/2003
Like any good politician, President Bush selectively cited EPA statistics when he stood before a Detroit Edison coal-fired power plant last month and declared it a "good example" of clean-air progress. Bush said the Monroe, Michigan, plant had cut emissions 81 percent in the past three decades while boosting power output by 22 percent.
A different set of emissions data that focuses on the future instead of the past was reported the next day in papers from the Washington Post to the Toledo Blade. Using an estimate made by environmentalists, the press noted that the plant could increase pollution as much as 56 percent more under Bush's "reform" of the Clean Air Act's New Source Review program, which now allows plants to be expanded without additional emission controls.
Even an EPA analysis released in July found that the Monroe plant, which Bush visited Sept. 15, could continue spewing 102,700 tons of sooty sulfur dioxide every year through 2020 if the president's other major "reform" plan, the so-called "Clear Skies Initiative," is enacted. That's enough to cause nearly 300 premature deaths each year, according to an analysis by a consulting firm often used by the EPA to assess health effects. Without Bush's proposed legislation, that 102,700 tons will have to be reduced by 2009 to meet stringent new health standards for soot and smog.
Of course, the president and his political mastermind, Karl Rove, are convinced that the public — especially those still stinging from a two-day blackout in August — won't mind a little environmental damage if they're told that's the price for keeping the lights on.
This argument conveniently ignores the dramatic results of a recent study by the White House's own Office of Management and Budget, showing that the public health benefits from enforcing tough clean-air regulations are five to seven times greater than the costs of compliance.
But the disconnect is easy to understand if you consider how the administration's clean-air policy was developed.
Earlier this year, the Natural Resources News Service obtained a list of the 34 members of the Clear Skies Senior Policy Group, a task force of political appointees that the White House tapped to draft a proposal for revamping the Clean Air Act.
Not a single member of the work group has a background in public health or environmental science. The closest the group came to hearing from an environmentalist was when former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman attended, and she left the team in June out of what many believe was frustration from being ignored.
Instead, the panel is loaded with former lobbyists from industries with the most to gain from relaxed air-pollution regulation.
There's Elizabeth Stolpe, who came to the White House Council on Environmental Quality from Koch Industries, a Kansas oil company with a long history of EPA entanglements. Just as an example, Koch paid a $10 million fine in 2001 for deliberately releasing excessive amounts of benzene, a known carcinogen, from a Texas refinery.
There's Steven Griles, currently being investigated for ethical violations — allegedly assisting former clients in the energy industry — in his post as second-in-command at the Interior Department.
And there's Jeffrey Holmstead, the only other EPA representative on the work group besides Whitman, who took over EPA's air office after representing chemical and agribusiness companies at Latham & Watkins, a top corporate law firm.
So now the administration, acting on the advice of its Clear Skies experts, has relaxed New Source Review requirements so that industries can upgrade their plants without installing up-to-date pollution controls. At the same time it is pushing its plan to give utilities nearly two decades to clean up their act, under the guise that strict regulations now could disrupt power supplies.
All of which is inciting a revolt by states that Bush needs as friends if he hopes to win a second term next year. Illinois has already petitioned to join a lawsuit filed by New York and other Northeastern states challenging the administration's New Source Review program, saying it makes it tougher for them to meet clean air standards, and several of Illinois' Midwestern neighbors are considering similar actions.
Talk about changing political tides. If Bush had visited the Michigan power plant a year earlier, he would have been standing next to a loyal friend, Republican Gov. John Engler, who initiated a lawsuit in 1998 to block an EPA crackdown on power plant emissions. Now when Bush goes to the state, he's met by new Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who promised in her campaign last year to oppose any federal efforts to weaken the Clean Air Act.