A Fishing forum. FishingBanter

If this is your first visit, be sure to check out the FAQ by clicking the link above. You may have to register before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Go Back   Home » FishingBanter forum » rec.outdoors.fishing newsgroups » General Discussion
Site Map Home Register Authors List Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read Web Partners

Outdoorsmen for Bush



 
 
Thread Tools Display Modes
  #1  
Old April 3rd, 2004, 05:11 AM
Deggie
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush


[ View Thread ] [ Post Response ] [ Return to Main Page ] [ Read Prev
Msg ] [ Read Next Msg ]

Northern California Fly Fishing Board

NFF: Very Long NYTimes article

Posted By: Andrew Weiner
Date: 4/2/04 4:10 p.m.


For those who are interested, others shouldn't read it if they don't
want to. I found it really interesting in terms of how politics gets
done, particularly environmental policy. And though I say NFF, air
pollution and acid rain obviously affect water and fish.

Changing All the Rules
By BRUCE BARCOTT

President Bush doesn't talk about new-source review very often. In fact,
he has mentioned it in a speech to the public only once, in remarks he
delivered on Sept. 15, 2003, to a cheering crowd of power-plant workers
and executives in Monroe, Mich., about 35 miles south of Detroit. It was
an ideal audience for his chosen subject. New-source review, or N.S.R.,
involves an obscure and complex set of environmental rules and
regulations that most Americans have never heard of, but to people who
work in the power industry, few subjects are more crucial.

The Monroe plant, which is operated by Detroit Edison, is one of the
nation's top polluters. Its coal-fired generators emit more mercury, a
toxic chemical, than any other power plant in the state. Until recently,
power plants like the one in Monroe were governed by N.S.R. regulations,
which required the plant's owners to install new pollution-control
devices if they made any significant improvements to the plant. Those
regulations now exist in name only; they were effectively eliminated by
a series of rule changes that the Bush administration made out of the
public eye in 2002 and 2003. What the president was celebrating in
Monroe was the effective end of new-source review.

''The old regulations,'' he said, speaking in front of a huge American
flag, ''undermined our goals for protecting the environment and growing
the economy.'' New-source review just didn't work, he said. It dissuaded
power companies from updating old equipment. It kept power plants from
operating at full efficiency. ''Now we've issued new rules that will
allow utility companies, like this one right here, to make routine
repairs and upgrades without enormous costs and endless disputes,'' the
president said. ''We simplified the rules. We made them easy to
understand. We trust the people in this plant to make the right
decisions.'' The audience applauded.

Of the many environmental changes brought about by the Bush White House,
none illustrate the administration's modus operandi better than the
overhaul of new-source review. The president has had little success in
the past three years at getting his environmental agenda through
Congress. His energy bill remains unpassed. His Clear Skies package of
clean-air laws is collecting dust on a committee shelf. The Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge remains closed to oil and gas exploration.

But while its legislative initiatives have languished on Capitol Hill,
the administration has managed to effect a radical transformation of the
nation's environmental laws, quietly and subtly, by means of regulatory
changes and bureaucratic directives. Overturning new-source review --
the phrase itself embodies the kind of dull, eye-glazing
bureaucrat-speak that distracts attention -- represents the most
sweeping change, and among the least noticed.

The changes to new-source review have been portrayed by the president
and his advisers as a compromise between the twin goals of preserving
the environment and enabling business, based on a desire to make
environmental regulations more streamlined and effective. But a careful
examination of the process that led to the new policy reveals a very
different story, and a different motivation. I conducted months of
extensive interviews with those involved in the process, including
current and former government officials, industry representatives,
public health researchers and environmental advocates. (Top
environmental officials in the Bush administration declined to comment
for this article.) Through those interviews and the review of hundreds
of pages of documents and transcripts, one thing has become clear: the
administration's real problem with the new-source review program wasn't
that it didn't work. The problem was that it was about to work all too
well -- in the way, finally, that it was designed to when it was passed
by Congress more than 25 years ago.

Having long flouted the new-source review law, many of the nation's
biggest power companies were facing, in the last months of the 1990's,
an expensive day of reckoning. E.P.A. investigators had caught them
breaking the law. To make amends, the power companies were on the verge
of signing agreements to clean up their plants, which would have
delivered one of the greatest advances in clean air in the nation's
history. Then George W. Bush took office, and everything changed.

II.

The Clean Air Act, adopted by Congress and signed by President Nixon in
1970, required industrial polluters to clean up their operations. The
law forced power plants and large factories to minimize their emissions
of harmful pollutants like sulfur dioxide and lead, and it established
national air-quality standards to be met by 1975. Congress acknowledged,
however, that forcing polluters to retrofit every existing plant
immediately would be tremendously costly, potentially crippling entire
industries. So in a concession to industry, the lawmakers agreed to
apply the tough standards only to newly built facilities.

Seven years passed, and the national air-quality standards went unmet.
Instead of building new, cleaner plants, many companies simply patched
and upgraded their old, dirty plants. So Congress updated the act in
1977, introducing a regulation called new-source review to bring older
plants into compliance. Under N.S.R., a company could operate an old
factory as long as it wasn't substantially modified. Eventually, it was
assumed, the company would have to update its equipment, at which point
new-source rules required the company to install the best available
pollution-control technology. It was a way to let companies phase in the
switch to cleaner factories over a number of years instead of all at
once.

The legislators who passed new-source review expected the law to
encourage electric utilities to replace old, heavily polluting
coal-fired plants with cleaner new ones. And during the 80's and 90's,
some power companies did replace coal plants with cleaner ones that
burned natural gas. But many others retooled plants to keep them running
long past their expected life spans, and few were fitted with the
scrubbers and other equipment required under N.S.R.

The electric industry complained that N.S.R. rules were so complicated
and confusing that it was impossible for utilities to determine the
difference between ''routine'' maintenance, which wouldn't require an
upgrade, and a significant ''physical change,'' which would. An
examination of documents made public as a result of lawsuits, however,
makes it difficult to credit these complaints. Beginning soon after
N.S.R. was implemented, E.P.A. officials issued frequent letters and
bulletins telling power companies exactly where the agency was drawing
the line. And in 1990, after a Wisconsin power company lost a suit
against the E.P.A. over N.S.R., Henry Nickel, an attorney representing
the Utility Air Regulatory Group, an industry association, complained in
a letter to William Reilly, the head of the E.P.A. under the first
President Bush, that the court's decision meant that ''any time a
component breaks -- even a minor component -- and repair is needed to
maintain normal operations,'' new-source standards would ''be triggered
unless the work is found to be 'routine' by the E.P.A. staff.'' Nickel
seemed to understand clearly what the new-source rules said -- but that
didn't mean he and other industry representatives liked them. Nickel
said that the rules were bad not only for utilities but also for clean
air, because power companies would be discouraged from updating their
plants with cleaner, more efficient technology.

Officials in the Clinton administration spent years trying to make the
N.S.R. program more palatable to industry without sacrificing public
health. Carol M. Browner, President Clinton's E.P.A. administrator,
floated new ideas like plantwide applicability limits (P.A.L.'s), a
program to cap and reduce emissions on a plant-by-plant basis, but chose
not to pursue them when it became apparent that they wouldn't reduce
pollution faster than the existing new-source regulations. Robert
Perciasepe, Browner's assistant administrator for air and radiation,
kept the flagging effort alive by bringing together industry officials,
state and local clean-air regulators, environmental leaders and public
health advocates in an ad-hoc working group that struggled to find a
mutually acceptable way to implement N.S.R. regulations. But by the end
of 2000, Browner told me, the E.P.A.'s efforts to find a compromise
''were essentially dead.''

When I spoke to him recently, Perciasepe, now C.E.O. of the National
Audubon Society, put the matter bluntly. The reason new-source review
did not get streamlined during the Clinton years, he said, was that the
energy companies, utilities and other industries had no interest in any
sort of workable reforms. ''In hindsight, maybe we were going after a
sort of holy grail,'' he told me. ''You were not going to reach
agreement with some of these folks,'' he said, referring to industry
representatives, ''because what they really wanted was to not have to do
it.''

Oddly, while industry and government haggled fruitlessly over potential
rule changes, nobody was making sure that companies were complying with
the existing law. Mostly the E.P.A. was leaving them alone. ''There were
other things that had to be done first,'' Browner explained. ''We looked
at where we could get the biggest bang for the buck in terms of
pollution reduction.'' Coal-fired power plants didn't move to the top of
the agency's list until late 1996, when Bruce Buckheit, a former Justice
Department lawyer who had recently joined the E.P.A. as director of its
air-enforcement division, happened to notice an article in The
Washington Post about proposed changes to the ownership rules that
govern the power industry. ''The story predicted that deregulation would
increase the use of coal-fired power generation in the Midwest,''
Buckheit recalled. ''So we thought, If they're going to have all that
expansion, they're going to have to pay attention to new-source review
rules.'' That led him to wonder, he said, whether utilities had been
paying attention to the rules at all.

Buckheit and other E.P.A. officials began asking questions. They found
disturbing answers. Industry records indicated that many power plants
had upgraded their facilities to burn more coal, which required
new-source review permits, but ''we started looking around for the
permits,'' Buckheit said, ''and there weren't any.'' Many of the
nation's biggest energy companies, E.P.A. officials found, had updated
their plants without putting in any new pollution controls and were
illegally releasing millions of tons of harmful pollutants. ''Companies
understood what was going on, and a lot of them thought they could evade
the law,'' recalled Sylvia Lowrance, who was the E.P.A.'s top official
for enforcement and compliance (and Buckheit's boss) from 1996 to 2002.

At the same time, a growing body of medical research indicated that
industrial air pollution was making a lot of people sick. Power plants
pump dozens of chemicals into the air; among the most harmful are
nitrogen oxides, sulfur dioxide and mercury. Nitrogen oxides are major
producers of ground-level ozone, or smog, and they interact in the
atmosphere with sulfur dioxide, water and oxygen to form acid rain.
Mercury, a highly toxic chemical that is emitted as a vapor when coal is
burned, has been found to cause brain disorders in developing fetuses
and young children, and unhealthy levels of it have recently been
detected in swordfish and tuna.

The most disturbing research, though, involved fine particulates, the
tiny particles of air pollution that spew out of smokestacks and lodge
deep within the lungs of people nearby and even miles away. During the
late 80's and 90's, medical researchers found that long-term exposure to
fine particulates caused asthma attacks in children and raised the risk
of chronic bronchitis in adults. Coal-fired plants account for about 60
percent of the nation's sulfur dioxide emissions and 40 percent of the
mercury, and power plants as a whole are the nation's second-largest
source of nitrogen-oxides pollution, after automobiles. Public health
researchers estimate that fine-particulate pollution from power plants
shortens the lives of more than 30,000 Americans every year.
Pollution-controlling technology, while costly, can make an enormous
difference. A new scrubber can cut emissions up to 95 percent.

Spurred on by that research, E.P.A. officials mounted a campaign to
clean up the illegally polluting coal-fired power plants. E.P.A. agents
began to go after suspected Clean Air Act violators through the
companies' own accounting books. In any corporation, big capital
improvement projects usually leave a trail of documents. Any department
in a company that proposes a capital improvement has to justify it to
the company's higher-ups, often by way of memos, briefing books, e-mail
messages or PowerPoint presentations. In 1997, the E.P.A. started
collecting such data, threatening subpoenas if companies didn't comply.
''We got lists of capital projects, then went after the internal
justifications for those projects,'' Buckheit said.

After two years of investigation, E.P.A. officials had accumulated a
daunting amount of evidence of wrongdoing by the coal-burning power
industry. ''This was the most significant noncompliance pattern E.P.A.
had ever found,'' Sylvia Lowrance said. ''It was the environmental
equivalent of the tobacco litigation.'' Records compiled by the
utilities themselves showed, according to former E.P.A. officials, that
companies industrywide had systematically broken the law. If that was
true, E.P.A. officials noted, the agency might have enough legal
leverage to force the industry to install up-to-date pollution controls
and achieve something truly historic: not merely incremental cuts in
emissions but across-the-board reductions of 50 percent or more. ''On
sulfur dioxide alone, we expected to get several million tons per year
out of the atmosphere,'' Buckheit said.

E.P.A. agents are sometimes portrayed as eco-cops, but they function
more like overworked and financially strapped prosecutors. Big
enforcement actions are rarely carried out in courtrooms; instead,
there's a lot of negotiating and plea bargaining involved. From the
E.P.A.'s perspective, at least during the Clinton years, the point was
not to hammer violators with big fines but to get them to reduce the
amount of pollution they were creating. That strategy had proved
effective with the oil-refinery industry, which like the utilities had
systematically skirted the new-source review law in the 80's and 90's:
E.P.A. officials presented their case, and many refinery executives
agreed to pay fines and install new pollution-control measures. Once the
agreements had been reached, some refinery officials even embraced the
changes. Tim Scruggs, the manager of BP's Texas City refinery, the
nation's largest, told Octane Week, an industry publication, ''We are a
society that can afford a few cents per gallon to achieve cleaner air.''

Utility officials, however, weren't going to give in so easily. In the
summer of 1999, Buckheit and other E.P.A. officials asked executives at
the worst-offending power companies to come to the agency's headquarters
in Washington. In a series of meetings, E.P.A. officials sat down with
representatives from each company, one by one, and laid out their
evidence. ''Is there something we're missing?'' Buckheit said he asked
them. Later, he gathered all the executives together in one room and
reiterated the agency's suspicion that their companies had
systematically violated the Clean Air Act. ''Unless we're getting
something wrong here,'' Buckheit recalled saying, ''these are violations
of the law. Y'all want to step up to the plate?'' No one did.

Months passed. Industry executives and lawyers refused to address the
E.P.A.'s complaints. Finally, in November 1999, the agency decided to
take the polluters to court. The Justice Department, on behalf of the
E.P.A., announced lawsuits against seven electric utility companies in
the Midwest and South, charging that their power plants had been
illegally releasing enormous amounts of pollutants, in some cases for 20
years or more. The companies included FirstEnergy, American Electric
Power and Cinergy, all headquartered in Ohio; Southern Indiana Gas and
Electric; Illinois Power; Tampa Electric, in Florida; and Alabama Power
and Georgia Power, two subsidiaries of the Atlanta-based Southern
Company, the biggest power supplier in the Southeast. The E.P.A. also
issued a compliance order to the Tennessee Valley Authority (T.V.A.),
the nation's largest public power company, charging T.V.A. with similar
violations at seven of its coal-fired plants in Kentucky, Tennessee and
Alabama. In addition, the E.P.A. put a number of other utilities on
notice, warning them that the Justice Department would come after them
next if they didn't clean up their acts.

Taken together, the companies named in the suits emitted more than 2
million tons of sulfur dioxide every year and 660,000 tons of nitrogen
oxides. Attorney General Janet Reno announced the suits herself. ''When
children can't breathe because of pollution from a utility plant
hundreds of miles away,'' she said, ''something must be done.''

III.

From the perspective of the utility industry, the E.P.A. was changing
the rules in the middle of the game. Dan Riedinger, spokesman for the
Edison Electric Institute, the leading trade association for electric
utilities, told me that the lawsuits came as a surprise. ''For years
we'd asked the E.P.A. for guidance about how we should meet N.S.R.
requirements,'' Riedinger said. ''That guidance never came. Instead, the
agency just began suing power plants.''

''I've heard that argument,'' Eric Schaeffer, a former E.P.A. official,
responded in an interview. ''And I've got to say, that's completely
hokey. I was in dozens of conversations with company officials and their
lawyers, and the idea that we were enforcing regulations they were
unaware of -- that simply didn't come up.''

A statement issued by the Southern Company shortly after the lawsuits
were announced noted that the utility had cooperated with the E.P.A.'s
investigation by providing the agency with more than 120,000 pages of
documents. ''Our goal throughout this process has been to cooperate with
E.P.A. and find a workable solution to this issue,'' the statement said.

The amount of money at stake was enormous. Potential penalties ran to
$27,500 per plant for each day it had been in violation. Since many of
the violations the utilities were charged with began in the 70's, they
faced potential fines of tens of millions of dollars. Cost estimates for
fitting power plants with new scrubbers and, in some cases,
reconfiguring entire plants to run on cleaner-burning natural gas were
estimated in the hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of installing
new equipment was, of course, the reason the companies had, according to
the E.P.A., skirted the new-source review rules in the first place.
(Still, the companies were not about to be put out of business by
complying with E.P.A. regulations. In 1999, the Southern Company
reported profits of $1.3 billion.)

The utility industry immediately turned to the Republican-controlled
Congress for relief from the lawsuits. A few days after the suits were
announced, power companies and industry trade groups asked sympathetic
House members to attach a rider to an appropriations bill. The rider
would allow companies to perform ''routine maintenance'' while the
lawsuits were pending. In the opinion of the rider's opponents, it would
let power companies perform more illegal retooling while the industry's
lawyers delayed the E.P.A.'s lawsuit in court. But Representative C.W.
Bill Young, a Tampa-area Republican, unexpectedly turned a deaf ear to
the overtures of his local utility company, Tampa Electric, and refused
to put the rider on the bill. As chairman of the House Appropriations
Committee, Young had fought to keep House members from sneaking
special-interest riders onto spending bills. He stood on principle, and
the rider died.

Faced with Congressional rejection and mounting fines, some utilities
struck bargains with the federal government. Tampa Electric, unable to
make any headway with Young, agreed in February 2000 to spend more than
$1 billion on new pollution controls and pay a $3.5 million civil
penalty. The agreement took 123,000 annual tons of pollution out of the
sky, and the civil penalty amounted to a little less than 2 percent of
Tampa Electric's profits from 1999. Officials at some other utilities
followed Tampa Electric to the negotiating table.

But others took an alternate route: they started writing checks to
George W. Bush's presidential campaign fund. The Bush campaign had a
special title for contributors who raised at least $100,000: Pioneers.
Among the more than 200 Pioneers during the 2000 Bush election campaign
were FirstEnergy's president, Anthony Alexander; Reliant Resources'
C.E.O., Steve Letbetter; and Reliant's chairman, Don Jordan.
(MidAmerican Energy's C.E.O., David Sokol, has joined the elite rank for
the 2004 re-election campaign; Southern Company's executive vice
president Dwight Evans has been named a Ranger, meaning he has raised
more than $200,000.) Each of these executives' companies was either in
litigation or was soon to be under investigation for new-source review
violations. Six other Pioneers were lawyers or lobbyists for companies
charged with N.S.R. violations.

Even in the early stages of Bush's 2000 run, energy executives
understood what strong support of a winning candidate could mean. Thomas
R. Kuhn, a Yale classmate of President Bush's and president of the
Edison Electric Institute, was a 2000 Pioneer and is a Pioneer for the
2004 campaign as well. On May 27, 1999, Kuhn sent energy-industry
executives a confidential memo, later made public in the course of a
lawsuit, advising them to bundle their contributions to the Bush
campaign under a tracking number to ''ensure that our industry is
credited'' for its generosity.

After Bush eventually emerged as the winner of the 2000 election,
industry leaders were upbeat about the prospect of the coming four
years. The president and the vice president, Dick Cheney, were, after
all, oilmen. The coal-industry trade magazine Coal Age exulted in the
industry's ''high-level access to policymakers in the new
administration.'' Soon after Bush's inauguration, the electric utilities
sought relief from the E.P.A. and its new-source review program. The
problem was that most voters -- including Republican voters -- opposed
rollbacks. A Gallup poll in 2001 found that 81 percent of Americans
supported stronger environmental standards for industry. According to
another 2001 poll, only 11 percent thought the government was doing
''too much'' to protect the environment.

Previous Republican leaders tried to enact a pro-industry environmental
agenda and met with only limited success. In 1981, President Reagan took
office promising that in his administration the E.P.A. would have
''leaders who know and care about the coal industry.'' He appointed as
head of the E.P.A. Anne Gorsuch, an attorney who had fought the E.P.A.'s
enforcement of clean-air laws, and he named James Watt, a staunch
defender of private enterprise against environmental regulation, as
secretary of the interior. Watt pushed to open up potential federal
wilderness lands to developers. Gorsuch took office under instructions
from the White House to make the E.P.A. more friendly to industry.
Within two years, they had become provocative symbols of
anti-environmentalism and were forced to resign in separate scandals.
Similarly, in 1994, Newt Gingrich and his House Republicans rode into
power determined to weaken the Clean Water Act and the E.P.A.'s
Superfund program. Their bold frontal attacks galvanized environmental
activists and the Clinton administration, and Congress was persuaded to
leave the laws alone.

The Bush administration seemed determined not to repeat those political
mistakes. Taking a lesson from Reagan's experience with Gorsuch and
Watt, Bush officials realized that it would be self-defeating to appoint
to public positions people with outspoken views on the environment, so
they found noncombative figures instead. They named as head of the
E.P.A. Christie Whitman, who was seen as a moderate when she was
appointed, in part because she had participated in a clean-air lawsuit
against a power company as governor of New Jersey. Learning from the
Gingrich defeat, administration officials recognized that bills that
overtly attacked environmental protections stood little chance of
surviving in Congress. So they adopted a two-track strategy. Publicly,
the president asked Congress to pass major environmental legislation
like the Clear Skies Initiative and a sweeping energy bill, which he
knew would face considerable opposition. Privately, the president's
political appointees at the Department of the Interior, Environmental
Protection Agency, Department of Agriculture and Office of Management
and Budget would carry out those same policies less visibly, through
closed-door legal settlements and obscure rule changes.

One key element of the strategy was putting the right people in
under-the-radar positions. The Bush administration appointed officials
who came directly from industry into these lower rungs of power --
deputy secretaries and assistant administrators. These second-tier
appointees knew exactly which rules and regulations to change because
they had been trying to change them, on behalf of their industries, for
years. One appointee was Jeffrey Holmstead, a lawyer and lobbyist for
groups like the Alliance for Constructive Air Policy, an electric
utility trade group that sought to weaken the Clean Air Act. Holmstead
stepped into the role of assistant E.P.A. administrator for air and
radiation, where he would oversee changes to new-source review.

IV.

In the past, industry succeeded in blocking environmental reforms by
arguing that they would mean lost jobs. But the
jobs-versus-the-environment defense became less convincing during the
economic expansion of the 90's, which took place under the relatively
tough environmental restrictions of the Clinton administration. The Bush
administration needed a different engine of necessity to propel
environmental rollbacks like the scuttling of new-source review. It
found one in the Cheney energy task force.

Nine days after his swearing in, President Bush created the National
Energy Policy Development Group, a task force headed by Vice President
Dick Cheney and charged with developing a national energy policy. The
timing of Bush's ascendance to the presidency could not have been better
for the energy industry. When Bush came to office, the nation was
riveted by a bizarre energy crisis unfolding in California. We now know
that California's energy shock was largely caused by market manipulation
(by Enron, among other companies) and regulatory breakdown, not by a
drought in supply. But we didn't know it then. A few days after he
created the energy task force, President Bush went on CNN and blamed
environmentalists for the crisis. ''If there's any environmental
regulation that's preventing California from having 100 percent max
output at their plants -- as I understand there may be -- then we need
to relax those regulations,'' he said. California utility officials
denied that environmental rules had anything to do with the crisis. But
their protests didn't matter. The president had forged the link.

Cheney's energy task force solicited suggestions from various quarters,
but few outside a tight circle of industry insiders were able to make
themselves heard. Although the vice president continues to fight a
lawsuit -- now before the Supreme Court -- that would require him to
divulge the names of industry executives consulted by his task force,
documents released in the course of the legal battle reveal the tenor of
the exchanges.

On March 18, 2001, Joseph Kelliher, a top assistant to Energy Secretary
Spencer Abraham, e-mailed Dana Contratto, an energy-industry lobbyist.
''If you were King, or Il Duce,'' Kelliher wrote, ''what would you
include in a national energy policy . . . ?'' Apparently that was one of
many e-mail messages to industry lobbyists, for Kelliher's electronic
mailbox was soon pinging with activity. A March 20, 2001, message from
Jim Ford, lobbyist for the American Petroleum Institute, a powerful
oil-and-gas-industry trade group, included a ready-made decree. ''The
last document,'' Ford wrote, referring to one of 10 attachments, ''is a
suggested executive order to ensure that energy implications are
considered and acted on in rulemakings and other executive actions.''
President Bush would issue a very similar executive order two months
later, the day after the energy task force report was released.

Another Kelliher correspondent, Stephen Sayle, a Republican
Congressional aide, who is now an energy lobbyist, added a somewhat
abashed note to the end of his March 23, 2001, wish list, which included
a plea to stop enforcement of new-source review. ''Obviously, this is a
dream list,'' he wrote. ''Not all will be done. But perhaps some of
these ideas could be floated and adopted.'' In fact, Sayle was being
needlessly pessimistic; most of the items on his list, many of which
dealt with new-source review, were eventually adopted.

Many more wish lists arrived at the Energy Department, and many of them
led with the same idea: gutting new-source review. In case the
administration didn't get the message, a consortium of energy companies
hired Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National
Committee, to press their cause in a face-to-face meeting with Vice
President Cheney. According to a recent article by Christopher Drew and
Richard A. Oppel Jr. in The New York Times, Barbour was accompanied in
that meeting by Bush's friend Marc Racicot, who is now chairman of the
president's re-election campaign.

Over at E.P.A., Whitman and other top officials tried to resist the
policy changes coming out of the Energy Department. When a draft of the
National Energy Policy circulated in late April 2001, Tom Gibson, an
associate E.P.A. administrator appointed under President Bush, sent a
memo to the task force director arguing that one of the president's, and
the policy's, fundamental assumptions -- that environmental regulations
had hamstrung American domestic energy production -- was flat wrong.
''Costs of compliance with environmental regulations are overstated,
several inaccurate statements and opinions are presented as factual and
no citations are provided for many of these statements,'' Gibson wrote.
He and other E.P.A. officials, he continued, ''are very concerned that
this language is inaccurate and inappropriately implicates environmental
programs as a major cause of supply constraints. . . . Such a
conclusion, in our opinion, is overly simplistic and not supported by
the facts.''

Whitman, who was a member of Cheney's task force, often found herself
and Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill acting as the panel's only defenders
of environmental protections. In Ron Suskind's recent book ''The Price
of Loyalty,'' O'Neill recalls Whitman saying after one meeting: ''This
is a slaughter. It's 10 on 2, not counting White House people and all
the advisers to the group from the various industries.'' (Whitman, who
is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign in New Jersey,
declined to comment for this article. According to her spokesman, she
has criticized O'Neill's book as inaccurate in many of its details.)

Whitman was in an especially tough position with respect to new-source
review. Thirteen months before she was named to the Bush cabinet, when
she was governor of New Jersey, Whitman joined a lawsuit to force
Ohio-based American Electric Power to clean up its coal-fired plants,
and now that she was head of the E.P.A., American Electric was one of
the seven utilities the agency was suing for new-source review
violations. In the spring of 2001, as the energy task force was
completing its work and preparing its report, Whitman understood that
new-source review faced effective elimination under industry pressure,
and she worried about the environmental and political implications of
such a move. In May 2001, less than two weeks before the final energy
report was released, Whitman sent a memo to Cheney. ''As we discussed,
the real issue for industry is the enforcement cases,'' she wrote. ''We
will pay a terrible political price if we undercut or walk away from the
enforcement cases; it will be hard to refute the charge that we are
deciding not to enforce the Clean Air Act.''

President Bush's final National Energy Policy (N.E.P.) was published on
May 16, 2001. In its 170 well-designed, color-illustrated pages lay the
administration's vision of the environmental future of the United
States. The policy's defining notion was simple: environmental
regulations have constrained America's domestic energy supply. In broad
strokes, the N.E.P. laid out the next three years of the Bush
administration's energy and environmental agenda: roll back wilderness
and wildlife protections to open up more public land to oil and gas
development; establish fast-track hydropower permits; expand offshore
oil and gas drilling; and replace tough Clean Air Act rules, including
new-source review, with an industry-friendly market-based pollution
trading system. These weren't items on a wish list. They were marching
orders. Among the first to be carried out was the mandate to overhaul
new-source review.

To that end, the White House directed the Justice Department to review
its cases against the Southern Company, American Electric and others to
see if any of the suits might be dropped outright. According to a senior
E.P.A. adviser supportive of the administration's policies, who spoke on
condition of anonymity, ''The administration believed some of those
cases were brought'' -- by the Clinton Justice Department -- ''without
regard to whether they were really egregious violations of the Clean Air
Act worthy of enforcement.'' Certain lawsuits, he said, ''were regarded
as more punitive than designed to achieve environmental goals.''

During the same period, Bush appointees at the E.P.A. disbanded Robert
Perciasepe's N.S.R. working group and, led by Jeffrey Holmstead, the
former industry lobbyist who had become an assistant administrator at
the E.P.A., started to rewrite the rules. Publicly, the president
ordered the agency to conduct a 90-day review of its new-source rules,
and officials dutifully sat through four public hearings during the
summer of 2001 and took note of the hundreds of comments regarding the
policy. Privately, though, the E.P.A. and the Energy Department were
already moving to undo new-source review. At a Senate hearing that July,
Whitman outlined a plan to replace the E.P.A.'s toughest clean-air
programs with a more flexible, industry-friendly regimen. ''New-source
review is certainly one of those regulatory aspects that would no longer
be necessary,'' she said.

The Energy Department took an unusually active role in drawing up the
proposed new-source review changes. In November 2001, D.O.E. officials
circulated their proposed changes among the E.P.A. staff for feedback.
Officials at the E.P.A.'s air-enforcement division were appalled. ''The
current draft report is highly biased and loaded with emotionally
charged code words,'' E.P.A. officials wrote in an internal memo. ''It
is drafted as a prelude to recommendations to vitiate the N.S.R.
program.'' The agency's memo noted that the report ''contains only
comments by industry and ignores the comments of all other
stakeholders.''

In January 2002, the White House suffered a setback. The Justice
Department delivered its report on the legality of the E.P.A.'s lawsuit
against the Southern Company and other N.S.R. violators. The department
found that contrary to the administration's hopes, all of the lawsuits
were legal and warranted. In fact, Justice's lawyers said they intended
to prosecute the cases ''vigorously.''

Shortly thereafter, White House officials decided it was time to try the
Congressional track. On Feb. 14, 2002, President Bush unveiled his Clear
Skies Initiative. The president declared that his proposed legislation
''sets tough new standards to dramatically reduce the three most
significant forms of pollution from power plants -- sulfur dioxide,
nitrogen oxides and mercury.''

It was true that the new standards, if enforced, would reduce emissions
from their current rate -- but the president's formulation was somewhat
misleading. Clear Skies was to replace Clean Air Act regulations with a
cap-and-trade market system. On its face, that was not an unreasonable
proposition. Many Republicans and some moderate Democrats embrace the
general concept of cap-and-trade, in which Washington sets pollution
standards for the entire country (the ''cap'') and then allows companies
that manage to reduce their emissions below the standard to sell their
extra pollution ''allowance'' to companies that haven't met the standard
(the ''trade''). The key to cap-and-trade lies in the standard -- how
low it is set and how quickly it shrinks. And when President Bush
announced Clear Skies, the E.P.A. was already on track to require deeper
reductions in air pollution than his cap-and-trade proposal would
produce. So the air would actually be dirtier under Clear Skies than if
the president allowed the E.P.A. to enforce the existing law. Clear
Skies allowed 50 percent more sulfur dioxide, nearly 40 percent more
nitrogen oxides and three times as much mercury as the Clean Air Act --
rigorously enforced -- called for.

Because of this discrepancy, the legislation was not greeted with much
enthusiasm in Congress. Clear Skies wasn't helped by the fact that a
former top E.P.A. official went on ABC's ''This Week'' to denounce the
proposal two weeks after it was introduced. ''We can do better under
current law than what they're putting on the table,'' Eric Schaeffer
told George Stephanopoulos. Schaeffer, the E.P.A.'s head of civil
enforcement from 1997 to 2002, had worked on the new-source review
lawsuits since their inception. He left the E.P.A. in early 2002, tired,
as he said in his letter of resignation, of ''fighting a White House
that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.''

Schaeffer's frustration stemmed from the collapse of talks that had been
leading, in his estimation, to the elimination of more than four million
tons of air pollution annually. Officials at the power companies named
in the new-source review lawsuits, who had been negotiating with E.P.A.
officials, were well aware that White House appointees were drafting new
rules that would all but scuttle N.S.R., and they lost their incentive
to cut deals. Beginning in 2001, soon after Bush took office,
negotiations began to break down. ''We were 80 percent of the way done
with seven or eight companies, and one by one they just walked away,''
said Bruce Buckheit, who conducted many of the negotiations himself.
Even done deals fell apart. In late 2000, E.P.A. officials reached an
agreement in principle with Cinergy that was designed to cut nearly
500,000 tons of the company's annual emissions. By 2002, Cinergy had
backed out.

Christie Whitman did little to help the negotiations. In her testimony
before the Senate Committee on Government Affairs in March 2002, she
described new-source review as ''a program that needs to be fixed,'' but
assured the committee that the E.P.A. would not eviscerate the program.
Later in her testimony, though, Whitman offered unsolicited advice to
the companies her agency was suing for N.S.R. violations. At the time,
the Tennessee Valley Authority, which had refused to settle with the
Justice Department, had gone to court to challenge the E.P.A. over
new-source review. ''If I were a plaintiff's attorney,'' Whitman said,
''I would not settle anything until I knew what happened'' with the
T.V.A. case. The message to the power industry, critics charged, was
clear: don't settle the cases; change is coming.

V.

Meanwhile, Bush appointees at the E.P.A. and the Energy Department
continued to undo the longstanding N.S.R. rules. There was one technical
question that was very important to both sides: where would the line be
drawn between ''routine maintenance'' of plants, meaning changes that
did not trigger N.S.R. pollution upgrades, and significant overhauls
that did. In the spring of 2002, Jeffrey Holmstead, the E.P.A.'s
assistant administrator, asked Sylvia Lowrance, the E.P.A.'s deputy
assistant administrator for enforcement, to suggest a financial
threshold -- a percentage of the total value of each generator that a
utility would be permitted to spend on renovations and still define them
as routine. Lowrance, a 24-year veteran of the agency, had officials in
her office study years of data, looking at figures that came from actual
power plants, and on June 3, 2002, she wrote a memo to Holmstead
indicating that her office thought 0.75 percent was a reasonable figure.
(The memo was later released to reporters by a former E.P.A. official
critical of the administration's policies.) In other words, if the total
value of a generating unit was $1 billion, a power company should be
able to legitimately spend up to $7.5 million a year on routine repair
and maintenance without being required to install new pollution controls.

In a separate memo, Lowrance, Buckheit and Schaeffer warned Holmstead
that the proposed changes in new-source review could seriously undermine
the E.P.A.'s lawsuits against N.S.R. violators. There were several
proposed changes, they wrote, ''that, if included in the final version
of the recommendations, could undercut ongoing enforcement activities,
including efforts to reach environmentally beneficial settlements.''
Holmstead does not appear to have worried much about the warning from
his colleagues. A few weeks later, on July 16, 2002, he went before
Congress and testified that officials at the E.P.A. ''do not believe
these changes'' -- to new-source review -- ''will have a negative impact
on the enforcement cases.''

Holmstead did not seem to believe in the very notion of new-source
review. Speaking at an energy-industry conference in Washington in
September 2002, Holmstead noted that N.S.R. had spawned thousands of
pages of guidance documents, and, he said, ''we can't even say we've
gotten any emissions reductions from existing sources.'' The E.P.A.'s
own documents, however, show that from 1997 to 1999 alone, the program
reduced emissions nationwide by a total of more than four million tons.
Holmstead's statement also ignored the fact that the main reason the
new-source review law hadn't brought greater across-the-board pollution
reductions was that many power companies had systematically violated it
for 20 years. (Holmstead declined to be interviewed for this article.)

Through the spring and into the summer of 2002, President Bush's Clear
Skies Initiative was stalled in Congress. The bill's principal sponsor,
Representative Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, formally introduced it on
the last Friday in July 2002, just before the House adjourned for summer
vacation. That fall, an internal E.P.A. analysis, later leaked to the
media, found that a rival bill sponsored by Senator Tom Carper, a
Democrat from Delaware, would reduce more emissions, on an earlier
schedule and at a comparable cost to consumers, than the president's
Clear Skies plan. If the Bush administration was going to bring about
changes, it was becoming clear that they would have to be done
administratively.

The E.P.A. revealed its overhaul of new-source review on Friday, Nov.
22, 2002. For all the buildup, it was a conspicuously low-key debut.
President Bush issued no statement about the new guidelines. Christie
Whitman declined to attend the news conference, which was run by Jeffrey
Holmstead. Cameras were not allowed at the event, which seemed timed to
hit the weekly news cycle at its Friday night nadir.

''There will be emissions reductions as a result of the final rules that
we are adopting today,'' Holmstead said. The new rules gave utilities
much more maneuverability under N.S.R. The E.P.A. adopted Carol
Browner's old ''micro-cap'' idea -- but abandoned its critical
component, the gradual tightening of the cap. Utilities that installed
new pollution-control equipment were given 10-year exemptions from
further upgrades. An official with the National Association of
Manufacturers called the new rules ''a refreshingly flexible approach to
regulation.'' The usually staid American Lung Association, in a report
issued with a coalition of environmental groups, called the rule changes
''the most harmful and unlawful air-pollution initiative ever undertaken
by the federal government.''

VI.

Bush's E.P.A. appointees left one crucial detail out of the final
report. They said they were still working on a final revision of N.S.R.
having to do with the often contested definition of ''routine
maintenance.'' The agency published its proposed rule in the Federal
Register but left the crucial percentage -- the one Sylvia Lowrance and
the E.P.A.'s enforcement office had suggested setting at 0.75 percent --
unspecified.

In early 2003 -- before that important percentage was arrived at -- the
Bush changes were being challenged. The attorneys general of nine states
filed suit to stop the new rules from taking effect. Attorney General
Eliot Spitzer of New York and his colleagues, almost all of whom were
from states in the Northeast, charged that the changes were so sweeping
and damaging that the E.P.A. could not make them without Congressional
approval. The lawsuit argued, in effect, that the Bush administration's
entire administrative approach to undoing new-source review was against
the law. Administration officials brushed off the suit as a political
maneuver, noting that most of the attorneys general were Democrats.

On Aug. 27, 2003, two days before Labor Day weekend, the other N.S.R.
shoe dropped. By then, Whitman was gone, having announced her
resignation in May. She said she was tired of making the New
Jersey-to-Washington commute and wanted to spend more time with her
husband. ''I'm not leaving because of clashes with the White House,''
she said in a television interview. ''In fact, I haven't had any.'' A
number of career E.P.A. officials told me they suspected that she'd had
enough of the White House's dictating policies with which she disagreed,
but, if true, Whitman never let on.

So it was Marianne Horinko, acting E.P.A. administrator, who announced
in August that the agency had finalized its rule on routine maintenance.
The new formula would not adopt Lowrance's suggested threshold of 0.75
percent. Instead, Horinko said, utilities would be allowed to spend up
to 20 percent of a generating unit's replacement cost, per year, without
tripping the N.S.R. threshold.

In other words, a company that operated a coal-fired power plant could
do just about anything it wanted to a $1 billion generating unit as long
as the company didn't spend more than $200 million a year on the unit.
To E.P.A. officials who had worked on N.S.R. enforcement, who had pored
over documents and knew what it cost to repair a generator, the new
threshold was absurd. ''What I don't understand is why they were so
greedy,'' said Eric Schaeffer, the former E.P.A. official. ''Five
percent would have been too high, but 20? I don't think the industry
expected that in its wildest dreams.''

The framework of new-source review would remain, but the new rules set
thresholds so high that pollution-control requirements would almost
never come into effect. ''It's a moron test for power companies,'' said
Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a nonprofit
watchdog group. ''It's such a huge loophole that only a moron would trip
over it and become subject to N.S.R. requirements.''

The report from the American Lung Association and various environmental
groups estimated that compared with enforcement of the old N.S.R. rules,
the new rules would result in emissions increases of 7 million tons of
sulfur dioxide and 2.4 million tons of nitrogen oxides per year by 2020.
Had the new rules been in effect before 1999, the lawsuits that the
Justice Department filed against the power companies would have been
impossible: nearly every illegal action the power companies were accused
of back then would have been legal under the new rules.

The announcement of the 20 percent limit had a devastating effect on the
E.P.A.'s enforcement division. ''Under the new rules,'' Buckheit said,
''almost everything we worked to achieve is wiped out.'' Two months
after Horinko's announcement, in November 2003, J.P. Suarez, the
Bush-appointed E.P.A. assistant administrator for enforcement, informed
staff members that the agency would newly ''evaluate,'' and perhaps
choose not to pursue, existing N.S.R. investigations, except those cases
that the Justice Department had already taken to federal court.
Investigations into 70 companies suspected of violations of the Clean
Air Act were abandoned.

On Christmas Eve, 2003, two days before the new-source review rules were
to take effect, a federal appeals court halted their implementation. The
court ruled that the new regulations could not go into effect until the
lawsuit brought by Eliot Spitzer and 14 other attorneys general (6 more
had joined the suit since its inception) was heard. The ruling meant
that the new rules would be delayed for at least a year and signaled the
beginning of what could be a years-long legal battle.

By the end of 2003, with new-source review all but dead, the White House
began moving on to other projects. Mike Leavitt, the newly installed
E.P.A. administrator, proposed two new regulations. The first suggested
new standards for mercury emissions that would in the short term permit
the release of as much as seven times as much mercury as current law
allows. The second, known as the interstate air-quality rule, set new
national caps on sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides, and was seen by
many as the administrative enactment of Bush's Clear Skies Initiative.
Supporters of the administration contend that the interstate air-quality
rule will accomplish all the goals of new-source review in a more
efficient and comprehensive way. ''All the arguments about N.S.R. and
the ability to control pollution from power plants are made moot'' by
the new rule, according to the senior E.P.A. adviser who is a supporter
of the administration's policies and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Yet the new rule set higher national limits for emissions of dangerous
chemicals like sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides than Clear Skies,
which in turn was considered by critics to be weaker than the existing
Clean Air Act. Around that time, some longtime E.P.A. officials decided
they'd had enough. Bruce Buckheit and Rich Biondi, Buckheit's deputy,
took retirement buyouts and left the agency. Buckheit and Biondi said
they could no longer carry out their jobs effectively, given the Bush
administration's attitude toward the Clean Air Act.

The White House's reversal of clean-air gains was especially disturbing
to Biondi, who joined the agency in 1971, six months after its inception
under President Nixon. The rule changes and the abandonment of the
new-source review investigations ''excuse decades of violations,'' he
said. ''We worked 30 years to develop a clean-air program that is
finally achieving our goals. It was frustrating to see some of our
significant advances taken away. I left because I wanted to make a
difference, and it became clear that that was going to be difficult at
the E.P.A.''

Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. This is his
first cover article for The Times Magazine.


Password:

Messages In This Thread

€ * NFF: V
  #2  
Old April 3rd, 2004, 06:27 AM
Wolfgang
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush


"Deggie" wrote in message
...

snip

In order to satisfy my curiosity, I am thinking about to posting emails to
the New York Times and to Bruce Barcott c/o Outside Magazine concerning
clarification about their policies on the use of copyrighted materials. Any
messages you'd like me to forward to them?

Wolfgang


  #3  
Old April 3rd, 2004, 06:28 AM
Jerry
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush

Deggie wrote:

- propaganda snipped -

Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. This is his
first cover article for The Times Magazine.



What you really mean is it is his first published left wing BS attack.
Funny how he never directs you to any published sources that back up his
article. The main thing that shoots this garbage down is if the
Democrats even had a whiff of anything being true about this story there
would be nothing in the news except this story.

Jerry

  #4  
Old April 6th, 2004, 05:31 AM
SamB
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush

NOTHING could make me vote for bush.
SamB

"David Snedeker" wrote in message
...

"Jerry" wrote in message
...
Deggie wrote:

- propaganda snipped -

Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor at Outside magazine. This is

his
first cover article for The Times Magazine.



What you really mean is it is his first published left wing BS attack.
Funny how he never directs you to any published sources that back up his
article. The main thing that shoots this garbage down is if the
Democrats even had a whiff of anything being true about this story there
would be nothing in the news except this story.


If you knew the story were true, would you still vote for Bush?

Dave




  #5  
Old April 6th, 2004, 06:31 AM
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush

On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 16:52:39 -0500, "Wolfgang"
wrote:

Wolfgang
who, nevertheless, is even more impressed by an excoriating attack that
includes calling someone a "demwit".


I _am_ a bit weird. I thought it was a shorthand way of saying
Democrat dimwit. No? Okay. Wrong again. I suppose the D would have
been capped, had it been intended to be so.

And maybe I've got the wrong party? Was this a Republican or Democrat
bashing thread before it turned more personal?
--

rbc:vixen,Minnow Goddess,Willow Watcher,and all that sort of thing.
Often taunted by trout.
Only a fool would refuse to believe in luck. Only a damn fool would rely on it.

http://www.visi.com/~cyli
  #6  
Old April 6th, 2004, 07:37 AM
rw
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush

SamB wrote:

NOTHING could make me vote for bush.
SamB


Amen. I'm reading Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling and I'm getting
angrier with every chapter. I knew these people were lying sacks of
****, but I wasn't completely aware of the magnitude of their medacity
and greed.

--
Cut "to the chase" for my email address.
  #7  
Old April 6th, 2004, 01:13 PM
Wolfgang
external usenet poster
 
Posts: n/a
Default Outdoorsmen for Bush


wrote in message
...
On Mon, 5 Apr 2004 16:52:39 -0500, "Wolfgang"
wrote:

Wolfgang
who, nevertheless, is even more impressed by an excoriating attack that
includes calling someone a "demwit".


I _am_ a bit weird. I thought it was a shorthand way of saying
Democrat dimwit. No? Okay. Wrong again. I suppose the D would have
been capped, had it been intended to be so.


A plausible and very likley correct alternate interpretation.

And maybe I've got the wrong party? Was this a Republican or Democrat
bashing thread before it turned more personal?


Well, the thread title suggests it could hardly have been anything else. At
any rate, if your theory is right the whole thing is even funnier. Anybody
so wedded to any one political party as to automatically assume an adherent
to the other to be a fool is right.....but for the wrong reasons......and
doesn't know it.....and has considerably more serious problems than poor
spelling.

Wolfgang


 




Thread Tools
Display Modes

Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

vB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is Off
HTML code is Off
Forum Jump


All times are GMT +1. The time now is 10:30 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.6.4
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, Jelsoft Enterprises Ltd.
Copyright ©2004-2024 FishingBanter.
The comments are property of their posters.