Conscious Choice: The Dawning of the Bush Years

March 2001 | News of the Earth

The Dawning of the Bush Years

by Dave Aftandilian

Every time I open up the newspaper nowadays it seems I meet with yet another idiotic pronouncement or plan presented to us by our elected (sort of) leader President George W. Bush. Bush came out of his inauguration swinging, issuing an edict immediately afterward that blocked many of the last-minute executive orders signed by former President Clinton. Among those orders was a plan to outlaw logging of old-growth trees in wilderness areas of our national forests — a plan that received more public comments in its favor than any other proposed executive rule in the history of the United States. Bush can’t just throw these orders out, but he can keep them from going into effect for a couple months while his corporate-affiliated Cabinet appointees and conservative legal teams do their worst to find ways to cripple the rules.

But wait — it gets better. Just a day after taking office, Bush reinstituted the global gag rule on family planning, ordering an end to all federal aid for overseas organizations, such as the International Planned Parenthood Federation, that use money from U.S. taxpayers or even their own funds "to pay for abortions or advocate or actively promote abortion," in Bush’s words. Never mind that U.S. law (the 1973 Helms amendment) already makes it illegal for any U.S. taxpayer dollars to be used to support abortions overseas, and that family planning prevents abortions rather than promoting them, because it helps avoid unwanted pregnancies. As the Sierra Club wrote in one of its action alerts on this topic, "because rapid population growth exacerbates every environmental problem, it is intimately linked to all our efforts to protect the environment.... By limiting access to information and services that help families to decide the timing and spacing of their children, President Bush is making it more difficult to protect the natural resources that are under pressure from the demands of rapidly increasing population."

And that’s not all. Just a couple days later, the Bush administration asked that the upcoming UN summit on global warming be delayed by two months so that Bush officials could take "a thorough look at the U.S. policy on climate change." Set to begin in May, this meeting would be our best chance to atone for scuttling an agreement at the discussions in the Hague this past November. Bush said repeatedly during the campaign that he didn’t like the Kyoto Protocol, so there’s every reason to think his team will be looking for ways to back out of the treaty (signed by President Clinton, but not yet submitted to the Senate for ratification). This is a particularly dumb move given the upcoming release of a new report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which represents the combined efforts and cutting-edge research of the world’s top climate scientists. Significantly gloomier than the previous IPCC report, the new one estimates that unless emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are curtailed soon, average surface temperatures could increase between 2.5 and 10 degrees Fahrenheit, and sea levels could rise by up to ten feet, submerging many of the world’s coastlines within the next century.

Bush’s Energy Plan:
Pro-Oil, Anti-Environment

And then, on January 29, President Bush, saying he was "deeply concerned" that California’s power crisis was "spreading beyond the California borders," announced his intention to move "boldly and swiftly" to enact a national energy policy that would reduce our "reliance upon foreign oil" and "encourage the development of pipelines and power-generating capacity in the country." Bush’s plan includes such oil-industry crowd pleasers as opening the 1.5 million-acre coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) to oil and gas drilling and offering tax incentives to promote domestic oil production, as well as granting federal waivers allowing states to run older power plants at full capacity, even if that means violating federal clean-air standards.

Bush also named Vice-President Dick Cheney (former CEO of the Halliburton oil services company) to head a task force charged with finding the best ways to put this plan into action. In addition to Cheney, the task force includes Commerce Secretary Donald L. Evans (former head of the oil company Tom Brown, Inc.), Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham (who voted to open ANWR to drilling and to roll back clean air and water protections when he was a U.S. senator from Michigan), Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton (who advocated opening ANWR to drilling when she was associate solicitor with the Department of the Interior in the mid-1980s), and other Cabinet members.

If you think that plan and the task force appointed to carry it through sound like they’re crafted more to please Bush and Cheney’s cronies in the oil industry than to solve California’s current power crisis or craft a realistic long-term U.S. energy policy, you’re not alone. Let’s start with Bush’s obsession with opening ANWR to oil drilling. "Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, President Bush’s signature energy cause, would not generate one kilowatt of electricity for California," says a recent Los Angeles Times editorial entitled "Arctic Oil a Sham Answer." "It wouldn’t even produce any oil for an estimated 10 years." A New York Times editorial explains that "it is wholly specious to suggest, as Mr. Bush does, a connection between opening the refuge and California’s energy problems. Less than one percent of California’s electricity comes from oil. California’s fuel of choice is natural gas, and if Mr. Bush wants to find natural gas, there are far better places than the coastal plain to look for it. One such place is Alaska’s North Slope, which includes far bigger proven natural gas reserves than even the most optimistic estimates for the coastal plain."

There are a number of other good reasons to think that drilling for more oil and relaxing clean air rules would do little or nothing to solve California’s current power crisis, or prevent such a crisis from happening elsewhere in the United States. For instance, when Bush suggested in a CNN interview that "if there’s any environmental regulations...preventing California from having a 100 percent max output at their plants — as I understand there may be — then we need to relax those standards." Richard Wheatley, a spokesman for Houston-based Reliant Energy Co., which operates four power plants in southern California, characterized Bush’s assertion that environmental regulations are holding back output as "absolutely false. We’re making every megawatt available on request. We factor the air-quality regulations into our daily operating basis, and they are not causing us to withhold power."

The problem in California is not so much with production as it is with distribution bottlenecks and pricing problems, many of them the product of poorly planned electricity deregulation. Hopefully Illinois will learn some lessons from California’s hardships as we proceed with deregulation here. Capping residential rates, for instance, as California did, may not be the best idea, because it gives consumers no incentive to conserve power. Utilities in California clued into this a little late; after cutting spending on energy-efficiency programs targeting consumers by 23 to 58 percent from 1994 to 1998, they’re only now scrambling to reinstate efficiency-outreach programs. A new statewide energy conservation plan aims to reduce demand by as much as 20 percent, partly through consumer initiatives, and partly through provisions requiring retail businesses to reduce outdoor lighting and take other steps to cut power consumption.

Now back to the Arctic. Drilling in the ANWR would severely impact the calving grounds of the 200,000-animal Porcupine caribou herd (one of the largest free-roaming herds left in the world), on which the Gwich’in people of northeastern Alaska and northwestern Canada depend (sustainably) for their subsistence, not to mention the homes of hundreds of other species, including musk oxen, wolves, and bears. For these and other reasons, Canadian environment minister David Anderson has said he is "utterly opposed" to drilling in the ANWR. In addition to encouraging the United States to seek other options for energy exploration in the Arctic (such as the North Slope mentioned above), Canada could potentially refuse permission for a pipeline carrying oil from ANWR to the continental United States to cross Canadian soil. More than 650,000 U.S. citizens also opposed the project, and sent postcards to former President Clinton urging him to declare the ANWR a national monument (which he decided not to do).

Setting aside the potentially horrific environmental impacts — remember the Exxon Valdez and the millions of gallons of crude oil it spilled into Prince William Sound? — drilling in the ANWR doesn’t make sense by economic standards either. The U.S. Geological Survey has estimated that about 3.2 billion barrels of oil could be economically produced from the ANWR over the typical fifty-year life span of an oil field; not only would this relatively small amount of oil last just six months at current consumption levels, but it would also take ten years to begin to appear on the market.

By way of comparison, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) estimates that 5.4 billion barrels of oil could be saved over the same fifty-year period if the federal government required replacement tires for passenger vehicles to deliver the same fuel economy as the original tires that come with cars when you buy them (these tires have better rolling resistance, i.e., resistance to the road, and make the vehicles that run on them about 4 percent more fuel efficient). Or, taking conservation a step further, the NRDC says that 50 billion barrels of oil could be saved in fifty years if the fuel economy of passenger vehicles in the United States were raised 60 percent. This isn’t as pie-in-the-sky as it sounds — current average fuel economy of passenger vehicles, including SUVs, is 24 miles per gallon; hybrid gas-electric vehicles you can buy now get better than twice that gas mileage, delivering 55 to 70 miles per gallon. We have the technology on the shelf to reduce emissions; what’s lacking is the will in Detroit and Washington to use it.

Given all that, why is Bush so hot on drilling in the ANWR, especially when he is likely to face fierce opposition in Congress (provided we do our part to let our congressional representatives know we vehemently oppose drilling in the refuge)? Good question. In addition to the obvious answer that Bush, Cheney, and many others either in or advising the new administration are former oil men, columnist Paul Krugman hypothesized in the New York Times that "to understand the enthusiasm of the administration for all things dirty, I believe, you need to see it as something that goes beyond simple calculations of cost and benefit. What it’s really about is political momentum — about eliminating Mr. Bush’s legitimacy gap by winning a series of striking victories. In effect, his advisers hope that by repeatedly rolling over the moderates they can make people forget that the other guy actually got more votes.... Think of it as an attempt to create the illusion of a mandate using smog and mirrors."

Survival of the Squeakiest:
Speak Your Mind Loud & Often

So given Bush’s less than stellar start on environmental issues, and the likelihood that things will get much worse before they get better, what can we do to safeguard our environment during the four years — "read my lips," four years and four years only — Bush will be in office? One obvious answer is to do what we can to educate Bush and his Cabinet members by writing and calling them about various issues as they arise. For instance, if it bothers you that Bush’s energy policy seems to focus on increasing production much more than reducing consumption, why not write a letter to Bush et al. explaining the virtues of increasing fuel efficiency standards for passenger vehicles, especially SUVs; installing compact fluorescent bulbs instead of incandescents; adding insulation to attics and hot water heaters; and so forth?

And while you’re at it, why not mention that we ought to be giving tax incentives not to increase oil production, but to develop low-pollution renewable energy technologies such as solar and wind power? After all, as Oregon Governor John Kitzhaber recently told Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, "drilling and digging and burning" are part of "the old vision of our energy security"; the current crisis "offers us the best opportunity in thirty years to rethink our energy future" and to develop an "ethic that values the conserved kilowatt as much as the consumed kilowatt."

If Bush and his staff decide not to listen to reason, and instead try to ram their anti-environmental, pro-business agenda down our throats, we can always ask our elected representatives in the House and Senate to vote against Bush’s plans. And if all that comes to naught, we should do our best to let friends, family, and the media know about the shenanigans Bush and his conservative Republican allies get themselves up to. As Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club said recently, we need to "ensure that every act of courage, every omission from cowardice, every visionary look to the future and every sidewise glance at a corporate donor are weighed, measured, and laid out before the American people for judgment." Then, two years from now during the midterm congressional elections, and four years from now in the next presidential election, we can put the evidence before the voters, and let them make their choices accordingly. Most Americans are environmentalists, and won’t take kindly to Bush and the right wing of his party despoiling our children’s future.

In the meantime, we also have some opportunities to take some proactive environmental stands. Bush has made it clear that he wants to support faith-based initiatives. Fine — environmentalists have been working with communities of faith on issues of shared concern for decades. Now is our chance to see just how compassionate a conservative Bush really is. Will he support environmental justice, and help congregations in downtrodden urban areas prevent their members from being dumped on by wealthy corporations? Will he encourage faith-based projects to ensure equal access to transportation for all Americans, such as the various initiatives that the Metropolitan Alliance of Congregations in Chicago is working on with the Center for Neighborhood Technology? Let’s make Bush’s marriage to the religious right work for us instead of against us.

Given Bush’s support for shifting legislative and regulatory responsibilities from the federal government to the states, we’ll also need to keep a close eye on developments in Springfield, support the good ones, and blow the whistle on the bad ones. Devoting energy to state and local issues will help ensure that even if Bush destroys our federal system of environmental protections, we’ll still have strong state and local laws to fall back on. Here again we need to pressure our elected officials — and remember that the more local the office, the more responsible a politician is likely to be to a constituent’s concerns.

Finally, we need to stay informed so that we can inform others. Many environmental groups have e-mail action alert networks for which you can sign up. On the national level, I recommend the Sierra Club’s SC-Action alerts, and locally, the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s Leginfo.org; you can sign up for both of these at the Web sites listed below. You can also help by donating money and/or time to your favorite environmental groups — trust me, with Bush at the helm, they need all the help they can get.

Resources

President George W. Bush, president@whitehouse.gov

Vice-President Dick Cheney, vice.president@whitehouse.gov

The White House, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W., Washington, DC 20500; 202-456-1414, fax: 202-456-2461

Senator Dick Durbin, dick@durbin.senate.gov

U.S. Senate, 364 Russell Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510; 202-224-2152, fax: 202-228-0400

Senator Peter Fitzgerald, senator_fitzger ald@fitzgerald.senate.gov

U.S. Senate, 555 Dirksen Senate Office Building, Washington, DC 20510; 202-224-2854

U.S. House of Representatives, 202-224-3121 (includes information at the bottom of the page on locating and contacting your representative)

State of Illinois (from this page you can find contact info for both Governor Ryan and the state legislature)

Center for Neighborhood Technology

Sierra Club Daily E-Updates (signup info is under "News You Can Use")

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