Conscious Choice: Bush Earns a D-minus for His First Year in Office

March 2002 | News of the Earth

Bush Earns a D-minus for His First Year in Office

by Dave Aftandilian

Near the end of January, the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) released their 2001 Presidential Report Card on the first year of President George W. Bush’s administration. Calling that year "the most damaging period for environmental policy in a generation," the report goes on to say that "Not since the opening months of the Reagan administration has there been such a deliberate attempt to dismantle federal protections for our environment.... With a continued record of hostility to environmental protection, we have little choice but to offer President Bush and his administration a near-failing grade."

How did Bush earn an environmental dunce cap from the LCV? From the staff he appointed to head key environmental posts in his administration to his 2002 budget request to Congress, to the programs his administration initiated, Bush and his staff consistently took the side of big business over public health and the environment. You can read the details in the full report on LCV’s Web site at www.lcv.org, but I’ll hit some of the "highlights" here.

Let’s start with his appointments. One of the worst, both in terms of her background and her actions while in office, has been Gale Norton, secretary of the interior. Reagan had the now-infamous James Watt in this post from 1981 to 1983. Norton worked for Watt while he was president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a conservative organization that strongly supports "takings legislation" (monetary compensation for landowners when environmental law affects the use of their land) and unsustainable logging and mining on public lands, and which has litigated against the Endangered Species Act and other federal laws that Norton is now responsible for enforcing.

As secretary of the interior, Norton has held true to her pro-business, anti-public lands past, arguing forcefully for the opening of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and protected areas in the Rocky Mountains to oil and gas drilling. She ignored the findings of her own department’s Fish and Wildlife Service when she told the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee that caribou would not be affected by oil drilling. As her special assistant for Alaska, Norton selected Cam Toohey, former executive director of Arctic Power, an oil-industry-funded lobbying group whose sole aim is opening ANWR to drilling. Norton also supported a rollback of Clinton-era hard rock mining regulations that would have strengthened environmental protections for public lands and she is currently looking for ways to revise boundaries and land-use rules for national monuments established during Clinton’s presidency, to make them more accessible for resource extraction.

Norton is just one among many environmentally egregious appointments to the Bush administration. J. Steven Griles, deputy secretary of the interior, is a former mining industry lobbyist who, while working with Norton in the Reagan Interior Department, played a key role in covering up the environmental risks of proposed oil drilling and development off the coast of California. William Geary Myers III, solicitor for the department, has served as lobbyist for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and the Public Lands Association, where he opposed the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park and supported the killing of bison who wander outside the park. Rebecca Watson, assistant secretary for land and minerals management, has ties to the conservative Mountain States Legal Foundation and a history of representing mining and timber interests as an attorney in Montana. She has provided legal advice to the Blue Ribbon Coalition, a group fighting for more off-road vehicle access to public lands.

More anti-environment appointees include Spencer Abraham, secretary of energy, and Mark Rey, undersecretary of agriculture. Abraham was one of four senators who sponsored a bill to abolish the Energy Department in 1999. He has been a vocal supporter of opening ANWR to oil and gas drilling and he has forged ahead with plans to use the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada for storage of nuclear waste from around the country — despite mounting concerns over the safety of the waste while in transit to the site and the long-term stability of the storage site itself.

Mark Rey, responsible for overseeing the U.S. Forest Service, was a prominent timber industry lobbyist for nearly twenty years. Rey helped draft an amendment to allow more clearcut logging of old-growth forests in the Pacific Northwest and repeatedly opposed a rule protecting roadless areas in the national forests. The Wilderness Society called Rey "the mastermind of nearly every timber industry strategy to get more trees off the national forests."

Budget Cuts

In his fiscal year 2002 budget request to Congress Bush sought to scale back or eliminate funding for many environmental programs, yet increase funding for oil and gas development. Even as the administration kept trumpeting the need for increasing America’s energy supply, Bush proposed cutting $600 million from the Department of Energy budget. He wanted to slash funding for renewable energy programs by more than a third and reduce funding for building energy-efficient homes and offices. Proposed increases in renewable energy research and development would have been tied to opening ANWR to oil and gas drilling.

While Bush’s budget fully funded the Land and Water Conservation Fund and began to eliminate the $4.9 billion maintenance backlog from the national parks, it also cut $365 million from other environmental programs of the Department of the Interior. The budget included a 25 percent cut to endangered species programs of the Fish and Wildlife Service and a 7.9 percent cut to the U.S. Geological Survey. This would have meant eliminating crucial programs such as the National Water Quality Assessment program. The EPA’s budget took a nearly 7 percent hit, with significantly reduced spending on programs for clean air and water, and a transfer of federal monies for environmental protection and enforcement to the states, with no provisions for overseeing how the funds would be spent. The USDA lost $1.1 billion from its budget, including no funding for the Wetland Reserve Program, the Farmland Protection Program, or the Wildlife Habitat Incentive Program.

Policy Failures

Bush’s policy initiatives — such as his pro-fossil fuel, pro-development energy policy — have been even worse news for the environment. Of the sixty-three-member advisory team Bush put together to develop his energy plan, all but one had ties to oil, nuclear, coal, or other polluting interests. Between 1999 and 2000, fifty-eight of them gave approximately $8 million in campaign contributions to Republican congressional and presidential candidates.

This biased task force came up with an energy plan that came down solidly on the side of pro-development, pro-fossil fuel initiatives, and gave short shrift to renewable energy development and energy efficiency measures. It called for building hundreds of new power plants over the next twenty years. It envisioned a significant upsurge in coal production and use and a long-term shift to nuclear energy. It called for more domestic oil and gas drilling in sensitive areas like ANWR, the Rocky Mountains, and off the shores of California, Florida, and other coastal states. (Read the July 2001 "News of the Earth" for a detailed analysis.)

In other domestic environmental policy initiatives, the Bush administration has continued to find ways to stall and water down the Forest Service plan to ban road-building in most roadless areas of the national forests, despite 1.6 million public comments in favor of the plan. Bush’s EPA has tried to limit or eliminate a provision of the Clean Air Act that requires power plants undergoing significant renovations to install new air pollution scrubbers. The Bush EPA also initially tried to rescind a Clinton rule to reduce the levels of arsenic in drinking water, yet let the rule stand after the National Academy of Sciences confirmed the science behind the rule and both chambers of Congress passed legislation to adopt the tougher standard.

On the positive side, the Bush administration has allowed to stand a Clinton regulation to reduce pollutants from diesel fuel. It will support the Clinton plan to hold General Electric responsible for cleaning up the PCBs it dumped into the Hudson River. And Bush has agreed to sign an international treaty to ban the production of certain persistent organic pollutants.

Bush’s other actions on the international environmental front have all been bad news. Most galling was his refusal even to allow the U.S. to participate in negotiations on the Kyoto Protocol to reduce emission of greenhouse gases.

In the service of overpopulation, Bush restricted funding for any international organizations that mention abortion as a potential tool for family planning (the "global gag rule").

He supports the insider negotiations of the World Trade Organization, supports the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and seeks fast-track trade authority from Congress so that he can negotiate international trade treaties without congressional approval (the House passed this fast-track authority for the President by one vote).

What You Can Do

Write to President Bush and the secretaries of the relevant departments to let them know that you don’t like the idea of the environment being governed by and for big business and big polluters. Vote for pro-environment House and Senate candidates in the primaries, and then work to elect them into office in November. If Bush loses the Republican majority in the House, and the Democrats retain control of the Senate, we just may have a chance to stop some of the anti-environmental mischief Bush is planning for his remaining years in office.

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