Star Staff Writer
| Marshall, executive director of Wild South, worked to get President Ronald Reagan elected. He believes Republican Theodore Roosevelt – who established the nation’s system of wildlife refuges and national parks early in the last century – was the best environmental president the nation ever had. Marshall describes himself as a meat eater and a hunter, and a member of the outdoors-loving mainstream that is starting to come together. They care about the land because it’s their ancestral landscape, because the bones of their great-grandfathers nourished its trees, because their roots and their culture are tied to the forest, the water and the air. They refuse to let their ancestors’ graves be bulldozed. “One day we’re going to have a revolution,” he said. “Somebody like Teddy Roosevelt is going to sweep through the country and restore some common sense.” With the presidential election less than a week away, this Alabama Republican says he will compromise on issues in which he disagrees with the Democratic Party to vote for the better environmental candidate – John Kerry. “Bush is the worst anti-environmental president we’ve had in history,”
Marshall said. “It’s not a Republican or Democratic issue. There’s no such
thing as a Republican or Democratic child that gets asthma because (of) particulates
in the air.” Marshall is part of a national grassroots organization called Republicans for Environmental Protection, whose mission is “to resurrect the GOP’s great conservation tradition and to restore natural resource conservation and sound economic protection as fundamental elements of the Republican Party’s vision for America.” He compares the government propaganda in George Orwell’s 1984 - slogans like war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength – to the Bush Administration’s environmental policy. “Orwellian” is the adjective that environmentalists and Democrats often use when discussing Bush’s “Clear Skies” initiative, which rolls back protections in the Clean Air Act and allows more emissions, or the “Healthy Forests” initiative, which allows for more logging. Unlike Orwell’s 1984, in the real 2004, Marshall said, it’s not the government that holds the power. Until people wake up, he said, they are under the thumb of corporations. “The number one threat to our freedom is not terrorism,” he said.
“It’s the excess of corporate power. Our air is dirty because of corporations,
our water, the great forest of Alabama that once was has been cut down and
replaced with tree farms.” In an election anticipated to be neck-and-neck, the environment has not been a dominant issue. But it is the issue in which legislative and executive records find the sharpest divide between Bush and Kerry. Environmentalists and Democrats, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Al Gore, have called Bush the worst environmental president in the country’s history. At the same time, environmental groups rank Kerry‘s record as about as good as it gets. Kerry’s record in the Senate and throughout his political career has earned him the support of environmental groups, including the League of Conservation Voters, which endorsed him Jan. 24 – the earliest endorsement of a presidential candidate in the group’s 34-year history. The League of Conservation Voters gave Kerry a lifetime rating, based on his Senate votes, of 92 percent. Al Gore’s rating was 64 percent, and the League did not choose to endorse him until May 30 in the 2000 election cycle. Marty Connors, chairman of the Alabama Republican Party, laughed at the mention of Bush being described as the worst president in history on the environment. “Some of those environmental groups are completely Democratic,” he said. “It doesn’t matter what the president does. He wouldn’t get any credit.” Connors cited Clear Skies and Healthy Forests as examples of what the President has done for the environment, as well as Brownfields legislation to accelerate cleanup and redevelopment and funding for “clean coal” research and technology. “I think the president has been a good conservationist and steward of the environment,” Connors said. “Extreme environmental groups will not agree with that. You have to weigh the thin line between maintaining our energy and independence and maintaining a clean environment.” Connors said Bush takes a realistic approach to the environment,
and he doesn’t think anyone has any great complaints with the president’s
actions. Martha Marks, president of Republicans for Environmental Protection, said the GOP had been good on the environment back to the nation’s first Republican president, Abraham Lincoln in the 1860s. It was Richard Nixon, elected in 1968, who signed the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and who established the Environmental Protection Agency. The Republican Party’s anti-environmental movement, Marks and others said, began with Ronald Reagan, who publicly proclaimed his anti-environmental stance during his 1980 election campaign, calling himself a “Sagebrush Rebel.” Reagan founded the Heritage Foundation, which called the environmental movement “the greatest single threat to the American economy.” Ray Vaughan, director of Wildlaw, a non-profit environmental law firm in Montgomery, said the belief that environmental quality has to be sacrificed to promote economic growth and prosperity isn’t true. “I don’t think God intended us to sacrifice what he created just so a few people can make money,” he said. Vaughan’s religious beliefs aside, he said, studies have proven “the better you protect your environment, the stronger your economy is.” In 1995, as a Republican-controlled Congress attempted to roll back environmental regulations, Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor Stephen M. Meyer wrote that such actions were driven by “the widely held belief that three decades of creeping environmental controls had strangled the economy and undermined economic competitiveness.” To test that belief, Meyer did an economic analysis of the relationship between state environmentalism and economic growth from 1982 to 1992. He concluded that environmental regulatory costs are small in the context of other business costs, and that there may be a small – but growing – correlation between environmental efficiency and productive efficiency. In short, there was no evidence that economic performance is affected negatively by environmental regulations, and there is some evidence that it is affected positively. “The all-out assault on federal and state environmental statutes now under way is unwarranted and unwise,” Meyer wrote. “Gutting environmental statutes merely prolongs public subsidization of inefficient, uncompetitive businesses.” A report released this month by environmental and union groups, including the Sierra Club, Natural Resources Defense Council and Union of Concerned Scientists, found that a clean-energy policy would create 1.4 million new U.S. jobs and reduce the average household’s energy costs. In Alabama, the report says, the “smarter, cleaner” energy plan would create 15,000 more high-quality jobs than would be provided under current policies, and consumers would average a $1,650 annual savings on energy bills by 2025. The plan, which would speed the use of existing clean, energy-efficient technology, stimulates the development of renewable domestic energy sources. They also promote research on new technologies and would improve air quality and lessen the nation’s dependency on foreign oil, its authors say. Truth in labeling Environmental groups say Bush’s environmental-friendly names for policies are a reflection of public opinion. Unlike during the Reagan era, when some associated environmental regulation with big government that took rights from local governments and property owners, the public today is more educated about pollution and global warming. They’ve had toxic sites in their communities, and they want to protect the health of their children by protecting the air and water. “I think it’s a very telling thing,” Marks said of such labels as “Clear Skies” and “Healthy Forests.” “The Bush Administration realizes their policies would not be popular if people knew what they really, truly were doing. “A lot of people are fooled by friendly sounding names, and they don’t have the savvy to look behind the names and see what’s actually being done.” Marshall admits Reagan’s environmental policies “weren’t the greatest,” but he said they were nowhere near the levels of the Bush Administration. “He wasn’t on a rampage like Bush is,” Marshall said. By the time President George H.W. Bush was elected, it seemed the days of an anti-environmental movement coming from the White House were over. “The first Bush was better than Reagan on environmental issues, and he was a thousand times better than his son,” Marks said. Neil Milligan, chair of the Alabama chapter of the Sierra Club, believes that, given the opportunity, people would back an environmental initiative that means something. “Time after time, when people are given a rational poll, people do care about the environment,” Milligan said. “They make the connection between their children’s health and clean air and clean water.” Although she believes people care, Marks said the environment is
not the hot issue people will be voting on this year. Vaughan said air pollution policy should be a major issue for Alabamians because of the number of coal-fired power plants in the state and the health effects associated with them. A June U.S. Public Interest Research Group report, “Dirty Air, Dirty Power,” said power plant pollution annually causes 38,200 heart attacks and 23,600 premature deaths nationally. Clear Skies is the Bush Administration initiative that would mandate a 70 percent cut in air pollution from power plants over the next 15 years. “I think a 70 percent reduction in emissions is pretty good,” Connors said. “Extreme, but good.” Environmental groups, however, say those reductions would actually be less than the reductions already mandated in the Clean Air Act. For nitrogen oxide, which contributes to smog and is linked to asthma and lung disease, Clear Skies allows 68 percent more emissions than the Clean Air Act does, according to the Sierra Club. For sulfur dioxide, a major contributor to acid rain and soot, the Clean Air Act would reduce emissions more than twice as much as Clear Skies. The administration’s proposal for mercury allows five times more pollution than the Clean Air Act does, and the EPA says that goal may not be achievable until 2025. A recent EPA report found that pregnant women pass mercury on to their babies, causing mental retardation. The Heritage Foundation says calls to drastically reduce emissions would jeopardize the U.S. energy supply and national security. On its Web site, the foundation urges Congress to replace the Clean Air Act with a market-based approach that would allow the industry flexibility. Kerry has supported strict enforcement of the Clean Air Act and
has opposed the Bush administration’s efforts to weaken the laws. The administration’s changes to the “new source review” rule has caused controversy and EPA resignations. The new source review rule in the Clean Air Act said that if a company made significant modifications to an old plant that increased emissions – thus making it a new source of pollution – then it must install the state-of-the-art pollution controls required of new plants. In 1999, the Clinton administration filed a series of lawsuits accusing Southern Co. and other large utilities of violating new source review. The Bush administration then added a utility-friendly “clarification” to the rule that would require all new source review cases to be studied to see if they were still justified. Southern Co., which campaign finance reports show is a major contributor to Bush, had hired lobbyists to fight the rule. The rule change adopted by the administration used the language for which the company had lobbied. Four top-ranking EPA enforcement officials have left the agency citing the Bush administration’s new source review policies as the reason. Among them are the director for air enforcement, the associate director for air enforcement, director of regulator enforcement and the acting director of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. Southern Company officials have said they felt the new source review
lawsuits against them were unwarranted because the EPA at the time claimed
the company’s normal, routine maintenance practices were modifications. The Healthy Forests Initiative passed in December would, according to the Bush administration, reduce the threat of wildfires while upholding environmental standards and encouraging early public input during review and planning processes. Environmental groups say the Healthy Forests Initiative is a timber industry bill that will make it easier for companies to log big, fire-resistant trees by reducing environmental review, limiting citizen appeal and pressuring judges to quickly handle legal challenges to logging plans. The law exempts federal land-management agencies from complying with the Endangered Species Act, which requires the Fish and Wildlife Service to approve any action that could harm endangered plants or wildlife. Kerry voted against Healthy Forests. In July, the Bush administration proposed repealing the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which U.S. Public Interest Research Group calls one of the most important land-conservation initiatives in American history. The roadless rule, enacted in 2001, protects about 58.5 million acres of forest in 39 states from most logging, drilling, mining and road-building. Repealing the law would put 11,000 acres in Alabama’s national forests
at risk, according to Wild South. The Superfund trust fund, which gives the EPA funds to clean up toxic waste sites where no responsible party can be found, has been bankrupt for more than a year. The Bush administration does not favor collecting taxes from industry to support the fund. The Superfund law, passed in 1980, was created with industry taxes so that polluters, not taxpayers, would pay for cleanups. In 1995, the industry taxes expired. The Clinton administration attempted annually to renew the Superfund taxes, but the Bush administration has said it has no intention of asking Congress to renew them. Under the current administration, Superfund cleanups have slowed, and its $1.4 billion budget for such cleanups is the lowest since 1988, according to a July Sierra Club report. The Anniston PCBs site is not a Superfund site because cleanup is being paid for by Solutia; but the cleanup must follow the same standards and procedures as a Superfund site. Vaughan said regardless of whether a Bush or Kerry administrations oversees the duration of Anniston’s cleanup, it will be done. The difference, he said, will be in the attitude of the regulators. “Are they trying to do a good job for the public, or for the industry?” Vaughan said. “It isn’t a slam against EPA people, but if their hands are tied, there’s only so much they can do.” It’s the difference between an A-plus cleanup and a C-minus cleanup, he said. “Either way, it may pass; but which would you rather have?” Kerry supports renewing the corporate tax that would restore the
Superfund so that industry pays to clean up toxic-waste sites. Robert Hastings, director of the Alabama Natural Heritage Program, said the Bush administration has made exceptions to the Endangered Species Act for developments, and has attempted to prevent new species from being listed or prevent critical habitat from being designated. The Endangered Species Act, enacted under President Nixon in 1973, seeks to prevent animals and plants from being driven into extinction by development pressures, hunting or trafficking. It also authorizes the government to set up conservation programs to restore species that are at risk. According to a Washington Post report, the Bush administration has added an average of 9.5 species per year to the endangered list, compared with 65 per year under Clinton and 59 per year under President George H.W. Bush. The administration has designated as critical habitat only half the acreage federal biologists have recommended, and is transferring decision-making powers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to other agencies that have different priorities. Alabama, Hastings said, is fifth in the nation in its total number of species, but it also has the second-largest number that have become instinct. The state has the fourth-highest risk level for its threatened and endangered species. Hastings believes every species is worthy of protection simply because it exists, and that every species that goes extinct is a warning of things to come. “It’s sort of the canary-in-the-coal-mine situation,” he said. “If we endanger any species, we’re destroying a part of our habitat that needs to be protected.” Hurricane Ivan brought that message home to the owners of some beachfront
property. Referring to a Birmingham newspaper article, Hastings said developments
on the Fort Morgan peninsula were spared the damage that other beachfront
properties were dealt. They had built farther back from the surf to preserve
the habitat of an endangered beach mouse in the primary and secondary dunes. Marshall accuses Bush of deceiving the public by “putting polluters in charge of every agency.” He notes that Linda Fisher, deputy administrator of the EPA, has been a chief lobbyist and political fund-raiser for Monsanto Co., and Mark Rey, assistant secretary in the Department of Agriculture, was a lobbyist for the timber industry. Other appointments that have raised eyebrows among environmental groups include Steven Griles, a former lobbyist for the mining, oil and gas industries, who now has authority over national parks and monuments, national wildlife refuges and energy programs; and John Graham as director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the Office of Management and Budget. Graham was director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, a research group funded by corporations including Dow Chemical, DuPont, Monsanto, and General Electric, where he recalculated cost-benefit analyses to challenge federal regulations. The Bush-Cheney energy plan has received the most ridicule from environmental groups, who say it relies too heavily on increased oil, gas, coal and nuclear production and ignores more energy-efficient alternatives. The energy plan also has been criticized as heavily influenced by lobbyists from oil and gas, electricity, nuclear, coal and chemical companies. Vaughan said the Bush administration policy sacrifices long-term prosperity to pursue whatever makes a short-term profit for the companies that already have the power. The Alabama GOP’s Connors said the Bush administration has promoted research into clean technologies, such as clean coal. The League of Conservation Voters says Kerry has been a key player in fights against the administration’s attempts to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Kerry championed an energy plan that increases fuel economy to reduce the nation’s dependence on oil and supports the development of clean, energy-saving technologies and renewable energy. “This is a man who will stand up to the corporate interests and tell them to do what is right for their country, not their wallets,” said Deb Callahan, president of the League of Conservation Voters in a prepared statement. “This is a man who understands the 2004 election is about the world we pass on to our children.” |
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About Jessica Centers
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Jessica Centers, a University of Missouri graduate, covers business for The Anniston Star. |
| E-mail: |
jcenters@annistonstar.com |