Friday, September 24, 2004
Abandoning the environment
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
±
Hill, of Blacksburg, retired from the University of Maine and is author of "Understanding Environmental Pollution," 2nd edition, Cambridge University Press, 2004.
In my textbook, "Understanding Environmental Pollution," I refer often to American environmental laws and to the regulations crafted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. These are imperfect but reflect the best judgments of those who developed them, and the laws are periodically updated (reauthorized). Many other countries look to them for guidance. Only as I write this do I realize how proud I am that in the United States so many legislators have cared about our environment.
That is now profoundly changing.
The Bush administration has tried to get Congress to pass legislation with names such as "Clear Skies" or the "Healthy Forests Initiative." As former Sen. George Mitchell said, these titles" actually are the opposite of what the bill will do."
For example, President Bush's Clear Skies bill would dismantle the Clean Air Act, the famous law protecting our atmosphere. Congress has not passed it, so the Bush administration has instead started dismantling the environmental regulations that resulted from earlier laws.
Sometimes, changing just one word can have astonishing consequences. Consider an Aug. 17 report by The Washington Post ("Appalachia Is Paying Price for White House Rule"). In the 1990s, coal companies in West Virginia, eastern Kentucky and Tennessee used so-called mountaintop removal to flatten hundreds of peaks as they recovered the coal within them. Because federal laws were poorly enforced, they dumped mining waste into the valleys below, burying 700 miles of mountain streams, and forcing the communities affected to relocate.
Lawsuits resulting from these practices were almost successful in stopping mountaintop removal. But then the Bush administration, responding to industry appeals, changed one word in the regulations governing such mining: The word "waste" became "fill." As a result, the coal industry is back to flattening mountain peaks. They now - legally - dumpfill into the valleys below.
Congress first passed the Clean Air Act in 1970. As described in "Changing All the Rules" (April 4, New York Times Magazine), this law "grandfathered" old coal-burning electric power plants. Only new plants would have to install modern air-pollution controls. This did not sufficiently improve air quality, so in 1977 Congress developed a new rule ("new source review"): When plants make substantial improvements to their equipment, they must also install up-to-date pollution-control equipment.
Some plants did install cleaner-burning technology in the 1980s and 1990s. Many others just ignored the rule; they called modernization of equipment "routine repairs and upgrades" and did not install pollution-control equipment. EPA said "this was the most significant noncompliance pattern [it had] ever found."
Finally, in the late 1990s, the courts acted in response to lawsuits. However, then - you guessed it - the Bush administration interfered. Last fall, Bush told people gathered before a Michigan electric-power plant: "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. We simplified the rules. We made them easy to understand. We trust the people in this plant to make the right decisions."
And now, 34 years after the passage of the first Clean Air Act, there is still no modern pollution control equipment in the most polluting of America's power plants.
In addition to other air pollutants, coal-burning power plants are the largest unregulated source of the toxic metal mercury - about 48 tons each year. Mercury contamination is the most common reason states issue advisories regarding eating fish caught in more than a third of America's lakes and nearly a fourth of its rivers. Nonetheless, the EPA (now controlled by a Bush appointee) recently moved to downgrade the hazardous classification of mercury and to give power plants 15 more years to implement controls. Overnight, mercury conveniently became less hazardous.
These examples are only three among many ways that the Bush administration is degrading environmental, health and safety regulations.
I am being careful not to write about Republicans vs. Democrats, because a clean environment is vital to us all. The EPA was established under the Republican administration of Richard Nixon, who also signed major pieces of environmental legislation, including the Clean Air Act. Republican President George H.W. Bush signed a major 1990 amendment to the act. But something totally different is occurring in the George W. Bush administration - an often reckless indifference to our environment.
Consider another country: China has beautiful environmental laws on the books but doesn't enforce them, leaving it among the most environmentally degraded countries on Earth. Must the United States also follow this path? China now realizes that environmental degradation is affecting its national security, including food security.
As former Sen. Gaylord Nelson once said of the United States: "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. All economic activity is dependent upon that environment with its underlying resource base."
