Tuesday, March 09, 2004
By John Heilprin, Associated Press

WASHINGTON — On his Texas ranch, President Bush gets back to nature by cutting down cedar trees with a chain saw to give the native oaks more water and light. Visiting the Santa Monica Mountains, he shovels dirt to fix a trail, an image the White House keeps alive on one of its Web sites.

The hand tools he favors and the immediate results they produce reflect how in just three years Bush has reshaped the debate over environmental protections.

Making life easier for people now gets more priority than protecting an endangered salamander. Preventing a wildfire from engulfing a home trumps not cutting down a tree. Cheap electricity prevails over cleaner air, at least for the time being.

Bush sells his policies in the simplest of terms, like "healthy forests" and "clear skies."

Environmentalists call those labels deliberate misnomers, intended to mask an agenda far different and more complex. They say Bush wants nothing less than to restructure a society that he and those around him believe has become too soft, and a government that, though well-intentioned, helped make it that way by overpromising to protect people from risks in life.

"They are very careful to present themselves as being in the mode of solving the same problems that environmentalists want to solve," said Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director. "But when you look at what they do, and what they say in the fine print, they don't actually want to solve the same problems. They don't think they are problems."

Environmental groups have tried to call attention to some of the president's actions, but they acknowledge the environment is far down the list of voter concerns this election year.

The "healthy forests" law Congress passed last year is a prime example of how Bush reversed decades of government policy. He announced the initiative from a mountain peak blighted by wildfire in Oregon, a state he narrowly lost in the 2000 election and where battles over logging and water rights polarize voters.

"We've got to understand that it makes sense to clear brush," he said from a road dividing the Douglas firs that paralleled his black-and-white message. On one side, its trees unmanaged, was a bleak moonscape of dead trunks; the other side, thinned of undergrowth, held surviving trees and regrowth budding in the ash.

The new law sums up some core Bush beliefs: Nature requires intervention, market forces are better than regulations, and environmental protections are not possible without economic growth.

After wildfires consumed more than 3,600 homes in California alone last year, and 28 firefighters were killed battling the blazes, Congress agreed to let companies log large, commercially valuable trees in national forests in exchange for clearing smaller, more fire-prone trees and brush.

The contracts give timber companies incentive to invest in equipment while saving the government money on wildfire prevention. Critics say timber companies are unlikely stewards and that the government is paying off in trees an industry that supported Bush in 2000. But, looking at the jobs that will be generated, many Democrats abandoned environmentalists they had sided with in the past.

Bush and his aides say their view of nature as requiring upkeep is in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt.

"That's an important part about conservation. It's man's ability to make sure that God's beauty is maintained and preserved," Bush said last August.

Environmentalists would prefer he leave nature alone.

"There is a philosophy that everything is put on Earth for humanity's sake. And that's a very arrogant and somewhat selfish perspective," said William H. Meadows, president of The Wilderness Society. "Those of us who have worked around wildlands believe nature takes care of itself and, in fact, the biggest problem is where man has interfered."

When it looks like persuading Congress to change the law will fail, Bush uses executive orders, regulatory changes, and court positions to carry out his pledge "to protect both the claims of nature and the legal rights of private property owners."

Just as his predecessor, Democrat Bill Clinton, filled top environmental jobs with a cadre of environmental group activists, Bush plucked lawyers, lobbyists, and experts from environmentally regulated industry.

The result is a catalog of policies that reflect a sophisticated insiders' knowledge of government.

"He has figured out on environmental issues that you sometimes need to do what Clinton did, which is to use the regulatory agencies, rather than try to get something out of Congress — especially environment, where 60 votes can block the Senate," said William L. Kovacs, a vice president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

That the policy changes in most cases have conformed to ideas put forth by the industries that were among his biggest campaign contributors has fed an outrage and cynicism about his motives.

"Disconcerting to people in the environmental movement, pleasing to people who want to see their regulatory apparatus relaxed or rolled back somewhat" is how environmental historian John R. McNeill of Georgetown University characterizes the reaction.

McNeill views Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, a former chief executive of the Halliburton Co., as "almost reflexively hostile to environmental regulations," owing to their backgrounds in the oil industry.

"Many years hence, I think that Bush will be regarded as having swum against the tide in this respect. He represents, in some ways, the tail end of the fossil fuel era in human history," McNeill said. "And their efforts to make the world safe for that industry is the central motivation in their environmental policy, or so it appears."

Much of Bush's approach to air and water pollution, as well as global warming, is tailored to the continued use of coal — among the dirtiest of fuels but also the source for more than half the nation's electricity.

Within months of taking office, Bush withdrew from an international climate treaty negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, that required the United States and other industrial nations to reduce by 2012 greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming to levels below what they were in 1990.

Vice President Al Gore's signature in 1997 on the treaty, which caps carbon dioxide from power plants, was viewed by the coal industry as a declaration of war. Bush used the fallout to help take him to the White House, upsetting Gore in West Virginia, the first win there by a GOP presidential nominee in the overwhelmingly Democratic state since President Reagan's re-election in 1984.

Shortly after assuming office, Bush also reversed a 2000 campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, considered the biggest culprit for a warming effect.

Christie Whitman, the former New Jersey governor who headed the Environmental Protection Agency the first two years of Bush's presidency, recalled how Bush's turn on carbon dioxide occurred just after her meeting with other industrial nations' environmental chiefs in Trieste, Italy in March 2001.

"It wasn't an issue that we focused on until I went over to Trieste and talked about regulating carbon, where a whole lot of people got very upset," she said.

Bush then moved to assure coal's future by creating new incentives for utilities to keep old coal-burning power plants operating — without having to install more pollution controls — instead of replacing them with new plants fueled by cleaner but costlier natural gas.

The EPA issued the last of its new regulations in October, but a federal appeals court has temporarily blocked a key feature at the behest of states claiming the added pollution will endanger public health.

Citing language in the Clean Air Act calling for the "best available" technology in most cases, officials in the Clinton administration had used lawsuits to force several utilities to install hundreds of millions of dollars in new pollution-control equipment on older plants.

Bush's senior environmental advisers question whether "best available" technology always produces the best results.

"If you want the greatest environmental outcome the soonest, what typically happens is you end up picking the technology standard that's one step short of perfect," said James L. Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "The technology that's one step short of the best technology is the one that people will tend to be able to afford and will, in fact, buy."

Nonetheless, Bush espouses the view that new technology driven by marketplace demand rather than government requirements will be the means by which pollution is reduced in the future.

"In this century, the greatest environmental progress will come about not through endless lawsuits and command and control regulations, but through technology and innovation," he said in his State of the Union speech last year.

To stimulate demand, Bush wants to set broad, gradual, nationwide caps on both water and air pollutants that are below current levels. Polluters could then buy and sell among themselves the rights to pollute. Plants unable to reduce their pollution enough could buy allowances from other plants that cut more than is required.

That approach is based on the idea that innovators will find new, cheaper pollution-control methods as prices for pollution rights rise. Eventually, innovation and the market should lower pollution control costs to the point where it becomes cheaper for a company not to pollute.

For example, Bush's "clear skies" initiative would set annual nationwide caps to be met by 2018 on three major power plants' pollutants at well below current levels and then rely on pollution-trading schemes to reach them.

Mercury, a toxic element that contaminates waterways and goes up the food chain from fish to people, would be cut from 48 tons to 15 tons. Nitrogen oxide, a big factor in smog, would fall from 4 million to 1.7 millions tons, and sulfur dioxide, blamed for acid rain, would drop from 10 million to 3 million tons.

Environmentalists don't dispute those figures. But they say the reductions would be bigger and faster under current regulations or, in the case of mercury, under proposals initiated by Clinton. The EPA itself has separate sets of figures on the issue, one supporting environmentalists' claims and another supporting Bush's.

Proving the effectiveness of one policy over another is virtually impossible until years later. And even then, the numbers are subject to interpretation.

Most would argue, for instance, that the air and water are cleaner now than 25 years ago — under both Republicans and Democrats — thanks to the landmark antipollution laws of the 1970s.

However, EPA's biennial water quality surveys show a slight deterioration of lakes, rivers, and streams and a big increase in polluted coastal waters during the eight years of the Clinton administration. The first report covering the first two years of Bush's presidency is due out this fall.

Paul Portney, president of Resources for the Future, an independent think tank, says Bush is correct that the environment is unlikely to improve in the long run if people's material needs aren't being met. But he says it's misleading to argue that growth is a necessity for environmental protection.

"It is not clear a let-'er-rip approach to economic growth will necessarily mean a better environment," he said. "It got better because we put laws in place and enforced them."

Source: Associated Press