 Sometimes, an article is so well written that it's pointless to try to summarize it. This week's lead in the New Yorker's Talk of the Town
is one such article. Writer Elizabeth Kolbert succinctly captures the
extent, the cynicism, and the atrocity of George Bush's war on the
environment in six short paragraphs. Read it here before it disappears into the PPV archives, buy a subscription, and/or read it below.
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Each year, the Detroit Edison plant in Monroe, Michigan,
burns roughly eight million tons of coal. That is enough to generate
electricity for three million homes and also to make the plant one of
the nation’s most extravagant polluters. In 2001, the last year for
which complete data are available, Monroe’s smokestacks emitted, among
other things: more than a hundred thousand tons of sulfur dioxide (the
principal pollutant in acid rain), nearly forty-six thousand tons of
nitrous oxide (the chief ingredient of smog), and seventeen and a half
million tons of carbon dioxide (the major culprit in global warming).
Widely accepted statistical models project that the plant will cause
some three hundred premature deaths annually, from ailments like lung
disease and stroke. All of which makes President Bush’s visit to Monroe
last week to tout his latest air-quality initiatives either horribly
ill-advised or, if you prefer, perversely appropriate.
Even in the catalogue of depredations that is the Bush Administration’s
environmental record—a list that includes the decision to reclassify
various forms of mining waste as “fill” so that it can be dumped in
valleys and streams; the attempt to open up millions of acres of public
lands (including the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) for oil
exploration; and the so-called Healthy Forests initiative, whose major
beneficiary is the logging industry—the President’s assault on the
Clean Air Act stands out. When Congress approved the act, back in 1970,
its goal was explicitly to prevent plants like Detroit Edison’s from
being built. Because of the difficulty—the expense, really—of
retrofitting existing plants, Congress granted them an exemption but
some years later stipulated that if changes were made that went beyond
“routine maintenance” the plants would have to be equipped with
up-to-date pollution controls. In resisting this requirement, known as
“new source review,” or N.S.R., plant operators have over the years
tried to define as “routine maintenance” projects that were essentially
rebuilding efforts. (In one spectacular example, the Tennessee Valley
Authority labelled as “routine maintenance” a project that required
constructing an entire miniature monorail system.)
Then, last New Year’s Eve, the Bush Administration proposed new rules
that broadened the definition of “routine maintenance” to allow
operators to make, in effect, any changes they want to their plants
without installing new pollution controls. These rules were finalized
just before Labor Day weekend, and, not coincidentally, before Governor
Mike Leavitt, of Utah, the President’s nominee to be the next E.P.A.
administrator, was forced to take a position on them. (At an E.P.A.
hearing in Salt Lake City this past spring, Utah’s air-quality director
labelled the Administration’s plans for N.S.R. “a disastrous approach
to managing air quality,” “a step backward,” and a “train wreck.”)
According to environmentalists, the new N.S.R. regulations would let
the Monroe plant emit about forty thousand additional tons of sulfur
dioxide a year.
Critics argue that the new rules represent yet another payback from the
Administration to a friendly industry—the Times called them a “giveaway
to Mr. Bush’s corporate allies.” Certainly the paper trail is
suggestive. In March, 2001, an official of the Southern Company, the
owner of twenty-three coal-fired power plants, a defendant in several
lawsuits that the Clinton Administration brought under the Clean Air
Act, and a major Republican donor, wrote to Vice-President Cheney’s
energy task force urging “reform” of the N.S.R. regulations. Precisely
such a “reform” effort was recommended in the task force’s final
report, and the changes made to the regulations last month can be
considered its fruits. (The Southern Company memo was made public
thanks to prolonged litigation by the Natural Resources Defense
Council.)
What the new N.S.R. rules finally reflect, though, even beyond undue
corporate influence, is the Bush Administration’s casual relationship
to cause and effect. You can say that your
three-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar tax cut is aimed at the middle
class, but when the top two-tenths of a per cent of the population
stands to gain more than the bottom seventy per cent it’s not the
middle class that’s going to benefit. Similarly, you can claim that tax
cuts pay for themselves, but, four hundred and eighty billion dollars’
worth of red ink later, there is, it would seem, something off about
the calculation. And you can argue that dismantling pollution laws will
produce cleaner air, but the fish in acidified lakes know (if that’s
the right word) different. The companion piece to the new N.S.R.
regulations is a package of bills that the President calls—in the
Orwellian spirit of Healthy Forests—his Clear Skies initiative. The
Administration likes to assert that the initiative, if approved, would
reduce power-plant emissions by seventy per cent by the year 2018. In
fact, the initiative weakens several laws that are already on the
books, and that would reduce the same pollutants by a greater amount in
a shorter period of time.
Last week, by way of defending the new N.S.R. regulations, Bush invoked
the progress that has been made since the Clean Air Act was passed.
“Our economy has grown one hundred and sixty-four per cent in three
decades,” he said. “That’s pretty good growth. And yet, according to a
report that the E.P.A. is releasing today, air pollution from six major
pollutants is down by forty-eight per cent during that period of time.”
Citing the success of the Clean Air Act in order to justify gutting it
makes, on the face of it, no sense whatsoever; if there’s any lesson
here, it’s that tough pollution standards work, and that they are
perfectly consistent with a robust economy. But the weakness of the
President’s arguments only makes the broader message of his trip to
Monroe that much plainer: nothing is going to stand in the way of the
Administration’s environmental 'program', least of all logic.
— Elizabeth Kolbert (The New Yorker, September 29, 2003)
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