Climate Change
With the Democrats now in control of Congress, the White House faces a new assault on its environmental policies
Toward the end of his first 100 days in office, President George W. Bush suspended proposed Clinton administration regulations to clamp down on arsenic in drinking water, arguing that more study was needed. His action drew the ire of Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer. "I sent Arsenic and Old Lace over to the White House with a note that says, 'Don't you know arsenic kills? Watch the movie,'" she tells U.S. News. "I never got an answer." In the end, Bush allowed the Clinton rule to take effect. Democrats notched a win, but arsenic proved to be just the opening salvo in a red-faced battle over all things green.
Overshadowed by the high-stakes debates over Iraq and the war on terrorism, environmental policy has simmered as an ideological battleground for congressional Democrats and the Bush White House. Toting an M.B.A., Bush came to Washington determined to wed environmental policy with market-based reality. And for most of his time in office, the president clearly had the upper hand. Not only is he the chief executive of the Environmental Protection Agency, he was aided by a Republican-controlled Congress disinclined to raise questions. But as Boxer, who now wields the gavel of the Environment and Public Works Committee, recently declared: "Elections have consequences."
Suddenly empowered Democrats are vowing to push back. The environment committee just added a new legislative gunslinger, an attorney who specializes in clean-air regulation. Rep. John Dingell, Boxer's powerful counterpart in the House, is investigating the drop-off in progress cleaning up some of the worst environmental pollution cases, the so-called Superfund sites. And both have summoned the EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, to Capitol Hill to justify the agency's budget requests for the first time in the Bush administration.
The White House isn't blinking. The president issued a controversial executive order on January 18 that strengthened his hand, putting a presidential appointee in charge of rule making at the EPA (and other agencies) as well as decreeing that "market failure," or proof that a regulation is ineffective, will be the primary catalyst for stricter regulations-as opposed to other factors, such as new pollution-control technology. In short, the war over the EPA just escalated.
For observers, it's hard to imagine things getting much uglier. The arsenic flap raised tensions. So did Vice President Dick Cheney's early closed-door sessions with energy representatives as he composed a national energy policy rife with environmental implications. The affair affirmed some people's worst suspicions about the White House, although experts say industry advice on regulations is necessary. The problem is that "closed-door meetings favor perceptions that it's a one-sided debate," says James Boyd, an environmental policy expert at Resources for the Future, an independent research group in Washington.
Critics say it's more than perceptions. Eric Schaeffer, the EPA's former top cop, resigned in protest in 2002 after 12 years at the agency. In his parting letter, he wrote that the White House "seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce." He calls industry influence in the EPA today "totally over the top." William Wehrum, one of the EPA's top officials on air quality, counters that the agency, under the Bush administration, has enacted "two of the most health-protective clean-air rules we've ever adopted." One greatly curtails toxics from nonroad diesel-powered equipment; the other reduces power plant pollutants in some regions through a cap-and-trade program. Greens give the latter lukewarm reviews, faulting the program as slow and limited. "Those two rules alone reduce emissions by millions and millions of tons," Wehrum asserts. "There is no doubt we have made great progress."
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