Climate Change
With the Democrats now in control of Congress, the White House faces a new assault on its environmental policies
But Democrats do have doubts, even about Wehrum. His former ties to the energy industry have raised the hackles of some Democrats, who have forced him to hold his position on an interim basis by blocking his confirmation, which is now more unlikely than ever.
In coming months, global warming will dominate the headlines (box, Page 30), but Democratic committee chairs are moving on other areas as well. Three key environmental fights to watch:
Hot air. Air quality is the biggest and baddest battle. How to enforce regulations on old power plants is now being slugged out in federal courts. Last week's 9-to-0 Supreme Court verdict against Duke Energy's bid to lower emissions per megawatt hour but increase total hours operated-supported by the Bush administration-is buoying Democrats and some Republicans peeved about how the Clean Air Act is being enforced.
On Boxer's list of concerns: a change made by EPA officials that injects policymakers earlier in the process when determining National Ambient Air Quality Standards, the national rules on airborne pollutants like smog-causing ozone. The NAAQS process was unique in the EPA by allowing scientists, inside and outside the agency, to pore over data, exchange reports, and eventually arrive at a consensus range of acceptable pollution levels. Then, that range was sent to EPA policymakers, who settled on a number. Now the process is open to policymakers' influence early on. The EPA calls it a streamlining maneuver, but environmentalists and public health advocates are crying foul, noting that the rule change topped the wish list of the American Petroleum Institute.
That change comes on the heels of another controversial move by the EPA: It rejected scientists' recommendation to toughen standards for particulate matter, or soot, a NAAQS pollutant linked to serious heart and respiratory ailments. "For the first time ever," says Blake Early of the American Lung Association, "the EPA really ignored the health basis for setting the standard." The EPA argues the science didn't justify a tougher standard. Democrats are trying to find a way to challenge the EPA's alteration of the NAAQS process, while environmental groups and more than a dozen states are gearing up for a court fight over the soot standard.
Super unfunded? Cleanups of Superfund sites-locations contaminated by industrial pollutants-dropped when Bush came to office, from 87 completions in 2000 to 47 in 2001. The number hovered in the 40s until this year, when the EPA announced that it would complete just 24 cleanups. Dingell and other Democrats angry over the slowdown blame the GOP's 1995 refusal to reauthorize the Superfund tax, a general fee on polluting industries. Today, taxpayer dollars alone fund the program, at a fraction of its 1990s heydays. The administration argues that money isn't the problem: "What we have found is the sites of today are significantly more complex than they were yesterday," Johnson declared at a House hearing. But even the EPA's inspector general, the agency's internal watchdog, called money "an issue of primary and current concern in the Superfund program."
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