The US manufacturing sector has lost over 5.1 million jobs in the last 10 years. Output and investment per GDP has fallen consistently and imports have risen sharply. (See charts below) This is not the time to implement risky unproven climate policy. The US economy cannot afford to lose any more jobs or shutdown facilities. Approximately 40,000 manufacturing plants have closed during the seven years ending in 2008. We have lost eleven industries that we were once dominant since the late 1990s. By late 2008, the US trade deficit with China alone was running at close to $1 billion per day, amounting to more than $90 per month or more than $1100 per year for every American.

That’s from one of the strangest pieces of testimony you’re ever going to see — by Paul Cicio, Executive Director, Industrial Energy Consumers of America.

Cicio was the GOP witness at the landmark hearings for the Senate climate and clean energy jobs bill  today.  He seemed to think that a strong argument against the clean energy bill was that the U.S. manufacturing sector has been devastated by eight years of conservative rule.  I have argued many times that conservative do-nothing energy and economic policies led to sharp increases in energy costs (see “Senate GOP propose 25% ‘Do-Nothing’ energy tax on Americans“) and sharp decreases in US competitiveness (see “Invented here, sold there”).

But Cicio has the most (unintentionally) damning set of slides I’ve ever seen, a few of which I’m going to reproduce here since I’m sure progressives will want to use them in explaining why we must never go back to the Bush-Cheney policies.  The figure above shows how conservative policies have killed manufacturing jobs.   And lest you think that it is purely a coincidence that the manufacturing sector has been slammed by Bush-Cheney, Cicio provides this jaw-dropping figure which goes back another decade:

Invesment in industrial equipment recovered under the Clinton administration and stayed high for most of it, but simply collapsed under the Bush-Cheney administration and stayed low.  Looks like those tax cuts for the rich didn’t do very much other than enrich the rich.  The data in green is from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, but that amusing “trend line” is apparently from the Industrial Energy Consumers of America.

Here’s one more figure:

Yes, imports of manufactured goods soared, especially after 2003.  Again, thank you Bush-Cheney and a conservative Congress.

Sen. Boxer herself turned Cicio’s argument on its head and said that she agreed completely with his historical analysis, but disagreed completely with his conclusion.  The answer was not to continue these devastating do-nothing conservative policies, but to pass the clean energy jobs bill.

Related Links:

Merkley wants Senate jobs bill to help finance building efficiency retrofits

Clean energy opportunities

USGBC jobs finds green building to support millions of U.S.jobs

Eight years ago today, two planes flew into the World Trade Center, another crashed into the Pentagon, and a fourth landed in a Pennsylvania field. The raw power of that day came to be symbolized by a date composed of three numbers. Three numbers that evoked the shock of being attacked, the horror of the sounds and images on our television sets, and the heroism of so many men and women. Three numbers that framed the events of the last decade and seemed like they would define my generation.

But eight years ago, many in my generation couldn't vote. We didn't choose the President, his wars, or his policies. In fact, young Americans have largely rejected the politics of fear and division that dominated those formative years of our political consciousness -- voting 2 to 1 in favor of Barack Obama. Today we remember the victims and honor our heroes, but we also have a new President, new crises, and three new numbers: 3-5-0. 350.

350 is the most important number in the world. 350 parts per million (ppm) is the safe upper limit of carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere. It's the number agreed upon by many of the world's leading scientists and recently endorsed by 80 countries, but it's not the number in the current version of the climate and energy bill under debate in Congress or the target that seems likely to be set at the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen this December.

350 is where we need to be "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted," as James Hansen, NASA's top climate scientist so dryly puts it. The bad news is that we're already at 390 ppm and climbing. So, is it too late?

Is it too late for the obese man to quit junk food and start exercising? Is it too late for him to lower his cholesterol and prevent a heart attack? Absolutely not. But until he changes his lifestyle, he remains at a higher risk. And until we change our lifestyle, the Earth will remain in the danger zone. There is still time to bring carbon dioxide levels back down, but it's going to take a major transformation in how we think and act. Getting back to 350 means developing a thousand different solutions. It means building wind farms, not coal plants. And it requires that world leaders recognize our interdependence and work together like never before.

Eight years ago, I felt a swirl of emotions. I was scared for my family and friends in New York City, where I was born and raised. I was angry at the people who had done this to us. I was hurting for the victims and their families, especially those from Hook and Ladder Company 25, the firehouse where I used to play when I was a child. And I radiated with the patriotism that swept America, reveling in our shared sense of purpose. That night, I gathered with friends in my Yale dorm to mourn together and mark the immensity of the day. We knew our world had fundamentally changed and that that day marked a turning point for our nation.

Six weeks from today, on October 24, I hope for a similar turning point. The largest ever global grassroots action on climate change will take place, calling on world leaders to make 350 ppm the target in the global climate treaty to be negotiated in Copenhagen. I'll be in Flagstaff, AZ, where I live, spreading the word about 350 and joining with over 1,400 groups in 110 countries (so far), from the Great Barrier Reef to the Taj Mahal, who are organizing on behalf of our planet. Anyone can join a group or start their own by going to 350.org.

While October 24 is a day of hope, America is still being threatened by a politics of fear, hatred, and division. Witness Glenn Beck's vicious smear campaign that led to the resignation of Van Jones, my friend and one of the most visionary leaders in the nation. We need fewer Glenn Becks and more Van Joneses. People, ideas, and events that inspire hope, justice, and collective action.

That's why I love 350. 350 is a bright line to which we must return. It doesn't belong to one group or one nation -- it belongs to all of us alive today and those yet to be born.

350 slices through all the confusion and misinformation around the climate crisis. It's about being prepared. Eight years ago, we were caught off guard. This time there is no secret memo. Everything we need to know is for all to see, out in the open.

I can't wait to live in a post-350 world where the disastrous affects of climate change have been averted, and a thriving clean energy economy unites the planet. I hope some day my now one-and-a-half year old daughter looks back on my work with pride, and that she and her generation are up to the finishing the job. This is an intergenerational challenge and the stakes couldn't be higher.

This entry is cross-posted at The Huffington Post.

Related Links:

How to make 1.7 million new clean energy jobs permanent

India aims for 20 gigawatts solar by 2022

New Energy Finance: Solar power 50% cheaper by year end

Are we there yet?

EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson has decided she'll take another look at monitoring of car battery recyclers, concrete kilns and power plants that spew dangerous lead emissions. She did not say she'd toughen up the monitoring, but clean air advocates are hopeful.

"It's a step in the right direction for public health, and children's health in particular," said Avi Kar, staff attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco. His group and several others petitioned the agency in January to reconsider -- and tighten -- proposed monitoring requirements on lead emitting facilities. On Thursday, Jackson granted their petition, and said a new monitoring proposal would be ready later this summer.

"We do take it as a good sign that they're willing to reconsider," said Kar in an interview.

In an online blog post, he was more effusive.

The granting of NRDC's petition for reconsideration, as it's known in bureaucratic parlance, is one step in a still lengthy process. There will be a proposal, public comment, and, finally, a possible amendment to a huge update of the entire lead regulation. This is the federal government, after all.

"This is just reconsideration, this is just a first step," said EPA spokeswoman Cathy Milbourn. "NRDC and others asked us to reconsider it, and our answer is yes, we will reconsider it. ... We can't 'just change the rule' without going through notice-and-comment rulemaking. We can't change any final rule without giving the public opportunity to comment on potential changes."

Many in the environmental movement were astonished last fall when President Bush's EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, took his own scientists' advice over the complaints of industry, and lowered the legally allowable amounts of lead in the air by more than ten times. Lead battery smelters had charged over to the White House a few weeks earlier, as a court deadline neared to update the regulation. It was the first time lead limits had been touched since 1978.

The astonishment turned to familiar groans from environmentalists when it turned out White House budget officials had intervened at the eleventh hour to eliminate required monitoring for facilities emitting less than a ton of lead annually. Being exposed to the heavy metal in even small amounts can damage children's brain development, heart and kidney functions, among other maladies. Johnson's own staff had recommended that facilities spewing out half a ton be monitored in geographic areas where emissions exceed the new limits.

The night before Johnson's announcement, a senior EPA staffer e-mailed a White House Office of Management and Budget staff person saying a technical, rather than a policy explanation, was needed for why there had been a last minute, sharp reduction in monitoring. That explanation was never received, and Johnson followed the White House recommendations in his announcement the next day.

EPA staff reiterated in a conversation this week that proper monitoring is a critical part of protecting public health.

Any proposal by Jackson and her staff will have to be vetted by the White House budget office again, said Milbourn in an e-mail.

"Yes, whatever we propose will have to go back to OMB," she wrote.

A battery council representative did not return a call for comment Thursday. Industry representatives have argued in the past that they are among the world's best recyclers, and that the new regulations could drive their business overseas to places with far more lax health and environmental regulations.

Related Links:

BPA Babies and Cash Registers

Ask Umbra on ditching dirty things

Toward a medically defensible energy policy

Honda's FCX Clarity hydrogen fuel cell car: yours for only $100,000!There are only three sure things in life -- death, taxes, and you're never going to buy a hydrogen fuel cell car.  Congress should stop wasting your money pursuing Bush's phony dream.

The fundamental problem with hydrogen as a transport fuel is one that no amount of federal R&D can solve:  The absurdly expensive infrastructure will never be built.

Why would the oil companies build an infrastructure which would, at best, compete with their existing product, or, more likely, cause them to lose their entire investment?  That leaves governments.  But who has the kind of money needed for an infrastructure that -- if built around natural gas, which currently produces 95 percent of hydrogen in this country -- won't even save significant greenhouse gases compared to the best hybrids today running on gasoline?

But a renewable-energy-based hydrogen fueling system capable of handling even half the cars and light trucks on the road would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.  And it would have a cost of avoided carbon dioxide of more than $600 a metric ton, which is more than a factor of ten higher than most other strategies being considered today (see "Hydrogen fuel cell cars are a dead end from a technological, practical, and climate perspective").

Even California -- the big U.S. champion of hydrogen cars in the last decade -- has all but abandoned efforts to build a major infrastructure (see "California Hydrogen Highway R.I.P.").  Thus, the absurdly expensive hydrogen cars themselves will never be more than a niche product and thus never achieve the economies of scale needed come close to being affordable.

Energy Secretary Chu wisely slashed the hydrogen budget back in May:

"We asked ourselves, ‘Is it likely in the next 10 or 15, 20 years that we will convert to a hydrogen car economy?' The answer, we felt, was ‘no,'" Chu said in a briefing today. He cited several barriers, including infrastructure, development of long-lasting portable fuel cells and other problems.

Duh.

But now, as Jim Motavalli reports in the NYT's Wheels blog, Congress is putting that money back:

Congress appears close to restoring the $100 million in funding for hydrogen research that Steven Chu, the energy secretary, had cut from his budget in May.

The House of Representatives voted 320-97 last Friday to approve $26.9 billion for the Energy Department, including $153 million for hydrogen and fuel cells in the Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy program, plus $40.45 million for hydrogen from coal.

The Senate Appropriations Committee was even more bullish on hydrogen, approving $190 million for the program. Reconciliation of the two budget figures (assuming the full Senate leaves the $190 million intact) could result in a final amount greater than the $168 million for fuel cells in the 2009 Energy Department budget.

Can anyone stop the madness?

The Bush Administration spent some $2 billion pushing the hydrogen fuel-cell car dream.  Global car makers probably matched that.

Yet, the most advanced vehicle on the road, Honda's new FCX Clarity, which the company optimistically calls "the world's first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production" costs "several hundred thousand dollars each to produce," although Honda's president Takeo Fukui "said that should drop below $100,000 in less than a decade as production volumes increase" (see "The Last Car You Would Ever Buy - Literally").

But how will production volumes increase if the cars are unaffordable and there's no place to fuel them?!?

No wonder Dan Neil, the L.A. Times car guy, wrote "Honda's striking, amazing hydrogen fuel-cell vehicle may be the most expensive, advanced and impractical car ever built" (see L.A. Times: "Hydrogen fuel-cell technology won't work in cars." Duh.).

Hydrogen advocate Greg Blencoe -- who constantly disputes my analysis and who will owe me $1000 in a few years (see "The big hydrogen bet - your chance to get in on the action") -- brags on his website that the negative reaction people have to the true statement, "Large-scale hydrogen fueling stations cost $5 million each" becomes "much more positive" once they learn it means "Large-scale hydrogen fueling stations would cost $2500 per hydrogen car."

Makes me feel warm and fuzzy inside -- especially when you consider that we have a mere 200 million cars and light trucks on the road.  But in fact, that "low" cost per H2 car requires the people who put up the money for those stations to assume a high level of vehicle penetration when they build it, which would be a staggering risk for them to take.  That's why most vehicle stations are much smaller (though still wildly underutilized), and much more expensive per vehicle.

 Indeed, UCLA bragged in April that it is spending $2.1 million (42% of $5 million) on a fueling station with 14% (!) of  the hydrogen output (see "One more reason you'll be driving electric vehicles and plugs in soon - not hydrogen fuel cell cars") -- so it will have a per vehicle cost of $7500.   And it makes hydrogen from natural gas.  Are you much more positive yet?

This whole notion is so absurd that even former independent advocates of the idea now openly mock it.  I'm going to reprint one from a year ago (see"The car of the perpetual future" - The Economist agrees with Climate Progress on hydrogen).

When the world's uber-centrist magazine of choice runs a headline almost identical to mine (see "The Last Car You Would Ever Buy - Literally"), you know it's all over. Especially when one of that magazine's leading energy columnists, Vijay Vaitheeswaran, used to sing that technology's praises (here). Here's the bottom line:

But the promise of hydrogen-powered personal transport seems as elusive as ever. The non-emergence of hydrogen cars over the past decade is particularly notable since hydrogen power has been a darling of governments worldwide, which have spent billions of dollars in subsidies and incentives to make hydrogen cars a reality....

Here's the fatal flaw in the H2 economy:

...the logistical, technological and economic problems facing hydrogen fuel-cell cars mean that they are very unlikely to make it to market any time soon. One thing holding back hydrogen vehicles is a chicken-and-egg problem: why build cars if there is nowhere to fill them up, or hydrogen filling-stations if there are no cars to use them? Just around the corner, honest.

But wait, here's another fatal flaw in the H2 economy:

How much more investment is needed to make mass-produced hydrogen cars a reality? According to a recent study by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, sponsored by America's Department of Energy (DoE), public funding of $10 billion would be required to get 2m hydrogen fuel-cell cars onto America's roads by 2025, rising to $45 billion for 10m cars. A report issued by America's National Academy of Sciences in July was less optimistic, estimating that $55 billion of government investment would be needed to put just 2m hydrogen cars on the road by 2023. And both reports assume that the technology will get a lot cheaper: the Oak Ridge study assumes it will be possible to make fuel-cell vehicle systems in quantity at a cost of $45 per kilowatt of output by 2010, and $30 per kilowatt by 2015.

This is ambitious. Although fuel-cell costs have dropped by 65% since 2002, according to the CaFCP, today's fuel cells cost around $107 per kilowatt. Are sudden cost reductions around the corner? Not according to one of the pioneers of fuel-cell technology, Ballard Power Systems, a Canadian supplier of fuel-cell systems to a range of carmakers. In November 2007 it sold its automotive fuel-cell division to Ford and Daimler after a decade of losses, citing the "realities of the high cost and long timeline for automotive fuel-cell commercialisation" for its exit from the business.

Actually, the CaFCP's cost claim is laughable. You can't buy a warranteeable fuel cell for a car for $107 per kw today. Try more than 10 times that, over $1000/kw. The CaFCP number is a projection based on the assumption of mass production, hundreds of thousands of units a year, with no explanation of how you're ever going to get to those sales levels for cars whose best current generation models cost hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece.

As I wrote in Technology Review, one of the only car companies in the world still seriously pushing hydrogen cars, Honda, hopes that in a decade or so, production volume would drop the car cost to "below $100,000." As if that price would make it attractive to anybody but the super-rich. But in any case, why would production volumes increase for a car that delivers no real value to the consumer and has no significant societal benefit to motivate government support? Answer: They wouldn't, so prices may never drop below $100,000. That's why Ballard left the business.

Hydrogen cars have no future, or, as The Economist's headline puts it, hydrogen cars, like fusion energy, have the same future they always had.

And here's another bunch of fatal flaws:

Even if the network of hydrogen filling-stations can be built, and the technological advances needed to reduce the cost of fuel-cell vehicles can be made, a huge problem still remains: the production and delivery of hydrogen in large quantities. The Oak Ridge study says the two most promising ways to produce hydrogen cheaply in the near term are to make it from natural gas (through a process called "steam reforming") at the filling stations themselves, or to make it from gas derived from biomass or coal at large, centralised plants, and then deliver it by lorry or pipeline.

Hydrogen sceptics point out not only the large capital costs associated with the production, transportation and storage of hydrogen, but also the availability of far more viable alternatives. Hydrogen is "just about the worst possible vehicle fuel", says Robert Zubrin, a rocket scientist and the author of Energy Victory, a book on the post-petroleum future. Even if the requisite gains in fuel-cell technology are achieved, he says, the fuel-cell cars of the future should run instead on methanol, which has a higher energy-density than hydrogen and can be stored and transported much more easily.

Furthermore, steam reformation of natural gas is far from a zero-emissions solution, undermining the whole rationale of hydrogen cars in the first place. According to America's National Renewable Energy Laboratory, producing a kilogram of hydrogen by steam reformation generates emissions equivalent to 11.9kg of CO2. Given that the Chevy Equinox fuel-cell vehicle can travel 39 miles on a kilogram of hydrogen, and the FCX Clarity can travel 68 miles, powering these cars using hydrogen produced by steam reformation would result in emissions of 305 and 175 grams of CO2 per mile respectively. By comparison, today's petrol-electric Toyota Prius hybrid produces tailpipe emissions of around 167 grams per mile, and many small petrol cars achieve similar results.

Seriously -- how many fatal flaws does the technology need? Hydrogen cars were apparently killed in the drawing room by the knife, revolver, lead pipe, rope and candlestick.

The magazine includes as an afterthought yet another major fatal flaw, one that I have written a lot about. Some say "the solution to large-scale hydrogen production lies in using renewable electricity to extract hydrogen from water via electrolysis" or using "nuclear power. But it would surely be easier simply to use this energy to charge the batteries of all-electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles." Easier, hundreds of billions of dollars cheaper, and you don't throw away 75 percent of the valuable carbon free electricity in the process!

Some people cling to the notion that hydrogen can be reanimated like Frankenstein's monster (see here). But the Economist article ends more realistically:

In other words, claims that hydrogen will be the automotive fuel of the future are as true today as they ever have been.

Kudos to Chu and Obama for trying to kill this monster.  Jeers to Congress for flushing taxpayer money down the toilet in a weak imitation of Bush-Cheney technology strategy.

Related Links:

GOP witness details harsh impact Bush-Cheney policies on jobs

Our old electric grid is no match for our new green energy plans

Climate and hydrogen car advocate gets almost everything wrong

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Approaching Copenhagen with a Portfolio of Domestic Commitments

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Climate Denial Crock of the Week: The big mist take

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

The Bush administration was hostile to government regulation and protective of business interests. That was their stated ideology on the campaign trail, and when elected, the president saw to it that his government acted on it. Fine. We get it.

But the Bush environmental record is not entirely explicable through ideology. Some of the stuff Rove & Co. did was simply perverse, with little policy or philosophical rationale beyond, "hey, let's f*ck with the dirty hippies!" They did worse things, sure, but these are the ones that seemed to call for psychological diagnosis rather than political explanation. We call these episodes of sheer dickishness "WTF? moments." Here are a few:

Snowmobiles in Yellowstone

Purely on political grounds, getting more gas-burning, exhaust-spewing snowmobiles inside Yellowstone National Park is not an obvious priority. More than 80 percent of public commenters preferred to keep them out, and it's not like the snowmobile lobby wields the power to make or break a presidency. (Is there even a snowmobile lobby, outside Alaska "First Dude" Todd Palin?) But the Bushies really, reeeally wanted more machines in that patch of nature, so they tried again and again. And again. And again. And then one more time. WTF?

Mocking auto efficiency

It's something of a marvel that Bush's EPA once released a TV public service announcement encouraging home energy conservation. (Only you can reduce energy demand -- because we won't!) Perhaps to atone for this vaguely hippie gesture, the PSA poked fun at some dope trying to improve his car's fuel efficiency. We say again: mocked someone trying to improve fuel efficiency. Where was YouTube when we needed it? Also: WTF?

Testing pesticides on human subjects

The chemical industry has developed sophisticated methods of testing potentially toxic chemicals on animals, which, you know, isn't that cool, but it's not as uncool as testing them on human beings. But hey, sometimes you want to act like a villain in a dystopian sci-fi movie. Clinton banned the creepy and unnecessary practice of using data from pesticide health studies on human subjects. That act of sanity couldn't be tolerated, and sure enough, Bush promised the pesticide industry he would overturn the ban. We wouldn't make that up. (The plan ended when Senate Democrats raised a stink.)

Cocaine-Fueled Sex Romp

No administration is entirely free of corruption, and generally the public won't get too exercised about it if it's done in moderation. To pick an example out of a hat, it would be nice if federal regulators didn't offer favors to oil companies in exchange for cocaine and sex. Too much to ask? Apparently so, at least for the Interior Department's Minerals and Management Service, which issues offshore drilling leases and collects royalties from energy companies. An Inspector General's report on MMS cited a "culture of promiscuity" at the agency, where regulators regularly accepted blow, pot, illegal gifts, and sex from representatives of Big Oil. We knew the oil companies were screwing us. We just didn't know they were, you know, screwing us.

Formaldehyde trailers for Katrina victims

So there was that whole Katrina thing. Major U.S. city underwater, epic failure of federal response, international shame, so forth. Was that enough? Not for the Bushies. The clusterf*ck hat trick wasn't complete until the very people victimized by the hurricane got cloistered in tiny, toxic trailers! Nine months after FEMA's original bungle, reports surfaced that its evacuee trailers contained formaldehyde levels high enough to cause coughs, nosebleeds, burning eyes and sinus infections. In response to the reports, the agency prohibited its employees from entering trailers in storage -- before it got around to testing the trailers evacuees were actually living in.

According to a congressional investigation, FEMA "ignored, hid and manipulated government research" on the dangers of formaldehyde to skirt the issue. The agency promised never again to use the contaminated trailers ... er, unless they come in handy. Three years later, an in-depth medical study found that children who moved into the trailers have alarming rates of mental health problems and sickness, including respiratory ailments linked to formaldehyde. WTF, Brownie?

Withholding benefits from nuclear workers sickened by radiation

The Bushistas are obsessed with nukes -- using nuclear weapons, letting more countries get nuclear weapons, building more nuclear power plants, opening up massive nuclear waste dumps ... pretty much anything radioactive gets the thumbs up. You'd think as part of that obsession they'd have done whatever they could to clean up the messes left behind by previous nuclear adventures -- messes like, say, a group of workers sickened by radiation from working around nukes during the Cold War. Indeed, congressional Republicans urged them to do just that, even appropriated money. But ... no. That would be too, oh, decent. Instead, Bush's Energy Department has paid out only $700,000 of the $95 million it has received since the program was created, to only 31 of the roughly 25,000 claims filed. Denying already-appropriated money to radiation-sickened workers. Really?

Submit your own favorite WTF moments in the comments section below.

Related Links:

GOP witness details harsh impact Bush-Cheney policies on jobs

A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

EPA to review 2008 Bush action on lead emissions

 
For Americans passionate about environmental issues, the last eight years often felt like a horror movie -- all screams and monsters. So we could use a little laughter to change the mood.

Now that we've survived the reign of 43, Grist presents the Bush administration's cast of enviro villains as characters of Fox's hit cartoon comedy, The Simpsons:

Here's hoping that, in some not-too-distant future, we can laugh at Bush's zany antics rather than suffering the economy he mismanaged or floating our lifeboats on the rising oceans he refused to deal with. When "Pull a Dubya" catches on as a catchphrase, we'll know we're in the clear.

Images courtesy Fox.

Related Links:

GOP witness details harsh impact Bush-Cheney policies on jobs

A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

EPA to review 2008 Bush action on lead emissions

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Prologue to Copenhagen

Vinod Khosla Nonesense

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Related Links:

E.U. pushes China further after pledge to slow carbon intensity

Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Just after George W. Bush took office, two memos circulated among his top administrators that set the stage for what the president, during his campaign, promoted as a new era of environmental policy. On Bush's first day in office, January 20, 2001, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card sent a memo to all cabinet members directing them to ice more than 50 regulations (many of them several years in the making) that had been approved toward the end of the Clinton administration. The rules were not to be enacted unless the White House Office of Management and Budget could prove that their benefits justified their costs to the U.S. economy.

"I'll protect the environment -- I swear!"

Photo: White House.

The frozen rules included more than a dozen significant environmental ones. They called for less arsenic in drinking water, a ban on snowmobiles in national parks, controls for raw sewage overflow, stronger energy-efficiency standards, and protections against commercial logging, mining, and drilling on national lands. Of the environmental regulations that came under scrutiny, only half have since made it past the cost-benefit analysis and into the Federal Register.

In February, a second memo was sent to Bush by then-Secretary of the Treasury (and former CEO of Alcoa Steel) Paul O'Neill exhorting the president to take a strong stand on global warming. "Energy and the environment are in many ways the same problem," wrote O'Neill. "These subjects must be considered together." He urged Bush to become the first president to confirm publicly "the linkage between such [greenhouse] gasses and global climate change, [to] designate a targeted limit of greenhouse gas concentrations ... [and to] fashion a set of world interventions."

Not surprisingly, the memo wasn't long for the Bush world. (Nor was its author, who resigned from the administration last December after criticism of his allegedly ineffective fiscal policies.) The memo "was as good as thrown in the trash," said Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University and formerly a longtime scientist at Environmental Defense, who was recommended in O'Neill's memo as a Bush advisor. The following month, on March 13, 2001, President Bush reversed a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions, saying in a private letter that doing so would be too costly. And just days thereafter, he rejected the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, a move that provoked more international contempt for the U.S. than any other action Bush took during his first year in office.

In the two-plus years since those memos were released, Bush has come under fire both domestically and internationally for environmental policies that curry favor with U.S. industrial interests at the expense of the natural world. Even Bush's bosom buddy Tony Blair, prime minister of Britain, has challenged the president for his stance on Kyoto, equating the impact of climate change to that of weapons of mass destruction. "There will be no genuine security if the planet is ravaged," Blair cautioned last February at an international conference on the environment.

Bush stumps for his Healthy Forests initiative.

Photo: White House.

Domestically, Democrats and moderate Republicans alike are accusing Bush of having the worst environmental record in history -- of surreptitiously tearing down the regulatory framework that yielded vast improvements in the nation's air and water quality and land conservation over the last 30 years. For example, an ongoing study by the Natural Resources Defense Council entitled "The Bush Record" chronicles hundreds of efforts to weaken environmental regulations -- a tally more extensive than that of any administration (including the famously anti-environmental Reagan White House) since the U.S. EPA was established in 1971.

Even more surprising is the fact that while critics decry these changes as rollbacks, the Bush administration defends them as forward-looking: "This term 'rollbacks' is either a gross misrepresentation or grossly misinformed," said James Connaughton, director of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, in an interview. "You will see significant steps forward in all areas of environmental policy under this administration."

Despite the Lucky-Charms language ("Clear Skies," "Healthy Forests") with which the Bush administration refers to its environmental initiatives, and despite the war, terrorism, and tax-cut concerns that have been distracting the press from less emotionally immediate matters, the public outrage over Bush's environmental record is beginning to intensify as the 2004 elections draw near. Attacks on the Bush administration's environmental record can be found in recent issues of publications ranging from Mother Jones to Vanity Fair (not exactly what you'd think of as a lefty political rag). "Every administration rewards its friends," says the Vanity Fair expose, "but never has there been a wholesale giveaway of government agencies to the very industries they're meant to oversee."

So it's no surprise that Republican strategists are getting antsy. As far back as last November, Frank Luntz warned the GOP in a memo obtained by the New York Times that the growing criticism of the administration's environmental plan "is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general -- and President Bush in particular -- are most vulnerable." Luntz outlined a detailed strategy to avoid further communication imbroglios on environmental issues, suggesting, for instance, that Republicans use the term "climate change" instead of "global warming," because "while global warming has catastrophic connotations attached to it, climate change suggests a more controllable and less emotional challenge."

Sunday in the park with George -- and Gale, too.

Photo: White House.

The Bush administration has since made every effort to finesse its public-relations strategy, but none whatsoever to change its approach to environmental policies themselves. In fact, Bush's environmental officials say outright that they ardently believe in staying their environmental course because it's simply the right thing to do. Connaughton and others, including Interior Secretary Gale Norton, have publicly argued that the time has come for a paradigm shift in America's overall environmental strategy -- a shift predicated on their belief in a symbiosis between economic and environmental policies: "Strong economic growth and strong environmental performance go hand in hand," Connaughton has said at more than a few press conferences. "You can't have the kind of environmental improvements Americans demand without a growing economy to pay for them."

Connaughton, Norton, and others insist that the administration isn't just tearing down a time-honored regulatory framework; it's setting the stage for a new system entirely -- one that does not control and punish industry, but excites and motivates the market and rewards local communities that voluntarily adopt environmental protections. "The Bush administration is mobilizing a shift beyond the command-and-control regulations of the past to establish the groundwork for a New Environmentalism," said Connaughton.

Norton echoed these themes at a recent press conference: "At the heart of the New Environmentalism," she said, "is a recognition that ... we have in many ways reached the limits of what we can do through government regulation and mandates."

In theory, much of this "New Environmentalism" talk is compelling, particularly at a time when industry dinosaurs like Ford and General Motors are designing hybrid-engine SUVs, and Shell and BP are becoming top producers of solar panels and wind turbines. Indeed, from a business standpoint, times have changed decidedly for the better since the first command-and-control environmental regulations were enacted three decades ago. It stands to reason, then, that policies should be modernized, too.

But when you sit down and connect the dots between each one of the Bush administration's proposed regulatory changes, the final picture is not a bold vision for the future, but an aggressive and potentially calamitous scheme to return to the past -- to a time before environmental protections existed at all.

Whig deal: President William Henry Harrison.

Photo: White House.

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, sees nothing "new" about the Bush administration's environmentalism. "It's a very old set of ideas," said Pope. "It goes all the way back to the Whigs, who believed the primary function of the government is to help business. These are the same ideas behind [former Vice President] Dan Quayle's Competitiveness Council and the 'wise use' movement of the Reagan years."

Other environmentalists see Bush's agenda as grounded not so much in ideology as in political pragmatism: "It's payback to their corporate donors, plain and simple," said Maria Weidner, a senior researcher at Earthjustice. The Bush-Cheney campaign and the Republican National Committee received $44.1 million dollars in contributions from mining, timber, energy, chemical, and other manufacturing industries for the 2000-2002 election cycles, according to an Earthjustice report entitled "Paybacks" -- more donations from those sectors than any presidential campaign in history. In January 2000, Newsweek reported that it had obtained a fundraising memo from the Bush 2000 campaign directing its big contributors to incorporate special industry tracking codes into fundraising efforts -- an unprecedented system to ensure that each industry would be duly credited for its contributions.

Stephen Griles.

Photo: White House.

But the Bush administration's love affair with industry runs deeper than tracking numbers. The president, vice president, and almost every key political appointee in administration agencies have been snatched directly from the energy, automobile, and timber industries. A few examples: Andrew Card was a chief lobbyist for the American Automobile Manufacturers Association and later for GM. Jeffrey Holmstead, director of the air division at the EPA, formerly worked as a lawyer for the utility industry, including many of the biggest polluters. Mark Rey, undersecretary for natural resources and environment at the Department of Agriculture (where he oversees the activities of the U.S. Forest Service), spent nearly 20 years working for various timber trade associations. The biggest prize for industry bias may go to Stephen Griles, number two at the Interior Department and former energy lobbyist: During two years of government service, he has continued to be paid $284,000 a year by his former lobbying firm, National Environmental Strategies, where he represented mining companies.

In the cold-comfort department, it seems that not all these industry imports are calling the shots. According to a former EPA insider who served as a high-level attorney under Christie Whitman, the EPA administrator until her resignation early this summer, many of them are just there to take orders. "The White House has never been more interventionist in rule-making. The decisions come from the offices of Dick Cheney, of Karl Rove, of John Graham at the OMB. Whitman did not take one step to counteract this avalanche from the White House to gut the rules, gut the enforcement cases, and give the coal and oil industries the day." (John Graham, now head of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs*, is the founding director of the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis, a research center heavily funded by industry.)

Meanwhile, it seems likely that the same high-level image-makers who had Bush somersaulting onto an aircraft carrier on its way home from the Persian Gulf have also been meticulously controlling the public image of Bush's environmental agenda. For example, the administration has developed strategic timing for its news releases, according to Robert Perks, coauthor of NRDC's "Bush Record." "Without fail, they announce their most controversial rollbacks just before the holidays, when most reporters are unavailable, or on Friday evenings at 5:00, after the network news has aired and everybody's heading home. We call it the Friday Night Follies."

Old King Coal has a friend in the White House.

Photo: USFWS.

On Friday, Nov. 15, 2002, at about 5 p.m., for instance, the administration announced a controversial decision to exempt oil and gas drilling on national lands from environmental reviews if the Interior Department deemed the likely impact "environmentally insignificant." On the evening of Friday, Nov. 22, 2002, it announced a proposal to eliminate a key Clean Air Act program requiring power plants to adopt clean technologies when expanding their facilities. (An updated version of that proposal became official late last month.) On the evening of Wednesday, Nov. 27, 2002, as the Thanksgiving holiday began, the Bush administration announced major changes to the Forest Service's 22-year-old environmental review procedure.

And it goes on: Just before Christmas, on Friday, Dec. 20, 2002, at 5 p.m., the EPA announced changes to the 30-year-old Clean Water Act, weakening federal supervision in favor of voluntary state-level programs. And on the evening of Dec. 23, 2002, the Bush administration announced plans to allow public lands administrators to turn hiking trails, century-old wagon tracks, and animal paths into roads for industrial activities. On New Year's Eve, 2002, the Bush administration tried to change the requirements of the dolphin-safe tuna logo, proposing that the logo now apply to tuna caught by encircling dolphins with nets (a change that would allow Mexico and Ecuador to ship tuna to the United States). And the pattern has continued through 2003.

That the Bush administration deliberately conceals such changes from the media is not something even former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer denied. In a June 2002 Washington Post article, Fleischer was quoted as saying that manipulating the timing of environmental stories is a perfectly reasonable measure of self-protection: "These stories quickly become shoehorned into a 'Bush versus the environmentalists' formula ... [ignoring] the substantive reasons why the president did it."

From logging to oil exploration, fuel-efficiency standards to wetlands protections, pollution controls to endangered species regulations, the breadth of regulatory changes attempted by the Bush administration in its two and a half years in office is staggering -- but it's only part of the problem. What most concerns Carol Browner, EPA administrator during the Clinton administration, about the Bush environmental strategy is not so much what's happening to the regulations themselves but what's happening to the underlying decision-making process. "They're reaching in and fiddling with the A-B-C-D-E-F of the regulatory process that gets you to cleaner air and cleaner water, and that will be very hard to undo when they're gone," Browner said. "It could take 10 years or more to rehabilitate all those details."

Consider, says Browner, the pollution-measurement process: A seemingly small detail such as the amount of time during which power-plant pollution levels are evaluated can have tremendous implications for environmental policy. While pollution levels were previously assessed over at least a 24-hour period, the Bush administration attempted to shorten the evaluation time to span only a handful of hours, which means the pollution can be measured during non-peak hours, when the plant is not producing much electricity.

The cost-benefit analysis is another tricky issue. What's the dollar value of a smog-free view of the Grand Canyon, or a hike in Yosemite, or the existence of a certain species? What's the dollar value of a human life? The OMB sparked a scientific and ethical controversy when it suggested that the life of a senior citizen -- someone 70 years or older -- was worth only three-fifths as much as a younger person's life. The OMB ordered the EPA to apply the discounted value of 63 percent for elderly Americans when assessing whether to impose new restrictions on polluting industries -- an apparent attempt to relieve industry of the cost of complying with pollution requirements. (This was one of the rare initiatives that drew so much public outcry that the OMB abandoned it.)

Wesley Warren, senior fellow for environmental economics at NRDC and a former OMB official during the Clinton years, says that in the Bush administration's cost-benefit analysis for the "roadless rule," which protected roadless national-forest lands from development, the OMB calculated that the benefits of protecting land would amount to a grand total of $219,000 -- the sum the government would save every year by not having to maintain forest roads after they were built. The rule's calculated cost, however, was roughly $180 million in potential jobs and economic activity. The analysis completely disregarded the value of recreation and cultural and aesthetic values.

Another major concern is the administration's attempt to cut environmental enforcement. Under Bush, the number of EPA personnel assigned to conduct inspections and enforce environmental laws has fallen to the lowest levels since the agency was established. Overall, enforcement staff has decreased by more than 12 percent -- from 528 to 464 -- since the president took office.

The former EPA insider who served under Whitman described an alarming occasion on which she tried to address the lapse in enforcement acts with the administrator: "I told her: We've got a real problem. Performance is going to be down, enforcement actions are going to be down because people don't think you're serious about [enforcing the law]. So she goes, 'Well I'll say something.' So she goes in -- now remember, we have millions of regulated entities out there and hundreds of major, major corporations that we're supposed to be regulating -- so she walks into a room of senior managers at EPA and says, 'I want you to know that I really do care about enforcement. We want people to comply voluntarily, but if they don't, I don't have a problem with choosing one of them and bopping them on the nose.'

"You could have heard a pin drop," the insider continued. "I almost fell over. 'Bop them on the nose?' Like she does with her cocker spaniels? You can imagine. It was all I could do to contain myself before I got out of the room."

The great irony is that the Bush administration does, on some level, have a sound basis for arguing on behalf of a new, more market-savvy era of environmental regulations. "A sea change of innovation and environmentally strategic thinking is taking place in America," said Connaughton, echoing an optimism that has often been expressed by environmentalists. "We are in a time when companies are rapidly creating new technologies to solve environmental problems. They are outstripping government in terms of the speed by which they deal with these issues. This was not happening 30 years ago. Our policies need to tap into this trend."

Former EPA Administrator Browner agrees: "It's true that old-style regulatory programs are largely about doing the bare minimum: A standard is set and companies move to meet the standard and stop there. During the Clinton administrations, we were well aware that the old-style programs don't encourage companies and communities to go further." In fact, Browner not only realized that it was high time to introduce market- and incentive-based policies, but she also began to implement many such programs that the Bush administration is now calling its own.

Clear Skies or bold-faced lies?

Photo: White House.

So it's not that the theories behind the Bush administration's rollbacks and market-based strategies are in themselves completely untenable. Take, for instance, the crown jewel of the White House's "new environmentalism" approach, its Clear Skies proposal, which seeks to cut overall power-plant emission levels by establishing a market in which utilities can buy and sell pollution credits. The so-called "cap-and-trade" approach, which builds upon a successful sulfur-dioxide emissions-trading program implemented in the 1990s, would establish a limit on how much of a certain pollutant a power plant could emit; utilities that performed better than the requirements could sell their credits to utilities that couldn't meet the requirements.

More than a few environmentalists say that this kind of market-based strategy has tremendous potential. "What makes a cap-and-trade program revolutionary is that it creates a system in which the polluters pay the innovators," said Fred Krupp, president of Environmental Defense, the most prominent U.S. environmental group to throw its weight behind market-based solutions. "It puts the profit motive on the side of innovating on behalf of the environment. It's like putting traffic lights into the economy and having them turn green in the direction that we need to go -- toward cleaner and ever more efficient technologies -- instead of having a system that only blinks red."

But Krupp fears that, in practice, Bush will give a bad name to this mechanism because the president has set forth inadequate goals that would ultimately do less to protect the environment than the legislation already on the books. A cap-and-trade program is only as strong as its cap. And in the long run, the Clean Skies cap would be less stringent than the current standard. Furthermore, market-based mechanisms aren't the solution for every pollutant. Theoretically, they'd be great for non-toxic pollutants like carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide that diffuse into the air without affecting the neighborhoods where they are emitted. But other emissions, such as mercury and volatile organic compounds, can seriously harm the air and water in the areas immediately surrounding the polluting facility. In this case, if dirty plants in Chicago bought credits from clean plants in Maryland instead of cleaning up and meeting the requirement, the Chicago community would get a bum deal.

Likewise, the idea of a voluntary cap-and-trade system, such as Bush has proposed for carbon emissions, is bogus. "We all know that history shows us that it's a combination of carrot and stick that works in any policy, no matter what the issue," said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who has taken the lead on proposing a mandatory carbon-trading system. "You've got to have incentives toward good behavior and you've got to have a stick toward those that refuse to behave. That's just the way that human nature and businesses and policies work."

We may find in the future that the Bush administration's dogged emphasis on these kinds of incentive-based strategies -- many of which were also strongly supported in the Clinton administration -- was on track. But far more obvious will be the bait-and-switch tactics, the slick PR machinations, and the evidence that the Bush administration's promising "new environmentalism" theories were executed in ways that in fact undermined the progress of environmental protection.

Editor's note: In an effort to chronicle this pivotal moment in the history of environmental policy and help turn the tides in the direction of sensible progress, Grist Magazine is introducing "Muckraker," a regular column dedicated to tracking day-to-day, behind-the-scenes environmental politics, inside the Beltway and beyond. The column will expose unnoticed political maneuvering (from un-enforced legislation to ruinous judicial rulings) and the activities of little-known power brokers (from EPA deputies to congressional committee chairs). It will shine a klieg light into the dark rooms where loopholes are created and exploited and ecological protections are ignored or written out of existence. Muckraker will also give credit where credit is due: When and if our political officials implement effective environmental policies or make a good argument for modernizing them, you'll read about it here.

The mission of this column -- as of the entire magazine -- is to arm our readers with information about what's happening to the environment and thereby encourage its protection. Look for Muckraker in this spot every week. (And if you've got a tip about environmental goings-on, don't just sit on it; drop an email to .)

*[Correction, 03 Oct 2003: This article originally stated that John Graham was head of the Office of Management and Budget. In fact, he is head of the OMB's Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs.]

Related Links:

GOP witness details harsh impact Bush-Cheney policies on jobs

A New Number For a New Era: From 9/11 to 350

EPA to review 2008 Bush action on lead emissions