Crimes Against Nature (7 page)

After Bush took office, his newly minted EPA director, Christine Todd Whitman, put global warming at the top of her agenda. The White House had sold the former New Jersey governor to the American public as an environmental moderate, citing her participation in a lawsuit by several eastern states against an Ohio Valley power plant.

From my front-row seat across the Hudson River, she had not seemed very moderate. She had signed on to that power plant lawsuit reluctantly. In fact, as governor from 1993 to 2001, she was one of the nation’s leading advocates of pollution-based prosperity, cutting the state’s Department of Environmental Protection budget by 30 percent, firing virtually all of the agency’s enforcement attorneys, and relaxing enforcement of pollution laws in favor of “voluntary compliance” (which works about as well as “voluntary taxation”). She abolished New Jersey’s renowned environmental prosecutor’s office and dismantled some of the state’s most important environmental laws. She replaced the state’s public advocate with a business ombudsman and declared New Jersey “open for business.” To the public and Congress, however, Whitman looked moderate next to the Wise Use fanatics that were being handed the other top jobs. Her nomination passed the Senate 99–0.
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Still, Whitman was not part of the Texas clubhouse crowd that formed the president’s inner circle. As Ron Suskind reveals in his best-seller,
The Price of Loyalty,
only a favored few in the new administration had the ear of the president. A month into her appointment, Whitman was still trying to clarify the president’s views on U.S. environmental policy.
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As a result, Whitman was unsure what message she should bring to her first major international meeting, in Trieste, Italy, in early March 2001. The meeting was intended to prepare the eight leading industrialized nations for the official Kyoto Protocol meetings that summer. Despite Whitman’s abysmal environmental record, she recognized climate change as a genuine global crisis and, according to Suskind, she chose this issue to cultivate a reputation as an environmental steward.
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Whitman turned to Paul O’Neill at Treasury. Although energy and the environment aren’t Treasury’s principal baili-wicks, O’Neill could claim a credible expertise in global warming. He told me that in his former job as CEO of Alcoa, he had worked successfully to eliminate two potent greenhouse gases from the aluminum smelting process. “I once told my board, ‘We are environmentalists first and industrialists second,’ ” he said. “I believed this in my heart and I had a place to act on my beliefs.”
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In 1998, O’Neill had given a major speech on global warming to the aluminum industry that was later published as a booklet. Even then, he was frightened by the potential impacts of climate change. His overall message was that global warming, along with nuclear holocaust, must be taken more seriously than any other political issue. “If you get welfare reform wrong,” he said, “you get a second chance — civilization doesn’t go down the drain.”
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Try as they might, however, neither O’Neill nor Whitman could engage the president on the topic. While O’Neill had weekly meetings with the president — more access than any cabinet official save Donald Rumsfeld — he came to feel that the president didn’t listen or deliberate in an analytical way.
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According to Suskind, Whitman finally managed a meeting with Andrew Card and Condoleezza Rice to prepare a strategy on global warming. They agreed with her suggestions on what to say in Trieste: The White House was preparing to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. That would make it appear that the United States, which emits 25 percent of the world’s CO
₂
, was taking global warming seriously without committing the administration to the Kyoto Protocol. Whitman, confident that she had the White House’s blessing, stated this position on CNN’s
Crossfire
and in press conferences.
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Just days later, four right-wing Republicans with strong industry ties — Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Wise Use icon Larry Craig of Idaho, South Carolina’s Jesse Helms, and Pat Roberts of Kansas — sent a letter to the president, complaining about Whitman’s press appearances and demanding a “clarification of your administration’s policy on climate change.” O’Neill told Suskind that he was almost certain the senators’ letter had been prompted and possibly even written by Dick Cheney.
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Whitman, furious that she was being outmaneuvered, scrambled to schedule a meeting with the president. But the moment she arrived in the Oval Office, before she could even launch into her speech, Bush cut her off. “Christie, I’ve already made my decision.” He held up a letter — a letter both O’Neill and Whitman believe that Cheney wrote — all ready to send back to the Republican senators, and began reading from it.

The president would oppose Kyoto, the letter said, because it exempted 80 percent of the world, including China and India, and it was an “unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns.” As for his campaign promise to regulate CO
₂
in the United States, the letter explained that he had changed his mind. He argued that the Kyoto agreement would “cause serious harm to the U.S. economy,” and emphasized the importance of energy development.
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As soon as Bush had read the letter, he signaled for her to leave. In a few moments, it would be sent to the senators and released to the world. Whitman was stunned. She wandered into the anteroom outside the Oval Office, Suskind reports, where one of the secretaries was handing a document to Vice President Cheney. “Mr. Vice President,” the secretary said, “here’s the letter for Senator Hagel.” Dick Cheney picked up the letter, now freshly signed by the president, and brushed past Whitman on his way to Capitol Hill.
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As O’Neill related to Suskind, “It was a clean kill. She was running around the world, using her own hard-won, bipartisan credibility to add color and depth to his campaign pronouncements, and now she ended up looking like a fool.”
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By March 2001, the president had officially walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, and the United States had pulled out of all debate and negotiations with the rest of the world on global warming. O’Neill and Whitman were not the only ones in shock. Some of my colleagues at the NRDC had worked for more than a decade with Republican and Democratic administrations, international scientists and environmentalists, and world leaders from over 100 nations to iron out an agreement that would balance environmental and economic needs against the planet’s greatest crisis. Now the administration had not just changed the game plan — it had walked off the field. Its only proposal for dealing with global warming was denial. And its sole rationale appeared to be a desire to placate the coal and power industries and the Wise Use antiregulatory fanatics.

After the president’s letter, the press wrote Whitman’s political obituary, proclaiming her irrelevant. Some articles called for her resignation. The NRDC’s political expert Greg Wetstone commented that Whitman “suffered the most immediate and visible loss of clout ever for a cabinet officer.”
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Even her fellow cabinet members openly joked about her diminished stature. “That’s what Colin Powell had been calling me at cabinet meetings, the wind dummy,” Whitman explained to a journalist. “It’s a military term for when you are over the landing zone and you don’t know what the winds are. You push the dummy out the door and see what happens to it.”
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Whitman was demoralized but she wasn’t about to step down. The Kyoto incident taught her a tough lesson: Industry was calling the shots, and if she didn’t want to look like a feeble scold at a frat house orgy, she needed to toe the industry line. Within a week of the CO
₂
fiasco, she found an opportunity to genuflect to industry and its Wise Use allies.

On March 20, 2001, Whitman quietly announced that the EPA would suspend a Clinton-era rule reducing the allowable amount of arsenic in public water supplies. Bush officials complained that the arsenic rule was a draconian standard that was hastily devised at the last minute by Clinton’s people. While it’s true that the arsenic rule wasn’t finalized until the early days of January 2001, the rule was the result of years of wrangling between scientists, health experts, industry, and the public.

Several studies, including six by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), indicate that arsenic is a potent carcinogen. Bush’s problem, of course, is that much of the arsenic in our drinking water is the result of mining activities. And in 2000 the mining industry had shoveled $5.6 million into Republican Party campaign chests, with Bush receiving the lion’s share of it.
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He had also narrowly lost New Mexico, a big mining state, and the White House wanted to curry favor with the powerful mining interests there.

Whitman, aware that arsenic isn’t exactly a crowd pleaser, faxed her press release to the New Mexico media and almost no one else. “They were hoping to avoid publicity,” says Erik Olson, a lead attorney for the NRDC’s public health program. The ploy backfired. Olson learned of the decision and immediately called the
New York Times.
“It’s a huge deal,” Olson told the
Times.
“This decision will force millions of Americans to continue to drink arsenic-laced water. A lot of people are going to die from arsenic-related cancers and other diseases if they weaken or delay this thing.” The story made the front page of the national edition and kicked off a flurry of press and public outrage.
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Everyone from Leno and Letterman to a legion of cartoonists had fodder for the joke of the week. A cartoon by Mike Luckovich in the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
had Bush telling Cheney, “I want arsenic in the water classified as a vegetable.”
Doonesbury
had an empty cowboy hat explaining why the White House suspended the arsenic rules. “Fuzzy science, that’s why. We need good strong science, good science is where our wings take dreams.” Another panel had the Stetson explaining, “So, until we’ve really studied the polluted drinking water, I favor a voluntary approach.” Question: “To cleaning it up?” Stetson: “No, to drinking it.”

Meanwhile, 57,000 citizens and public interest organizations flooded the EPA and the White House with comments opposing the rollback of the arsenic rule.
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Fearing voter backlash in 2002, congressional Republicans were trampling one another to distance themselves from the president. The Republican-led House voted 218 to 189 in late July to block Bush and Whitman’s initiative.
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“They were getting calls in their own districts, and nobody really wanted to drink arsenic,” said Olson.
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Then came the biggest blow of all: Citing, among other things, Bush’s environmental policies, Senator James Jeffords of Vermont defected from the Republican Party, tipping the balance of power in the Senate to the Democrats. In his subsequent book
The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush,
the president’s speechwriter David Frum called the arsenic decision “the worst blooper of the first year.”
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Bush later publicly acknowledged that the rollback was a political mistake. Whitman called it “a dumb decision — politically, really dumb.”
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But Whitman justified the arsenic rollback, saying she wanted to verify the science behind Clinton’s standard. She promised she would follow the science and quickly announced that she would convene two economic reviews of the standard, and yet another scientific study by the NAS (the seventh!).
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The economic studies verified that Clinton’s rule was fiscally sound. The NAS study was released on the evening of September 10. It was apparently not at all what Whitman had hoped: The NAS found that the EPA had
underestimated
the cancer risks of arsenic by about tenfold.
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Whitman, who had pledged that her EPA would follow the science, was now faced with the prospect of dropping the standards even lower than the Clinton administration had suggested.

The next morning, the NAS study was a top story in the
Washington Post.
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The
New York Times
ran a 1,000-word article.
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Olson was on his way to a D.C. press conference, happily considering the irony that the NRDC might get a lower arsenic standard from Bush than from Clinton.

Just before he arrived, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon. The press conference was canceled, Washington shut down that day, and a new era in American history began. On Halloween 2001, Whitman quietly closed the comment period on arsenic before it was completed and announced that the EPA would not change the Clinton standard after all.
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“The issue had become an albatross for Bush and 9/11 gave them a way to get out,” Olson recalls. “I don’t think anyone ever read the new NAS study. Everybody just forgot about it.”
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The EPA gave industry five years to implement the ruling. The new standard will not take effect until 2006.
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Along with Bush’s refusal to regulate CO
₂
, arsenic was a misstep that telegraphed where the administration was headed on the environment. Bush and his posse “came in with guns blazing, saying they wanted to repeal regulations, but they learned some hard political lessons quickly,” says Reese Rushing, a policy analyst for OMB Watch.
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They realized that the public cares deeply about environmental issues and that any open attempt to dismantle those protections would cause a backlash, particularly among women, a key voter group.