Holy Earth!

Good News and Bad News

What a difference a hundred days makes. After a hundred-plus days of Bush the Sequel; and in the wake of our new governor’s mighty struggles with the West Virginia legislature in the first legislative session of his term; and following the appeals court’s ruling on the Haden decision on mountaintop removal, the environmental picture is a lot clearer now. There’s both good news and bad.

The best news is that environmental issues, having been relegated to the back of the bus throughout last year’s election campaign, have taken a front seat again, thanks to the good sense of the American people. As they’ve indicated to any number of pollsters in recent months, the public cares more about clean air and water than the corporate enablers in the White House do.

The Bush team’s boneheaded decisions to break a campaign promise to restrict carbon dioxide from power plants; to destroy a pristine wilderness area with oil drilling in the Arctic; and especially, to scrap a long-considered decision to reduce the level of arsenic in drinking water, revealed Bush’s environmental Achilles heel when his approval ratings plummeted. The corporate media, ever sensitive to every quiver of opinion in their advertisers’ customer base, has been shocked ... shocked to discover that the candidate whose environmental record went virtually undiscussed during the campaign turned out to be just as polluter- friendly a president as he was as governor of Texas.

Some polls are showing that, by as much as a seven-to-one ratio, the American public believes that Bush is more interested in paying off corporate contributors with favorable policies than in protecting the environment. There are strong majorities concerned about global warming and supportive of the Kyoto treaty, and opposed to drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Nor do they want to drink arsenic.

Yet the indications are that Bush (whom Ralph Nader still accurately refers to as "a corporation disguised as a person") sees the people’s rejection of his environmental policies as a public relations and "communications" problem, rather than an indictment of any wrongheadedness on his part. The energy plan sketched out early this month by Vice President "Oilman Dick" Cheney (the administration’s actual CEO) gave a big thumbs-up to fossil fuels (and even resurrected nuclear power from the grave as an example of "safe" energy -- no greenhouse emissions!) while pooh-poohing conservation as "inadequate," and dismissing alternatives like solar, hydrogen and wind power as "years down the road."

Exactly how many years Cheney didn’t specify. Certainly more than it would have been if the administration’s first budget didn’t propose to cut the funding for alternative energy research in half, as it does. But in fact, the Republican party’s assault on alternative energy development and research -- as well as on energy conservation programs -- goes back to the early years of the Reagan administration. That’s why the GOP gets the lion’s share of campaign contributions from oil, coal and mining interests, the industries most threatened by "green" energy.

Here in West Virginia, the state that defied tradition and gave Bush the presidency, we know all about "threatened industries." They’re the ones who have been running this state and dictating government policy here for over a century. We got a good indication of how little changed that situation is -- despite the turnover in the governor’s mansion -- in the legislative session just passed. Despite some token nods to the environment from new Democratic governor Bob Wise, the scenario that played out looked not much different from "business-as-usual."

The clearest (or more precisely, dirtiest) example of the new boss being the same as the old boss was the anti-degradation bill, which ultimately passed in a form just shy of the "dirty water" bill that a coalition of industry groups proposed at the beginning of the session. Just about every step of the legislative process moved the state regulations, intended to implement the federal Clean Water Act here, farther away from the compromise legislation developed over a year of stakeholder meetings and public hearings, and farther away from meaningful protection of West Virginia’s rivers and streams.

There were a couple of turning points that significantly undercut environmentalists negotiating the terms of the bill. The change in administration at the federal level resulted in a change in the position of the Environmental Protection Agency with regard to state anti-degradation policy. The Bush EPA is more inclined to let states set their own policies on environmental regulation (with Texas as a prime example of the disasters that can result); and the federal pressure which had given environmentalists some extra leverage in their negotiations was let up toward the end of the session. Perhaps more significant, particularly as an indication of attitudes in the Wise administration, was the exclusion of environmentalists from a meeting in the last week of the legislative session between the state Division of Environmental Protection and industry lobbyists. It was at this secret meeting that the final compromises were made that further weakened the DEP’s already watered-down version of the bill. DEP chief Michael Callaghan apologized for the enviros’ exclusion with the excuse that he’s new to the job, and insisted that the governor had wanted them included at the meeting.

But frankly, this is a little hard to swallow, given the history of this legislation and the realities of politics in Charleston. At this point, it seems likely the anti-degradation bill will end up in court.

This is not a hopeful development, especially in the wake of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling with regard to the Haden decision on mountaintop removal. The court said that citizen lawsuits filed in federal court, challenging a state’s implementation of federal policies, violate the 11th Amendment of the US Constitution. Granted, this was a ruling issued by three of the most conservative judges on what is considered the most conservative appeals court in the nation. But this decision is already being invoked by the WVDEP to challenge lawsuits on other environmental issues.

And what is truly chilling is that the Bush administration is gearing up to pack the federal courts with judges even more right-wing and industry-oriented than the crop currently on the bench. When you consider that some of the most important environmental victories in recent years have been in the judicial system, "ominous" doesn’t seem too strong a description for this turn of events.

But yet ... when you rack up the good news/bad news ratio in this column, it may feel weighted toward the latter, in that our entire political system looks like it’s lining up against us. But on the question of the environment, the people are solidly on our side. So what can we do about it?

That will be the subject of next month’s column.