How Green Is The White House?

By Andrew Goldstein and Matthew Cooper

This year there is no peace on Earth Day. While the nation's attention has been focused on war in the Middle East, domestic battles still rage between those who want to cordon off America's wild places and those who want to tap the oil and gas reserves that lie beneath them. Environmental groups were stoked last week by a Senate vote that killed--at least for now--George W. Bush's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the greens are continuing to hammer Bush's environmental record. Protesters planned to don surgical masks and hound Bush on Earth Day, April 22, for his air-pollution policies. Friends of the Earth, which had refrained from criticizing the President since Sept. 11, ended its silence this month by taking out full-page newspaper ads charging that Bush has put the earth up for sale. Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, calls Bush "the worst President for the environment since the first Earth Day in 1970." Eric Schaeffer, who recently quit as chief of civil enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency because he believes the White House is undermining the agency's role as watchdog, describes the problem this way: "The EPA is in the backseat, or maybe even riding the bumper, and the energy industry is having a field day."

Bush blinked on the high-profile issue of Alaskan oil, choosing not to spend political capital to save a dying, unpopular bill. But he hasn't given up on the domestic exploration he thinks is needed to reduce American dependence on foreign oil. In recent months the Administration has approved plans to search for oil and gas at dozens of sites in the Lower 48 states. In January, it fast-tracked seismic exploration for oil and gas by 26-ton "thumper trucks" in Utah's Dome Plateau desert, a few miles from Arches National Park--until the Interior Department's appeals office temporarily halted the trucks, saying a more thorough assessment of environmental damage was needed. And now the Administration is considering a proposal to drill more than 50,000 methane-gas wells in Wyoming and Montana.

To rebut its critics, the Administration is emphasizing its policies to clean the air and slow global warming. Bush plans to spend Earth Day in the Adirondacks, trumpeting policies that don't fit the environmentalists' caricature of him--such as EPA's decision to make General Electric pay almost $500 million to clean up the Hudson River. His defenders argue that environmentalists tend to be a misanthropic lot. "For many people, you can never do enough," EPA boss Christie Whitman told TIME. Indeed, the League of Conservation Voters, which in February gave Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney a grade of D-, gave Bill Clinton and Al Gore a C+ after their first year in office. "The President's environmental agenda is ambitious," says James Connaughton, chair of Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, which serves as a broker among myriad environmental agencies. "But it's also realistic. We focus on what's doable."

So who's right? Is Bush a menace or a pragmatist? On some issues--air quality, easing national-park maintenance backlogs and farmland conservation--Bush's novel, market-driven approaches may prove efficient and effective in ways that some environmentalists seem unable to see. And there has been more continuity with the previous White House than either the Clinton-bashing Bush team or the Bush-hating environmentalists like to admit. EPA's Whitman, for instance, upheld the standard for arsenic in drinking water that the Clinton Administration adopted in its last hours in office (although she did so only after a public outcry). With less fanfare, she also let stand a little-known but sweeping Clinton-era regulation making diesel fuel considerably cleaner--a move likely to have far greater impact than the more talked-about arsenic decision. But almost every time preserving the environment runs headfirst into local opposition or concerns about energy or corporate interests, the environment tends to lose.

To understand what the Bush Administration is doing, it makes sense to compare Bush with his father. In 1990 President George H.W. Bush signed a sweeping expansion of the then 20-year-old Clean Air Act. By contrast, his son is trying not to extend existing policy or even curtail it but to remake it in fundamental ways. Bush is preternaturally opposed to anything regulatory--and existing clean-air law, he believes, saddles energy producers with too many rules and too little incentive to be clean. So in February Bush proposed new legislation to curtail power-plant pollution. His plan, which he dubs Clear Skies, ditches regulations that govern the major power-plant pollutants--mercury, sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides--in favor of a "cap and trade" system. The market-oriented idea is to set nationwide targets for emissions reductions that are mandatory, but let industry decide how to comply.

Bush may be on to something here. Enforcing existing clean-air law has become a legal nightmare. Industry has taken advantage of overlapping and unclear regulations to drag enforcement actions through the courts. The result is that it often takes years before utilities are forced to clean up their dirtiest plants. "Our proposal will guarantee 70% reductions of these pollutants," says Connaughton, "without having to resort to lawyers."

Sounds good. But the key to such a plan is where you set the pollution caps. Sources say the EPA sent a proposal to the White House with caps nearly twice as stringent as the ones included in Bush's Clear Skies plan. That's because any trading system that does away with existing regulations, as Clear Skies would, has potentially deadly side effects. It could undermine the EPA's long fight to bring many of the nation's oldest, dirtiest power plants into compliance with current law. And since the caps would be nationwide--letting a polluter in one state trade credits with a clean plant in another--localities that suffer from the dirtiest air could be left with no recourse. Environmentalists say the caps in Bush's plan are so weak that it would be better to stick with existing law. "Clear Skies is not what the EPA sent to the White House," an agency insider says. "It's what the White House sent to the EPA." The White House maintains that these problems will be fixed as the Clear Skies idea moves from broad proposal to detailed legislation.

The story is similar with global warming. On the same day Bush introduced Clear Skies, he unveiled a "new approach" on global warming that he said was a "cleaner and better path" than the Kyoto protocol, the climate-change plan endorsed by much of the world but condemned 95 to 0 by the U.S. Senate. But this new Bush plan too was watered down. In January, Bush's Cabinet-level group on global warming, led by National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, assembled policy options meant to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The White House rejected the toughest provisions--including, sources say, one requiring industry to report its carbon dioxide output--in favor of a program in which reporting and compliance would remain voluntary. Within minutes of Bush's Feb. 14 speech spelling out his plan, green groups dismissed it as a "Valentine's Day gift to corporate polluters."

Bush's environmental approach is also marked by a certain deference to local political interests. The Administration sees this as a virtue, and looks disdainfully on the way Clinton designated vast tracts of land as protected national monuments without giving much consideration to the wishes of locals. Interior Secretary Gale Norton dismissed this approach in an interview with TIME as merely "taking out a map and drawing something in Magic Marker and saying 'This is the area.'" It's no surprise, then, that the few environmental groups that back Bush policies tend to be based outside the Beltway. "We're very supportive," says John Sheehan of the Adirondack Council, a group that fights acid rain in New York State and backs Bush's Clear Skies plan because it believes pollutants can be reduced more effectively through emissions trading than through the existing regulatory morass.

Sometimes, though, catering to the locals begets charges of hypocrisy. When the Interior Department voiced support for a ban on off-road vehicles in Florida's Big Cypress Swamp--while simultaneously undercutting the Clinton restriction of snowmobiling in Yellowstone--critics said the President was playing politics, noting that his brother Jeb, the Governor of enviro-conscious Florida, is up for re-election. Norton says the two cases are "like apples and oranges": under any new scheme, snowmobiling in Yellowstone would be permitted only on snowed-over, paved roads, while swamp buggies in Big Cypress would leave a bigger eco-footprint. But listening to the locals isn't always the best thing for the national interest. For instance, last year the Bureau of Land Management rescinded some of its own power when it scaled back a Clinton-era regulation that would have given it more authority to crack down on the worst polluting mining companies.

To be fair, the Administration has upheld the vast majority of restrictions on public lands; earlier this month it did not kill a Clinton-era regulation governing the use of personal watercraft, like Jet Skis, in national parks, although to the consternation of some environmentalists it will review the issue, raising the specter of the craft's returning to the parks. But in general, the Interior Department has been much more inclined to allow the use of public lands by corporations and sportsmen. The Administration plans to allow off-road vehicles back on 50,000 acres of the Imperial Sand Dunes, near San Diego. And later this month the Administration is likely to issue a rule clearing legal hurdles for coal mining companies, especially in Appalachia, to dump waste into streams after literally ripping the tops off of mountains.

Trashing the environment is a sure vote loser, so the Administration frequently tries to paint itself green, and sometimes ends up saying one thing and doing another. At his confirmation hearings, Attorney General John Ashcroft pledged to enforce another Clinton-era policy--the "roadless rule," which protected 58.5 million acres of national forest land from development. At the very end of his term, Clinton passed the rule, leaving it for the Bush Administration to put into action. And Bush has kept it on the books. But when logging companies challenged the measure in court, the defense put up by Ashcroft's Justice Department was so ineffectual that the judge cited the Administration's arguments as supporting evidence when he put the roadless rule on hold. Environmentalists are appealing the decision, but so far, the Justice Department has offered them no help.

Vice President Cheney has indulged in the same kind of double-talk. When Cheney's energy plan came under fire from environmental groups, he insisted that the plan "includes 11 of the Sierra Club's 12 solutions" to the energy crunch. But even a loose reading of the plans shows at most three similarities. The Sierra Club, for example, wants the country to use nonhydro renewables such as wind and solar power for 20% of its energy by 2020. Cheney, by contrast, aims for only 2.8%. "If Bush really believes these plans are similar," says Sierra Club president Carl Pope, "then Arthur Andersen must be checking his math." The bottom line is that Cheney's plan calls for $33 billion in energy-industry subsidies, including $13 billion for the oil industry and $2 billion for coal. Documents released by the Energy Department reveal that environmental groups were given just 48 hours to make their case to Cheney's task force, while industry lobbyists were given dozens of meetings over several months.

There is still time for Bush to prove the greens wrong. The next showdown in the environmental wars will be over the regulation of old polluting power plants, a process that is oddly named the "new source review." The current rules stick the older plants with tough emissions guidelines if they modernize, creating a perverse incentive to leave dirty plants unchanged. Bush officials say that the new regulations are only a couple of months away, and they insist that the rules will be considerably more enviro-friendly than activists fear. If the White House doesn't make good on that promise, environmentalists will pounce on the rules the same way they blasted back Bush's attempt to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The fight never ends.