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Millions of Americans, however, still breathe unhealthy air and
drink unsafe water. Technology to reduce polluting emissions is
widely available and cost-effective, as are ways to reduce our dependence
on polluting fuels. But the Bush administration has ignored these
solutions and put polluter profit ahead of public health. Here are
ten of the most egregious examples:
1. Three Times More Mercury. Ten More Years.
Despite findings by the EPA and the Food and Drug Administration
that mercury threatens the health of more Americans than previously
believed, Bush’s EPA Administrator Mike Leavitt announced
a plan that would allow three times more mercury in our air and
water than simply enforcing the Clean Air Act as currently written.
And it would give utilities 10 years more to reach these standards.
The EPA itself says we can eliminate 90 percent of the mercury from
our air by 2008 by enforcing the Clean Air Act and using existing
technologies.1 But instead of reducing
allowable mercury emissions to 5 tons before the end of the decade,
the Bush plan calls for emission levels of 15 tons by 2018.
The largest source of mercury in the United States is coal-fired
electric power plants. Mercury is emitted from smokestacks, and
eventually reaches waterways where fish ingest it and pass it on
to people who eat the fish.
The EPA estimates that one in six women of childbearing age has
mercury levels in her blood high enough to put her babies at risk.
That means as many as 630,000 infants are born in the U.S. every
year with unsafe mercury levels—double what was previously
estimated.2
"The EPA’s own numbers say the Clean Air Act alone will
reduce power plant emissions nearly twice as fast as Bush’s
new proposal," said Time magazine (February 25, 2002).
sierraclub.org/mercury
2. Polluter Pays? Not Anymore.
"You make a mess, you clean it up." That’s what
the Superfund law intended when President Carter signed it in 1980
to clean up the nation’s worst toxic messes. But the current
Bush administration has broken with more than two decades of policy
and rejected the principle of "polluter pays." In 1995,
taxpayers paid 18 percent of the cost of cleaning up abandoned toxic
waste sites. In 2004, taxpayers will foot the entire bill.3
Under the Bush administration, Superfund site cleanups have fallen
to fewer than 50 sites a year compared with more than 80 sites per
year during the 1990s.4 One in four
Americans lives within a short bicycle ride of a Superfund site.5
sierraclub.org/toxics
3. More Dirty Air
The nation’s oldest and dirtiest power plants were exempted
from meeting pollution standards set by the Clean Air Act, but they
were not allowed to expand without installing modern anti-pollution
technologies like scrubbers. The Bush administration has all but
eliminated this provision, called "New Source Review,"
allowing these polluting power plants to emit even more soot, lead,
mercury, and other contaminants. This dismantling of the Clean Air
Act affects 17,000 factories and power plants found in every state
in the nation.6 Old facilities emit
up to ten times more pollution than modern ones.
New Bush administration rules would allow almost unlimited changes
to be classified by plant operators as "routine maintenance"—a
utility can spend up to 20 percent of the plant’s cost on
expansion without triggering the requirements of New Source Review.
So the operators of an aging $1 billion power plant can add approximately
$200 million worth of new generating equipment without having to
install modern pollution controls. The previous level recommended
by the EPA was 0.75 percent.7
The American Lung Association calls these rule changes, "the
most harmful and unlawful air-pollution initiative ever undertaken
by the federal government."8
In The New York Times magazine story, "Changing All the Rules,"
on April 4, 2004, Bruce Barcott writes, "The administration’s
real problem with the new-source review program wasn’t that
it didn’t work. The problem was that it was about to work
all too well."
sierraclub.org/cleanair
4. Fire Up the Chainsaws
The Bush administration’s so-called "Healthy Forests
Initiatve," which was signed into law in 2003, promises to
protect communities from forest fires, but is really a gift to the
logging industry, allowing the harvesting of old-growth trees deep
in forests, far from affected communities. Forest Service scientists
have shown that the best way to protect communities is by clearing
the wooded areas located within 500 yards of homes.
The Bush administration bill calls for the thinning of 190 million
acres of forest land. But according to USA Today, "there were
only about 1.9 million acres of private and federal forestland—1
percent of the Bush administration’s estimate—that are
both at high risk of fire and close enough to communities to ignite
homes." (July 2, 2003)
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution said, "President Bush's so-called
‘Healthy Forests Initiative’ is anything but. The measure—purportedly
designed to prevent destructive Western wildfires—does little
to accomplish that task. Its real goal is to please timber companies
by increasing the amount of logging in federal forests, including
the southern Appalachians." (October 20, 2003)
sierraclub.org/forests
5. The Energy Plan: Dig, Drill, & Destroy
Hatched from the secret Cheney energy task force meetings, the Bush
administration’s energy bill calls for subsidies and tax credits
to the coal, oil, and nuclear industries totalling in the tens of
billions of dollars, but does nothing to reduce our dependence on
oil. It opens coastal areas to offshore oil drilling, encourages
methane drilling on land owned by farmers and ranchers, and protects
the makers of the cancer-causing chemical MTBE from being prosecuted.
The bill does all this without raising fuel economy standards for
cars, trucks, and SUVs, without addressing problems with the nation’s
power grid that led to blackouts in 2003, and without making meaningful
investments in renewable energy sources.
The bill has been rejected twice by the Senate, but administration
allies continue to push for its passage.
In September 2003, Vanity Fair magazine said: "The president
has made future energy needs a top priority. Unfortunately, massive
drilling on public lands is deemed necessary to meet them. Inside
his agencies, ‘preservation’ has become a dirty word—a
word that gets your transferred if you insist on it...instead of
proposing to auction mineral rights to the highest bidder."
sierraclub.org/energy
6. Hogwash!
Despite the massive amounts of animal waste discharged into our
air and water by huge factory farms operated by Tyson Chicken and
other giant meat producers, the Bush administration rewrote the
Clean Air Act in September 2003 so that it will not apply to such
facilities. Under the new rules, developed after backroom negotiations
with factory-farm representatives and without public input, factory
farms will be able to continue to discharge animal waste—approximately
2.7 trillion pounds per year in all—into our rivers, streams,
lakes, and air, and suffer only minimal consequences such as a $500
fine.
sierraclub.org/factoryfarms
7. Drilling Wilderness
Despite the fact that 63 percent of public lands in the West are
already available for leasing without restrictions, the Bush administration
has turned over control of an additional 5 million acres to oil
and gas companies. This includes some of the nation’s most
environmentally sensitive and beautiful places, like coastal Alaska,
the Powder River Basin in Montana and Wyoming, and the Rocky Mountain
Front. In spring 2003, the BLM approved drilling of 82,000 new oil
and gas wells in the Powder River Basin alone.9
On October 13, 2003, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer said: "The
Bush administration has ordered federal managers to remove regulatory
obstacles to oil and gas development along the Rocky Mountain Front.
It acted with no public consultation or examination of competing
land use values."
sierraclub.org/energy
8. Global Warming Put on Back Burner
During his 2000 presidential campaign, George W. Bush repeatedly
vowed to address carbon dioxide emissions, the main compound that
causes global warming, but once in office, the Bush administration
has refused to set limits on the pollutant.
After dismissing the Kyoto Protocol—which was signed by 155
other nations—as flawed, the administration offered no alternatives.
Then in late 2003, in response to a suit filed by the Sierra Club
and other advocacy groups, the EPA acknowledged the dangers of global
warming, but claimed it lacks the authority to do anything about
it.
sierraclub.org/globalwarming
9. Failing to Protect Workers at Ground Zero
After 9/11, the White House instructed the EPA to hide potential
health risks in lower Manhattan from the World Trade Center collapse.
On September 14, the EPA sent a proposed press release to the White
House, emphasizing that its tests had shown dangerous asbestos levels.
Yet the Bush administration’s edited version, released to
the public and media on September 16, was altered to read: "Our
tests show that it is safe for New Yorkers to go back to work."
MSNBC
reported that "a report by the EPA’s Office of the
Inspector General released on Aug. 21 states, among other criticisms,
that the White House reviewed and even changed EPA statements about
public health risks to make them sound less alarming." (September
11, 2003)10
9/11 Environmental Action at www.911ea.org
10. The Big Bite
Every administration since Teddy Roosevelt’s has left office
with more lands protected than when it entered, except the current
Bush administration, which has weakened protections on an incredible
234 million acres of our public land, an area equivalent to the
states of Oklahoma and Texas. The administration weakened the Clinton
administration’s Roadless Area Conservation Rule, which protected
almost 60 million acres of national forests, by exempting the Tongass
and Chugach national forests in Alaska and giving governors a loophole
to exempt national forests in their state.
"Assault on Wild America" at sierraclub.org/sierra/200403
SOURCES
1. EPA presentation to the Edison Electric Institute, 12/4/01. 2.
EPA statement released February 2004. 3. "The Truth About Toxic
Waste Cleanups: How EPA is Misleading the Public About the Superfund
Program," Sierra Club and U.S. Public Interest Research Group,
February 2004. 4. epa.gov/superfund/sites/query/queryhtm/nplccl1.htm
5. "Superfund Program: Current Status and Future Fiscal
Challenges." United States General Accounting Office. Report
no. GAO-03-850. Page 1 6. 67-Federal Register 80186, 12/31/02; 68-Federal
Register 61248, 10/27/03. 7. Bruce Barcott, "Changing All the
Rules," New York Times Magazine, April 4, 2004. 8. Clean Air
Task Force: catf.us/press_room/20030501-Final_Comments_on_Proposed_Rule.pdf
9. Powder Basin Environmental Impact Statement, 2002. 10. msnbc.msn.com/id/3076626
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