Amanda Griscom

But Jim Riddle, vice chair of the NOSB and endowed chair in agricultural systems at the University of Minnesota, argues that what the USDA is trying to pass off as a clarification of regulations is actually a substantial change: “These are the sorts of changes for which the department is supposed to do a formal new rulemaking process, with posting in the Federal Register, feedback from our advisory board and a public-comment period. And yet there is no such process denoted anywhere.”

Organic activists suspect that industry pressure drove the policy shifts. They point out that the USDA leadership has longstanding industry sympathies: Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman served on the board of directors of a biotech company, and both her chief of staff and her director of communications were plucked right out of the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association.

“Even though it evolved as a reaction against large-scale American agribusinesses, the organic food industry has seen tremendous growth, roughly 20 to 24 percent a year for the past 10 years,” said Ronnie Cummins, founder and national director of the Organic Consumers Association. “That, not surprisingly, has brought with it investments from big business and demands for conventional farming practices more favorable to mass production.”

One practice favored by large agribusiness is the use of antibiotics on cows, and a guidance [PDF] issued on April 14 will allow just that on organic dairy farms, a dramatic reversal of 2002 rules. Under the new guidelines, sickly dairy cows can be treated not just with antibiotics but with numerous other drugs and still have their milk qualify as organic, so long as 12 months pass between the time the treatments are administered and the time the milk is sold.

“This new directive makes a mockery of organic standards,” said Richard Wood, a recent member of the FDA’s Veterinary Medicine Advisory Committee and executive director of Food Animal Concerns Trust. “Organic farmers that we have talked to are furious because they have been very careful to follow the antibiotics rule. [The rule change] undercuts their ability to make a living doing things right.”

Furthermore, said Wood, the use of antibiotics will reduce the pressure on organic farmers to provide healthy accommodations for their livestock. If they know they can pump their animals up with drugs, they won’t have to worry so much about disease spreading when cows are penned up in close quarters, or about weaning calves from their mothers at an unnaturally early age.

“It’s hard to deny that this looks awfully like a political move by USDA to do the bidding of larger dairy operations that want to produce organic milk by expanding their herds with cattle that were once on non-organic farms,” Wood said.

Another new guidance [PDF] put out on the same day would allow cattle farmers to feed their heifers non-organic fishmeal that could be riddled with synthetic preservatives, mercury and PCBs, and still sell their beef as organic.

And the following week, on April 23, the USDA took the particularly egregious step of issuing a legal directive [PDF] that opens the door for use of some synthetic pesticides on organic farms.

Previously, organic farmers were only allowed to use natural, nontoxic pesticides on their crops, which effectively prohibited use of pesticides with hidden ingredients (pesticide manufacturers often don’t list certain ingredients, claiming the information is proprietary).

According to the new guidelines, however, organic farmers and certifiers are only required to make a “reasonable effort” to find out what is in the pesticides being applied to crops. “If they can’t come up with the info on toxic inert ingredients that may be in their pesticides, they’re off the hook” said Liana Hoodes, organic policy coordinator for the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture. “This takes all the pressure off of pesticide manufacturers to reveal their ingredients and develop nontoxic products. In fact, it creates a disincentive.”

Last but certainly not least, another guidance [PDF] released on April 14 narrows the scope of the federal organic certification program to crops and livestock, critics say, meaning that national organic standards will not be developed for fish, nutritional supplements, pet food, fertilizers, cosmetics and personal-care products.

“Consumers beware: This basically allows any opportunistic company to put fraudulent ‘organic’ labels on products outside of the regulated domain, without any liability concerns,” Hoodes told Muckraker.

There have never been federal organic standards for these product categories — which is why you cannot now trust an “organic” label on a bottle of shampoo or a package of farm-raised salmon — but the USDA had previously said it would develop such standards. In anticipation of that eventuality, many companies have invested millions of dollars over the past decade to develop fish farms and factories for non-agricultural products that adhere to criteria consistent with those for organic crops and livestock.

“All that effort has just flown out the window,” Cummins told Muckraker. “It’s an outrage for the 30 million consumers who pay a premium for organic products and expect that they can trust the organic claim.”

The USDA rejects activists’ interpretation of this particular guidance: “There’s a process to go through [to develop organic guidelines for non-agricultural categories] and it hasn’t happened [yet],” said Shaffer. “It could still happen. I’m not clairvoyant.”

Despite the USDA’s demurrals, activists view the department’s changes as a serious threat to hard-won standards for organic products. The National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture and other groups are investigating possible industry influence into the USDA’s process, and some environmental groups are preparing to take legal action.

“Secretary Veneman should withdraw these new directives and follow the appropriate rulemaking procedures,” said Riddle of the NOSB. “We want them withdrawn and to do it right.”

What do the National Chicken Council, the National Turkey Federation, United Egg Producers and Tyson Foods have in common?

Well, first there’s the obvious fowl connection. Then there’s the foul connection: Their facilities, known as “concentrated animal feeding operations” (CAFOs), have growing air-pollution problems thanks to the mountains of gas-emitting excrement deposited daily by their tens of thousands of cooped-up feathery charges.

These industry groups also share another connection: membership in the Ag Air Group, a coalition of special interests that includes the National Pork Producers Council and the National Milk Producers Federation (whose hogs and heifers also contribute to malodorous air-quality problems). The group has been helping the Bush EPA create an air-monitoring program that would allegedly pave the way for regulation of this escalating and, at present, virtually unregulated problem — but the program has a stench all its own.

Over the past decade, the livestock industry has steadily expanded and CAFOs have grown increasingly concentrated, displacing smaller, family-owned farms. As more animals are packed into massive factory farms, the facilities produce ever larger heaps of excreta, which emit noxious air pollutants, including ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, both of which are on par with cyanide and arsenic as hazardous substances, as well as volatile organic compounds and particulate matter from fecal dust.

In the past 10 years, nearly a dozen people have died in CAFOs in the U.S. from exposure to these gases, and according to a study released in February 2002 by Iowa State University and the University of Iowa Study Group, up to 70 percent of workers exposed to pollutants at CAFOs in the U.S. are afflicted with acute bronchitis and 25 percent with chronic bronchitis.

The EPA, though it has taken a number of legal actions against factory farms over surface and groundwater pollution, has been notably slow to act on air-quality problems at CAFOs, despite escalating calls from the environmental community to address the issue.

Michele Merkel, a former staff attorney in the EPA’s enforcement division, filed the agency’s first suit against a CAFO for Clean Air Act violations in October 1999, under the Clinton administration. The suit charged Premium Standard Farms — a pork company that owns more than 2.5 million pigs and produces more sewage than the city of St. Louis — with violating clean-air standards, and was settled out of court. A second such suit filed by the EPA was also settled out of court.

But the Bush administration put the kibosh on these enforcement efforts, according to Merkel. “Once the Bush team came in, I was not allowed to pursue any further air lawsuits against CAFOs,” she told Muckraker. “We got political cover to continue what was underway, but I was told that new efforts were off-limits. It wasn’t just coming from my EPA superiors, it was coming from the White House.” Merkel found it so demoralizing to see the enforcement process hamstrung that she quit.

“But now the problem is only getting worse,” she said. “The negligence is leading to a growing incidence of respiratory problems, not to mention olfactory discontent, among the residents in neighboring towns.”

Merkel now works at the nonprofit Environmental Integrity Project, which recently joined the Sierra Club in an effort to obtain under the Freedom of Information Act hundreds of pages of e-mails and meeting records that reveal the backroom negotiations between industry and the EPA as they worked to devise a CAFO-friendly air-regulation program.

The documents, first exposed May 16 in a Chicago Tribune article by Andrew Martin, reveal that the latest draft of the program [PDF], which the EPA intends to release this summer, is remarkably similar to the program proposal [PDF] submitted to EPA in June 2002 by a lawyer and a lobbyist for the Ag Air Group. There’s also evidence that EPA officials used a PowerPoint presentation drafted by an industry lobbyist as they explained the proposed air-monitoring program at a National Pork Producers Council meeting last year.

What’s the program all about? As enviros see it, the factory-farm industry realized it was a sitting duck, out of compliance with Clean Air Act rules and a prime target for lawsuits, so it approached the EPA with a deal that would stem the threat of litigation. Industry people freely admit concerns about lawsuits: “We don’t want to face haphazard, expensive lawsuits,” said Richard Schwartz, a lawyer for the Ag Air Group. “It’s like being struck by lightning — that’s how random it is.”

The program would insulate CAFOs from clean-air enforcement efforts if they volunteer to participate in a two-year monitoring program to measure their air emissions. In 2007, they would be asked to come into compliance with the Clean Air Act during a 120-day “cure period” — essentially having bought a couple of years of extra time to clean up their acts.

Industry and EPA officials characterize the program as a way to gather emissions data that can be used down the road to create a solid regulatory program; they point out that current methods for measuring CAFOs’ emissions are rudimentary and not standardized, so study in this area is needed. “We need standards that will level the playing field and do away with these uncertainties,” said Schwartz.

Enviros agree on the need to formulate better standards, but they argue that the EPA doesn’t need to cozy up to industry in the process. “The EPA has fully within its authority the power to order the production of air-quality data at each facility that’s conducted with a single, standard, government-controlled test, without entering into a deal with industry,” said Sierra Club attorney Barclay Rogers, who led the FOIA request.

To take part in the program, a company would be asked to pay a “penalty” (or as critics call it, an “admissions fee”) of between $200 and $1,000 per factory farm, depending on the size and number of farms it owns, plus a flat per-factory fee of $2,500 to fund monitoring efforts.

“That’s a pittance compared to the statutory penalties available under the Clean Air Act, which are $27,500 per day of violation,” said Rogers.

Schwartz made no bones about the program’s potential advantages to industry in — where else? — Pork magazine. “[Y]ou can view it as a very cheap insurance policy,” he’s quoted as saying in a May 7 article.

However, he told Muckraker that the program was a reflection of industry’s charitable inclinations — not the EPA’s. “To my knowledge, this is the first time industry has gone out of its way to pay for a study to determine its own emissions,” he said. “It is extraordinary, that’s for sure!”

The EPA did not respond to Muckraker’s request for comment.

Rogers is hopeful that the EPA will decide against formally implementing the program, but if the agency goes forward with it, “of course we’ll contemplate the appropriate legal actions,” he said.

Yucca seems to have hogged more airtime and headline space in the last four months than in the last four years. In the last few weeks alone, the Washington Post, the New York Times, ABC, MSNBC and various other national news outlets have run stories fueling the Yucca controversy. The Kerry and Bush campaigns have issued a number of press releases and statements bashing each other’s positions on the issue; Kerry staunchly opposes the dumping, while Bush supports it. As of this week, both candidates will have made four visits each to Nevada — which Bush took by four percentage points in the 2000 election — to rally voters.

On Monday, Associated Press reporter John Heilprin went so far as to argue that Yucca is the only green issue with enough emotional immediacy to convince a critical mass of red voters to cast a blue ballot: “Nevada, where Bush wants to entomb a half-century’s waste from atomic power plants, is the only state where an environmental issue can realistically swing the outcome [of the election], according to environmental leaders and political analysts.”

Really? Muckraker tried to hunt down those “environmental leaders,” but couldn’t find one who agreed with that contention.

“By no means is Yucca the final, or only, environmental frontier in this election,” said Mark Longabaugh, senior vice president of political affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, which is investing up to $7 million in the election to help draw out environmental voters to defeat George Bush. “It’s misleading to conclude that any particular issue will be more dominant or decisive than others. Issues are merely a way of getting voters to understand the larger themes of this race: George Bush sides with special interests at the expense of average citizens and the public interest.”

Aimee Christensen, executive director of Environment2004, which is putting up to $5 million toward rallying the green vote with very targeted messages in swing states, agreed that specific issues are primarily a device for illustrating a larger message: “We’re addressing local issues, but really what we’re trying to get voters to understand is that George Bush is neither compassionate nor conservative. Conservation is deeply ingrained in the Republican ethos, and Bush is betraying his Republican roots.”

Republican pollster Frank Luntz (the same Luntz who penned the 2002 memo leaked to the New York Times in which he argued that that the environment “is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general — and President Bush in particular — are most vulnerable”) also told Muckraker that swing-state victories will not be decided on Yucca Mountain or any other issue: “This is not an issue-based election,” he said. “It’s going to be decided on presidential image, on personal attributes. Kerry’s weakness is not based on his position on the issues at all — it’s based on perceptions of his leadership skills, on concerns that he’s weak-minded, indecisive, on three sides of every issue.”

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake added that “one of the things that Republicans have been better at doing than the Dems is using issues as character frames. That’s clearly a very, very important component of what we need to get in the election in the next 50 days.” Lake added that voters see the environment, in particular, as a character-defining issue: “It’s a positive for Kerry because people think that candidates who are good on the environment also have integrity and courage — you have to stand up to special interests and protect the little guy, you have to be a truth teller. That’s why the Dems need to go on the offensive with this — to frame [Kerry's] character in this context.”

Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, also said that environmental issues are a potent tool for illustrating values: “It’s about issues to the extent that we have to tell a good story at the door in Wisconsin. If you go there and say, ‘Kerry has a 96 percent LCV rating,’ they’ll say, ‘Big whoop.’ If you say, ‘George Bush is the worst environmental president since William McKinley,’ big whoop. But they listen if you say, ‘Did you know that George Bush has delayed cleaning up that mercury-infested fish in your backyard for 10 years and got huge campaign contributions from the power companies that didn’t want to clean up?’”

Whether it’s mercury contamination in the waterways in Wisconsin and Florida, pumping water out of the Great Lakes in Michigan, or road building in the forests of Arizona and Oregon, environmentalists “need to make it a window onto the character issue,” Pope said. The Sierra Club is putting an estimated $5 million toward its get-out-the-green-vote effort, the bulk of which will be spent in the month leading up to Nov. 2.

Though Luntz now insists that the environment will play a negligible role in this election, he pinpointed what could be another Bush weakness: “Most Americans today consider themselves anti-big business,” Luntz said. “Americans are simply anti-big. Anti-big government. Anti-big media. Anti-big corporations. We like small business, small government, independent television. We’re for the underdog, the little guy.”

Leave it to Luntz to lay out the strategy for the next six weeks of the Kerry campaign. Catering to big business could be to Bush what flip-flopping is to Kerry — his most serious perceived character flaw. Virtually every environmental issue, from Arizona’s forests to Yucca’s nuclear waste, lends itself to this message — which, unlike the flip-flopping charge, is not just spin.

Muck it up

Here at Muckraker, we always try to keep our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground (a real physiognomic challenge). The more sources we have, the better — so if you are a fellow lantern-bearer in the dark caverns of the Bush administration’s environmental policy, let us know. We welcome rumors, tips, whistleblowing, insider info, top-secret documents or other useful tidbits on developments in environmental policy and the people behind them. Please send ‘em along to muckraker@gristmagazine.com.

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“Many corporations and interest groups participated in the governor’s reform plan,” wrote the AP’s Tom Chorneau, “but state records and interviews with the participants show ChevronTexaco enjoyed immense success in influencing the report through its array of lobbyists, attorneys and trade organizations.” The report repeatedly references ChevronTexaco input in footnotes, and its acknowledgments page names at least five lawyers and lobbyists associated with the company.

Last February, some three months after assuming office, Schwarzenegger commissioned a team of 275 state employees to assemble recommendations for the California Performance Review, an analysis of the efficacy of state government. (The report is referred to as the CPR — apropos for a state that currently has a faint economic heartbeat.) Last month, the team unveiled a catalog of recommendations so colossal — coming in at a staggering 2,500 pages — that only the likes of Arnold himself could lift it single-handedly. The proposals could significantly enhance the power of the governor to expedite the legislative process and affect everything from the levying of taxes to the procedures for siting oil refineries.

“This is the biggest government-restructuring proposal California has seen in years,” said Bill Magavern, senior legislative representative of the Sierra Club’s California branch and one of the few environmental advocates who got the chance to offer suggestions on the report during its drafting.

“I know of only a few other environmentalists who were asked for input,” Magavern told Muckraker. “In my case I got a call to attend one two-hour meeting, but I was never asked for feedback on the most important proposals, and very few of our recommendations were reflected in the report.” Magavern said he knew little about industry’s behind-the-scenes influence on CPR because everyone who worked on it was forced to sign a gag order that prohibits discussions about the proceedings: “It was a rigorously secretive process.”

Dozens of enviro groups and public-interest organizations say they were shut out of the process entirely. As Ann Notthoff, California legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council, explained it, “While the industry interests were able to deploy huge lobbying forces and resources to shoulder their way into the drafting process, public-interest groups simply didn’t have the manpower required to outgun industry at the front end.”

NRDC and other environmental groups have been invited to air their concerns about the report’s recommendations during the formal public comment period, which will last though September, but even here activists are at a disadvantage: “I’ve talked to leaders of community groups in low-income neighborhoods in parts of L.A. who live near industrial sites and are concerned about rollbacks in pollution and siting regulations,” said Notthoff. “But they simply don’t have the time or resources to make a dent in this massive and complex report.”

ChevronTexaco spokesperson Stan Luckoski told Muckraker that by appointing a team of lobbyists and lawyers to contribute to the drafting of the CPR, the company was “just participating in the democratic process.” He said, “As a major California-based company, [it's perfectly reasonable] that we participated to make recommendations on how to improve the performance of the California economy.”

And the participation didn’t stop there. ChevronTexaco donated $100,000 to a political fund directly tied to Schwarzenegger just weeks after the report’s release, according to AP. The company also helped foot the bill for the governor and his staff to attend the GOP convention, and last week Schwarzenegger held a closed-door meeting for officials from ChevronTexaco and the other companies that sponsored his travel.

“You have to admit, with all the gag orders and corporate canoodling, this smacks of the Cheney energy task force debacle,” said Denny Larson, coordinator of the National Refinery Reform Campaign, an organization that works to protect communities around the United States from oil-refinery pollution.

Siting and expanding energy facilities in California has become a concern for oil and gas interests, ChevronTexaco in particular, which is trying to build a liquefied-natural-gas facility in Southern California in the face of strong community resistance. Among the long list of concerns enviros have about the report’s recommendations are the proposals to expedite the permitting and siting processes for constructing and expanding refineries and other energy facilities. Refineries are the biggest generators of hazardous waste in California and among the biggest contributors to the state’s air-pollution problems, according to Magavern.

Perhaps even more objectionable from the enviros’ standpoint is the report’s proposal to eliminate the independent commissions and boards that govern the regulation of California’s air, water and utilities. This means that the California Air Resources Board, for instance, which is responsible for implementing some of the most groundbreaking and effective statewide pollution regulations in the country, would be subsumed within the executive branch.

“The overarching theme of the report is to find ways to put more power into the hands of the executive branch and remove checks on the governor’s power,” Magavern said.

Restructuring is not necessarily a bad thing, said Notthoff, but eliminating key independent boards and commissions is going overboard. “Independent commissions are critical avenues for public input,” she said. “Eliminating them could substantially reduce the opportunities for public comment on decisions regarding the environment.”

These are hardly the kinds of changes one would expect from a leader who has been compared to New York Gov. George Pataki and Arizona Sen. John McCain as one of the most environmentally ambitious Republican politicians in America today — the same man who pledged to build the first hydrogen highway and put solar panels on the rooftops of a million homes in his state.

Some critics see the news of industry influence on the restructuring report as a gloomy bellwether. “Now we are seeing Schwarzenegger’s true environmental colors,” said Larson, “and they’re not green at all.”

Schwarzenegger has insisted that the report doesn’t represent his ideas or those of his administration, pointing out that it’s simply a set of recommendations from an independent task force. “At times the governor and his appointees have sought to distance themselves from the report,” said Magavern. “But then he turns around and talks out of the other side of his mouth, saying he’s going to do everything he can to execute it.” The governor will have to come down on one side or the other within the coming months, as he decides which proposals from the massive report he is going to press forward with.

The problem, as many observers see it, is that Schwarzenegger wants to please everyone. He put Terry Tamminen, a highly reputable environmentalist, in charge of the California EPA to gratify the green community, even as he hired former industry lobbyists to work in key staff positions to make business interests happy.

But he can’t go on playing to both sides. More than half a dozen pro-environment bills are piled up on his desk, including ones that would require stricter tailpipe regulations on old vehicles, crack down on diesel exhaust from idling ships in California ports, curb overfishing in oceans, and protect residential communities from pesticide drift coming off industrial farms. “Between now and the end of September, he’ll either have to sign these bills into law and anger some industry lobbies, or reject them and seriously discourage his green supporters,” says Magavern. “He’s at a crossroads.”

Enviros also hope Schwarzenegger will make more of an effort to follow through with his Million Solar Homes initiative and his hydrogen-highway program, both of which he touts but has made little concrete progress on.

Let’s just hope he’s not waiting for ChevronTexaco to give him the go-ahead.

Muck it up

Here at Muckraker, we always try to keep our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground (a real physiognomic challenge). The more sources we have, the better — so if you are a fellow lantern-bearer in the dark caverns of the Bush administration’s environmental policy, let us know. We welcome rumors, tips, whistleblowing, insider info, top-secret documents or other useful tidbits on developments in environmental policy and the people behind them. Please send ‘em along to muckraker@gristmagazine.com.

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For more environmental news, sign up for Grist Magazine’s free e-mail service.

Hence the Bush campaign’s efforts to neutralize the environment as an election issue: “They know they can’t persuade voters that Bush is good on the environment, so they’re trying to create enough confusion about Kerry’s record that people decide it can’t be the issue that decides their vote.”

Kerry strategists agree: “The Bush campaign has got Kerry written all over it,” said Roger Ballentine, a senior environmental strategist for the Kerry campaign. “From day one, the goal of the Bush campaign has not been to get voters to like their candidate and respect his record, but to get people to dislike John Kerry even though on this issue Kerry is widely thought to be the greenest candidate America has ever seen. They want people to go into the voter booth, hold their nose, and pick the lesser of two evils.”

Bush campaign spokespeople failed to return Muckraker’s repeated calls, but a quick glance at the George W. Bush campaign Web site confirms that Bush’s strategy is Kerry-centric. The homepage is a montage of derisive cartoons and photographs of the opponent — here’s Kerry playing the “Flip-Flop Olympics,” there’s a “Kerry Gas Tax Calculator,” which claims to compute how much a 50-cent-per-gallon gas tax would cost individuals (a tax, mind you, that Kerry has repeatedly said he has no intention of imposing). Not a single image of the president himself graces the page.

The Kerry Web site looks remarkably similar — only the portraits of Kerry are more flattering. It has only a low-placed and somewhat defensive nod to Bush, saying, “The Bush-Cheney campaign is running one of the most negative and misleading campaigns ever.”

A comparison of the two campaigns’ press releases is even more telling. Thus far in the month of August, the Bush campaign has churned out 18 releases dealing with energy and the environment, nearly all of them roasting Kerry, with titles along the lines of “THE RAW DEAL: John Kerry: ‘Brought to You by Special Interests.’” The Kerry campaign, meanwhile, has put out a total of six releases on energy and the environment. While they all slam Bush’s rollbacks, at least half of each is devoted to the Democratic candidate and his campaign promises. One example: “Kerry Pledges to Make Decisions Based on Sound Science and Put Public Health and Safety First.”

Most of the Bush team’s environment-related releases rely on one of two tired claims — that Kerry is a flip-flopper, or that creating jobs and protecting the environment are incompatible goals. An Aug. 6 release charged that Kerry’s plan to raise auto fuel-economy standards “will eliminate 104,000 jobs.” It derided Kerry for supporting the McCain-Lieberman bill on global warming, asserting, “Climate Stewardship Act Is a Job Killer.” And it accused the Democratic candidate of having “killed American jobs” because he didn’t vote for the Bush energy plan.

These charges have, to put it delicately, little basis in fact. The 104,000 figure, for instance, was plucked from a brief and informal analysis commissioned by General Motors and drafted single-handedly and without peer review by a professor from Pennsylvania State University. Team Bush ignores the fact that higher CAFE standards have won support even from many members of the United Auto Workers union, who agree with more authoritative studies showing that tightening fuel-economy standards would in fact create jobs.

Last week, a release slammed Kerry for past votes that favored designation of Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a repository for high-level nuclear waste. While Kerry has voted in favor of a few bills that included procedural measures on Yucca, his opposition to the project has been consistent, and he has repeatedly pledged that there would be no dumping at Yucca during his presidency. “Kerry Voted for ‘Screw Nevada’ Bill,” the release proclaimed — rather bizarrely, as Bush staunchly supports the Yucca Mountain dump, which most Nevadans oppose.

Another baffling release mocked Kerry’s position on forest protections (which enviros insist has been strong and consistent): “Where does John Kerry stand on forest policy? No one really knows, because he’s taken every side of every important forest issue,” read the statement by Bush campaign spokesperson Danny Diaz. It hinges on a comment Kerry made to the Wall Street Journal that he “like[d] a lot of parts” of Bush’s Healthy Forests bill, though he didn’t in the end support it (as if any sane politician should OK a bill full of objectionable provisions simply because a few parts are agreeable).

The few Bush campaign press releases that do tout the president’s environmental initiatives, such as this one on his national park policy, use angry and defensive language even as they try to make a positive point: “John Kerry and his extremist allies have issued a torrent of false charges and distortions about the president’s record on parks.”

The Kerry campaign insists that it has no interest in joining in the mudslinging. “To our minds, these preposterous screeds work to our advantage,” Ballentine told Muckraker. “Quite obviously, the Bush campaign is shooting itself in the foot with this nonsense. Their anti-environment record is too long, too strong, and too wrong at this point for greenwashing.”

Mark Longabaugh, senior vice president for political affairs at the League of Conservation Voters, added, “It’s so desperate, so rhetorically over the top, that if any voter actually ever read one of these things, they’d think, These folks need a sedative.”

But there’s a good reason the Bush campaign has resorted to negativity. In mid-July, when it tried to tout Bush’s environmental record in a “fact sheet” of “Key Bush Environmental Accomplishments,” the press ignored the list, and a number of major environmental organizations issued scathing, point-by-point rebuttals.

Strategically speaking, the negative screeds really aren’t about the environment anyway, according to Kevin Curtis, vice president of the National Environmental Trust: “They are not attacking Kerry on the environment, they are attacking him on this predetermined theme of ‘flip-flop.’ They know voters’ eyes will just glaze over the details and take one message from the attacks: Kerry waffles,” Curtis told Muckraker. “It’s ruthless, but it’s effective. These guys have message discipline like nobody’s business.”

Only time will tell whether voters are tiring of such tactics or whether the Bush campaign will, in the end, succeed in muddying the waters around what environmentalists say is a clear-cut choice between a friend of the environment and a foe. After all, enviros argue, Bush never flip-flops on the environment: His support for industry at the expense of natural resources and public health has been numbingly consistent.

Muck it up

Here at Muckraker, we always try to keep our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground (a real physiognomic challenge). The more sources we have, the better — so if you are a fellow lantern-bearer in the dark caverns of the Bush administration’s environmental policy, let us know. We welcome rumors, tips, whistleblowing, insider info, top-secret documents or other useful tidbits on developments in environmental policy and the people behind them. Please send ‘em along to muckraker@gristmagazine.com.

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For more environmental news, sign up for Grist Magazine’s free e-mail service.

Now the Bush administration may be only weeks away from implementing more environmental exemptions for the sake of “national security,” a plan critics find equally preposterous. The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a directive that would enable a raft of agencies under its domain — including the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Coast Guard, Border Patrol and more than a dozen others — to eschew environmental reviews and assessments required by the National Environmental Policy Act if agency officials feel such reviews are impinging on their efficacy. The directive, which does not require congressional approval, would also allow the agencies to conceal information they consider sensitive from a national-security standpoint.

Enviros are aghast, of course. A whole conflux of groups — including Defenders of Wildlife, Natural Resources Defense Council, Audubon Society and Ocean Conservancy — have submitted exhaustive comments criticizing the proposal for its potential impact on the environment and public health. (Through Aug. 16, members of the public can also fax comments on the draft directive to 202-772-9749.)

“What they’ve proposed is outrageous,” said Sharon Buccino, a senior attorney at Natural Resources Defense Council, “not just from the point of view of exploiting the issue of national security to bend the [environmental] rules, but because it inhibits Americans’ democratic right to the freedom of information — in this case, information that the American public could use to protect itself from potentially considerable health risks.”

The National Environmental Policy Act requires federal agencies to evaluate and disclose the possible environmental and public-health impacts of their operations and to give the public an opportunity to weigh in. While there is no standard formula for implementing NEPA — each federal agency develops environmental review processes tailored to its own activities, exempting certain provisions when appropriate — critics say that the DHS has done such a radical tailoring job that it has effectively ripped NEPA’s requirements to shreds.

“The environmental community isn’t opposed to agencies developing their own NEPA procedures that include certain exemptions,” said Buccino. “The problem here is that it’s being abused to include wide-ranging activities that can significantly harm the environment and public health.”

DHS argues that the proposed exemptions will have no significant environmental impact and that they are necessary to save time and paperwork and improve the efficiency of an agency that has more important things to worry about.

“Why should we keep having to prepare environmental assessments for operations that clearly have no adverse environmental impacts?” a top DHS official told Muckraker on condition of anonymity. “Our agencies have done these reviews over and over again, only to arrive at the same conclusion — that the environmental impacts of these activities are insignificant. Why create the needless paperwork? It wastes time and resources.” Streamlining this process improves the efficacy of the DHS, said the official, “because we don’t have to be expending those resources … and can put them toward the goal of national security.”

Lest the DHS be seen as crying “excessive paperwork” as a way to shirk federal environmental law, spokesperson Valerie Smith was quick to assure Muckraker that the agency “is serious about environmental stewardship,” adding this proviso: “We need to strike a balance with the agility required for our homeland-security mission and the genuine responsibility to take environmental impact into consideration.”

But take a look at the sorts of activities the DHS considers worthy of exclusion from NEPA and you’ll find they have as little to do with national security as Iraq had to do with 9/11.

For instance, the directive would permit logging of live trees on up to 70 acres and salvage logging projects on up to 250 acres on DHS-controlled lands without so much as a page of environmental review. Similarly, the Border Patrol would be allowed to build roads through national forests with zero public input if DHS decides the projects must be classified for national-security reasons.

The directive would grant a categorical exclusion from NEPA reviews for the use of pesticides on all “buildings, roads, airfields, grounds, equipment, and other facilities” under DHS jurisdiction. And Homeland Security agencies across the board would be exempted from environmental reviews for dredging and repair activity within waterways and wetlands under their control.

There’s also a proposed exemption for DHS agencies from NEPA reviews of their hazardous and non-hazardous waste disposal. While Homeland Security officials insist that their agencies would still have to qualify for permits at designated landfills or disposal facilities, enviros say that the permitting process is hardly environmentally rigorous and does not necessarily take into account the impact on surrounding communities or allow those communities to have a say about whether the waste should be dumped in their backyards.

The directive would also allow the DHS to work with the Department of Energy on plans to build new natural-gas pipelines in the U.S. and keep those projects classified if they deem it necessary for the sake of national security. Communities located near proposed pipelines might have no knowledge of the disproportionate security risk they face, nor any opportunity to give feedback. (In a separate but similar rollback last week, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission announced that the nation’s 103 nuclear power plants will no longer be required to reveal security snafus discovered on their premises, lest terrorists get hold of the information.)

“The DHS directive raises major questions about the fine line between protecting national security and jeopardizing public and environmental safety,” said Brian Segee, associate counsel for Defenders of Wildlife, adding that the Bush administration is using fear tactics to roll back protections purely for the sake of cutting corners. “We’re all for expediency and keeping secrets when it’s necessary, but if our government refuses to tell us that there is hazardous waste in our backyard, or that environmental damage is occurring on our public lands, are we truly safer as a nation?”

Is FEMA really hampered by having to properly dispose of its trash? Does the Border Patrol really need to be able to secretly blaze roads through national forests for the sake of our security? Will we be safer if the feds log more trees or spray more pesticides? Is any of this really going to prevent terrorist attacks on America?

Not likely, enviros say.

Muck it up

Here at Muckraker, we always try to keep our eyes peeled and our ears to the ground (a real physiognomic challenge). The more sources we have, the better — so if you are a fellow lantern-bearer in the dark caverns of the Bush administration’s environmental policy, let us know. We welcome rumors, tips, whistleblowing, insider info, top-secret documents, or other useful tidbits on developments in environmental policy and the people behind them. Please send ‘em along to muckraker@gristmagazine.com.

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Obama’s comments at the League of Conservation Voters’ pro-Kerry rally last week — made only hours before he delivered the convention speech that catapulted him onto the national stage and elicited comparisons to Martin Luther King Jr. and John F. Kennedy — brought enviros to their feet.

“Environmentalism is not an upper-income issue, it’s not a white issue, it’s not a black issue, it’s not a South or a North or an East or a West issue. It’s an issue that all of us have a stake in,” Obama shouted. “And if I can do anything to make sure that not just my daughter but every child in America has green pastures to run in and clean air to breathe and clean water to swim in, then that is something I’m going to work my hardest to make happen.”

The crowd went bananas at this call for unity across ethnic and socioeconomic lines, as though they’d been waiting for exactly this kind of dynamic leader to deliver environmentalism from the perception that it’s predominately a white upper-middle-class issue.

Obama’s environmental activism stretches back to his undergrad days at Columbia University, during which he did a three-month stint with a Ralph Nader offshoot organization trying to convince minority students at City College in Harlem to recycle. Later, when he worked as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago, he fought for lead abatement in the Altgeld Gardens neighborhood.

After getting a law degree from Harvard, Obama became a civil-rights lawyer and then in 1996 was elected to the Illinois state Senate, representing the 13th district on Chicago’s South Side, where he distinguished himself as a leader on environmental and public-health issues. In 2003, Obama was one of six state senators to receive a 100 percent environmental voting record award from the Illinois Environmental Council.

His efforts on behalf of the environment have been so consistent and comprehensive, in fact, that LCV and the Sierra Club endorsed Obama in his bid for Congress this year over half a dozen other Democrats competing in the primary. Last month, the LCV named him a 2004 Environmental Champion, one of 18 sitting and prospective members of Congress to receive the award.

Obama is “by far one of the most compelling and knowledgeable politicians on the environment I’ve ever sat in a room with,” Mark Longabaugh, senior vice president for political affairs at LCV, told Muckraker. “I’ve been playing national politics for more than 20 years and I quite literally can’t remember one person I’ve met — even on a national level — who was more in command of facts, more eloquent, and more passionate on these issues than Sen. Obama.”

Obama’s commitment to environmental protection has a personal component: His 6-year-old daughter, Malia, has chronic asthma, a fact he often cites when defending the long list of initiatives he has pushed to clean up smog and air pollution in his state. And many of his constituents suffer from the same condition. “More people die from asthma attacks in Chicago than anywhere else in the country,” said Brian Urbaszewski, director of environmental health programs for the American Lung Association of Metropolitan Chicago. “And Illinois has the highest African-American death rate from asthma in the country — four times the national average.”

This year, Obama made an aggressive move to stem the tide of pollution from Illinois’ coal plants — which produce nearly 50 percent of the state’s electricity — by introducing a bill that would in effect block the Bush administration’s rollback of the Clean Air Act’s new-source review rules from being carried out in his state. “This is a very complex issue, but Obama took it by storm,” Urbaszewski said. “He dove headfirst into all the complexities and wouldn’t quit until he had a solution.”

According to Jack Darin, who, as director of the Sierra Club’s Illinois chapter, has worked with Obama closely on these issues, “He’s an incredibly quick study. He’s not a scientist, but remarkably adept at analyzing the details of complex environmental issues, asking the right questions, and ultimately making the right policy decision for public interest.”

To build support for cleaner air, Obama opened a dialogue with the coal-mining industry about how better pollution controls on power plants could help create new markets for Illinois coal. Most of the coal now being burned in Illinois comes from Wyoming and other Western states, which has hurt the Illinois coal industry. But Illinois coal is cleaner in terms of pollutants such as mercury. Obama argued that cracking down on mercury pollution from coal-fired plants would give Illinois coal a competitive advantage over Western coal.

“Most politicians have forever played the interests of the coal industry and the environment against each other,” said Darin, “but Obama found a way to argue soundly that we can put mine workers back to work while making the air cleaner.”

Obama has taken on energy matters in Illinois as aggressively as air-quality protection. As state senator, he is cosponsoring a pending measure that would require 10 percent of the electricity generated in the state to come from renewable sources by 2012, and he supports another pending bill that would tighten energy-efficiency codes in residential and commercial buildings.

And Obama is making energy independence one of the top three priorities in his campaign for a seat in the U.S. Senate, according to his spokesperson, Robert Gibbs. He has pledged to endorse legislation that would require 20 percent of America’s power supply to be generated by renewable sources by 2020, as well as regulations that would boost corporate average fuel economy (CAFE) standards to 40 miles per gallon for cars.

The list doesn’t stop there. Obama has fought for tougher standards on diesel engines, waged battles against urban sprawl and the destruction of Illinois’ wetlands, and mobilized residents in Chicago’s lowest-income neighborhoods to block toxic dumping in their communities.

It’s particularly notable that Obama has gone out on a political limb to advance environmental protections. “Illinois is a heavily industrial state, and a tough place for environmentalists and other progressives,” said Darin. “Illinois is a state that has no limits on campaign financing, meaning the special interests are well entrenched.” But Obama has never capitulated, said Darin, and for most of his time in the state Senate, he has been in the minority, going against the political grain with surprising success.

Nothing could better prepare him for the current scene in Washington.