At a White House ceremony last week announcing the nomination of Mike Johanns, the Republican governor of Nebraska, to succeed Ann Veneman as agriculture secretary, President Bush called his pick “a strong proponent of alternative energy sources, such as ethanol and biodiesel,” later adding that “in a new term, we’ll continue policies that are pro-growth, pro-jobs and pro-farmer.”
Funny he didn’t mention “pro-corn.”
Hailing from a state ranked as the third-largest corn producer in the nation, Johanns has had obvious economic reasons to be a strong advocate for ethanol, the gasoline additive derived primarily from fermented corn. Thanks in part to Johanns, who in 2001 served as chair of the Governors’ Ethanol Coalition, Nebraska currently boasts 11 ethanol plants and is the nation’s fourth-largest producer of the alternative fuel.
Right now the ethanol industry is going gangbusters: In the past four years, it has seen explosive growth of 20 to 30 percent annually, and further expansion is predicted. According to Gary Blumenthal, who served as farm advisor to George H.W. Bush and is now the head of World Perspectives, a Washington, D.C., agriculture consulting company, “currently about 12 percent of the country’s corn yield goes to ethanol production, but I’ve heard projections that this trend will increase to 20 percent in less than a decade.”
Johanns is just the guy to make that happen, according to the American Coalition for Ethanol. “The nomination definitely bodes well for ethanol,” said Brian Jennings, the organization’s executive vice president. “We have confidence that Johanns will do everything necessary to continue growing America’s ethanol industry.”
But while ACE and other pro-ethanol groups, along with the Bush administration, rave about the environmental benefits of corn-based ethanol over traditional gasoline, some environmentalists call these accolades misleading, if not downright delusional. They worry that ethanol boosters are interested not so much in alternative fuels as in pumping massive subsidies into the corn industry.
Corn is, in fact, America’s No. 1 subsidized crop, according to Kenneth Cook, president of the Environmental Working Group. The U.S. Department of Agriculture doled out more than $37 billion in corn subsidies between 1995 and 2003. “The reason we paid such huge corn subsidies is that we grew much more than we needed domestically, so the market was glutted and prices bottomed out,” Cook told Muckraker. “The export market didn’t lift up prices. That’s why corn growers want to make ethanol in the worst way. It’s a get-rid-of-the-surplus-corn strategy.”
It’s no wonder, then, that more than 90 percent of ethanol produced today comes from corn, even though the fuel can be made from a broad range of biomass materials ranging from wheat and barley to woodchips, waste lumber, and switch grass. The latter is a fast-growing crop dense in cellulose, easy to grow without chemicals, and favored by enviros as the best source for so-called cellulosic ethanol.
A number of enviro groups have long criticized corn-based ethanol production for the huge fossil-fuel inputs that are required on the front end to grow and harvest the corn and convert it to fuel. And yet they’re not opposed to ethanol outright: Cellulosic ethanol, they say, has far greater environmental benefits than the corn-derived kind.
“When you look at the full fuel-cycle analysis of corn-based ethanol versus cellulosic ethanol, the latter has huge greenhouse-gas advantages,” said Jeff Fiedler, a climate-policy specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In fact, corn-based ethanol offers surprisingly scanty reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions. Natural gas is a key ingredient in the nitrogen fertilizer used on corn crops; coal and natural gas power the process of converting corn into fuel; diesel gasoline powers the tractors used to plant and harvest the corn. Given these fossil-fuel inputs, the greenhouse-gas emissions associated with corn-based ethanol are only about 15 percent lower than those of traditional gasoline.
In contrast, ethanol derived from switch grass results in a 95 percent reduction in greenhouse gases compared to refining and burning gasoline, Fiedler says. The crop requires little to no fertilizer, and switch-grass plowing and management require only relatively low-intensity machinery.
Switch grass, however, has its drawbacks: The acreage required to produce a unit of ethanol from switch grass is considerably greater than the acreage of corn needed to produce the same amount of fuel. (At current efficiencies, the entire country would have to be blanketed with switch grass from sea to shining sea to produce enough ethanol to power the U.S. car fleet.) Furthermore, the process of converting switch grass to fuel is currently more complicated and costly than that for corn — more than three times as expensive, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, the trade association for the U.S. ethanol industry. “While it would cost roughly $250 million to build a cellulosic ethanol plant today, it would cost roughly $70 million for a corn-based ethanol plant,” said Monte Shaw, spokesperson for RFA.
The price disparity is due in part to the fact that corn-based ethanol has taken the lion’s share of research-and-development funding. Fiedler argues that with the right R&D investments to improve the grass-to-fuel conversion process, condense crop plantings, and move switch grass into the mainstream, cellulosic ethanol could be cost-competitive in under 10 years. “If we double efficiency of the cars, double the density of switch grass per acre, and double conversion efficiency per ton of switch grass, then the amount of acreage needed to power all of America’s cars drops to the 100-million-acre range — roughly the amount of acreage currently used to grow corn in this country,” said Fiedler. Already, innovators have cut the cost of the enzymes used for the switch-grass conversion process 20-fold over the last four years.
Fiedler argues that if the ethanol industry were required to meet specific environmental performance requirements, switch grass would have a clear advantage over corn given both its greenhouse-gas benefits and its agricultural benefits, because it’s easier on the soil and therefore a more sustainable crop.
The ethanol industry isn’t wild about the idea. “Farmers are going to plant what makes them money,” said Shaw. “And right now there is no market for switch grass. The environmentalists keep saying it’s going to be much more energy-efficient and lower in greenhouse gases [than corn-based ethanol] when we figure out how to make it cost-competitive. All that’s true — as long as you underline the word ‘when.’ And the reality is: not today.”
Moreover, creating a market for switch grass would require innovative thinking on a federal level, of the sort unlikely to come from the Bush administration. Johanns, for his part, is not known for going against the grain — or the kernel, as it were. “The profile he cut in Nebraska as a politician was pro-corporate, pro-subsidy, pro-Bush,” said EWG’s Cook. “He was a huge supporter of the 2002 farm bill. I think it’s safe to assume he resists reform. He’s comfortable with the status quo.”
According to Blumenthal, Johanns is considered a golden boy among the Bushies: “The White House heavily recruited him. He possesses unusual political firepower for this position — not since President Kennedy has an administration managed to get a sitting governor to take a post as secretary of agriculture.”
Blumenthal added that despite increasing pressure on the Department of Agriculture to curtail the massive farm subsidies it doles out, Johanns will not likely experience any scaling back of his budget: “Red states are largely rural, agrarian states, and the president will not want to do anything to the agriculture budget that will hurt the red states. Moreover, the USDA nominee is an important political ally to the Bush administration and Republicans in Congress: “Johanns is very popular in the Midwest — he’s shown an ability to please and motivate agrarian voters — so he’ll be very effective for Republicans in the 2006 [congressional] elections.”
Bottom line: The Bush administration is not likely to encourage corn growers to convert millions of acres of the great American crop to a little-known, mangy-looking grass. But from the perspective of those who consider global warming a great American threat, such a conversion could be an act of true patriotism.
At a time of soaring oil and gas prices and mounting concerns about climate change, the Bush administration and industry routinely point to “clean coal” technology as one of the most promising energy innovations on the horizon. Strangely enough, some environmental leaders are beginning to do the same.
New technologies are in development that could make coal-powered generation almost completely smog-free and easily conducive to capturing and storing carbon-dioxide emissions. Given that coal accounts for a whopping 50 percent of U.S. electricity production, it can’t realistically be phased out overnight — or even in the next half-century — which means that transition technologies are critical.
The business community, for its part, is atwitter with excitement over clean-coal developments. Last month, the New York Times published a cover story in its business section titled “Fuel of the Future? Some Say Coal,” reporting a huge increase in investments in coal generation as a result of rising oil and gas prices. Likewise, a leading business newsletter, Platts, published a report last week on the ballooning demand for clean-coal facilities.
But despite mounting enthusiasm for the technology, clean coal apparently got short shrift when Congress approved the $388 billion omnibus spending bill last week. The White House was granted only $18 million — a sliver of its $237 million funding request for fiscal year 2005 — for its “FutureGen” program to develop zero-emission coal-fired power plants within the next decade.
The program, often touted by the administration as one of its leading efforts to address global warming, is centered around a new technology known as “integrated gasification combined-cycle” power-generating units (IGCC for short). These next-generation plants do not directly burn coal, as traditional plants do, but pressurize it, thereby producing a gas from which smog-causing pollutants can easily be filtered before the gas is used to power a jet-engine-style turbine (much like the ones in natural-gas power plants). The pressurizing process also releases a stream of carbon-dioxide emissions that can be captured for underground sequestration.
According to Tom Gavin, spokesman for Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va.), who has been the leading advocate of clean-coal technology on Capitol Hill, IGCC has big environmental advantages over traditional coal plants. Plus, the technology is ready to go: “Several models have already been built and proved successful. The technology can already reduce key pollutants — nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, mercury and particulates — by more than 90 percent.”
Gavin added that eliminating carbon-dioxide emissions is also perfectly practicable: “While [the current] models aren’t designed to capture and sequester carbon dioxide, it is feasible from a technical perspective for them to do so.”
Of course, there are those environmentalists who say clean coal is perfectly foolish. Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program, is loath to call the technology “clean”: “There is no such thing as ‘clean coal’ and there never will be. It’s an oxymoron,” he said.
The trouble with IGCC, according to Becker, is that carbon sequestration has not yet been proved a successful technique, and extracting coal from the earth can be so damaging in itself that boosting coal generation will inevitably have dire consequences for the natural world. He also believes that IGCC technology could be used as an excuse to build hundreds of new coal plants, diverting investments from renewable sources and stalling the shift away from fossil fuels.
David Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate Center, has a different take on the matter. He points out that coal accounts for more than a third of U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions and nearly 40 percent of global carbon-dioxide emissions. “In the next several decades, coal is an inevitable and substantial part of the global energy mix, so to the extent that we are going to use it, we believe coal-based generation should be IGCC with carbon capture and storage,” he told Muckraker.
The biggest growth in coal generation is likely to be in developing countries like China, where coal is in far more abundant supply than oil or natural gas. “The best argument for this technology is the developing world,” concedes Becker. “China and India have access to an enormous amount of coal that may be burned whether we like it or not.” Down the line, he said, carbon sequestration may be their only hope.
So with everyone from Bushies to greenies touting the potential benefits of clean-coal technology, why did FutureGen — the program intended to spur IGCC and carbon sequestration development — get overlooked in the 2005 budget? The answer, put simply, is that the Bush program is more smoke and mirrors than substance.
“The administration pays lip service to this project, but will have to spend more political capital to actually move this technology,” said Rusty Mathews, a former Senate staffer who worked on the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990 and is now a legislative specialist with the law firm of Dickstein, Shapiro, Morin & Oshinsky. “IGCC technology is the ultimate integration of environment and energy policy — it is the future — but it still needs funding to get off the ground. The Bush administration is not committing the resources and planning necessary to make it happen.”
In fact, the $18 million that Congress granted for the program was all that the administration had earmarked to spend for 2005 — no plan had been outlined for what to do with the additional $219 million requested. Moreover, the money requested for FutureGen wasn’t new funding, exactly; rather, it would have meant diverting funding from other clean-coal technology projects.
Critics say that the Bush plan would do nothing for clean coal in the near term. FutureGen aims to get just one prototype up and running by 2008 — a goal seriously lacking in ambition given that the technology exists today to have four or five plants built in the next several years.
“Our nation’s energy future will be built upon the decisions we make today [to] support new research and technologies that contribute to an energy-independent and environmentally sound America,” Byrd told Muckraker. “But shortchanging these technologies, as the Bush White House has done time and time again, only undercuts our nation’s energy independence and national security.”
Part of the problem is that there’s hesitancy within the coal industry to embrace this paradigm shift; IGCC technology is currently some 20 to 30 percent more expensive than traditional systems. Economies of scale will take care of that eventually, but in the meantime the industry is concerned that once the technology is on the market it will be pressured to upgrade its plants.
According to Mathews, the Bush administration is using FutureGen as an excuse to avoid taking real action on climate change. “Basically it’s a dodge,” he said. “Whenever they’re asked about climate change, they say we don’t need caps on carbon emissions. We don’t need regulations. We’ll solve this problem by throwing money at emerging technologies — with FutureGen and FreedomCar — so leave us alone!”
IGCC advocates hope that with increasing pressure on Bush from both domestic and international fronts to address the reality of climate change, at the very least he will take FutureGen more seriously, aggressively subsidizing the technology and stepping up the timetable rather than waiting 10 years for it to take shape.
For the time being, however, FutureGen is just another cryptically named environmental gimmick from the Bush team: “You could call FutureGen FreedomCar without wheels,” Hawkins told Muckraker. “The problem, fundamentally, is that the Bush administration fails to grasp the urgency of climate change. What they don’t understand is that when your roof is burning, you don’t research fire-suppression methods, you call the fire department.”
Presiding over his final hearing as chair of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee last week, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., delivered a feisty swan song assuring GOP colleagues and environmentalists alike that he won’t be giving up his fight for climate-change regulations anytime soon — even if the Bush administration and the 109th Congress seem likely to thwart his efforts.
The hearing took place just two weeks after Bush’s reelection, setting the stage for a rancorous debate inside the Republican-dominated Beltway over the next four years, likely deepening the divide between moderate, pro-environment Republicans and the more right-wing, anti-regulation members of the party.
McCain was not shy about reproaching the White House in his commentary at the hearing: “We do have a major task in convincing the administration [to support mandatory greenhouse gas caps],” he said. “Its performance so far, to date, is disgraceful.”
The topic of discussion at the hearing was the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a recent study conducted by some 300 scientists worldwide and commissioned by an international council representing eight countries, including the United States. Scientists testified that the Arctic is heating up 10 times faster than anywhere else in the world as a result of human activity, thereby destroying Alaskan villages, liquefying glaciers, and threatening to wipe out polar bears and ringed seals.
Highlights of the hearing included McCain’s tart criticism of a report by the right-leaning George Marshall Institute alleging that global warming is a result of natural variability in the climate. McCain snapped that Marshall himself, a moderate conservative who supported conservation, “must be turning over in his grave.” The Arizona senator then called upon Drew Shindell, a climate expert named one of the world’s top 50 scientists by Scientific American magazine, who dismissed the Marshall Institute’s findings as bogus and testified that scientists worldwide “are well above 95 percent confident that natural variability does not explain the warming we are seeing.”
Scientific certitude notwithstanding, the ACIA report has run up against some formidable resistance from Alaska’s congressional delegation, even though its constituents stand to suffer more from climate change than anyone else in the nation.
“My biggest concern is that people are going to use this so-called study to try to influence the standard of living that occurs within the United States,” Republican Rep. Don Young of Alaska was quoted as saying in the Anchorage Daily News. “I don’t believe it is our fault. That’s an opinion. It’s as sound as any scientist’s,” he added glibly.
Worse still, the report was also dismissed by Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, the man who will inherit McCain’s seat as chair of the Commerce Committee in the 109th Congress (the GOP rotates committee leadership every six years). “I’m just not sure [these scientists] are the only people we should listen to with regard to that subject,” Stevens told the Anchorage Daily News. He too expressed doubt that global warming is a phenomenon directly tethered to human activity.
“Having McCain step down from the Commerce Committee definitely takes away from the forum for bringing attention to these issues,” said Casey Aden-Wansbury, spokesperson for Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., who wrote the Climate Stewardship Act with McCain to impose mandatory caps on greenhouse-gas emissions.
Aden-Wansbury still held out hope for the climate bill’s passage, however, saying that Lieberman and McCain are determined to reintroduce it in the next congressional session. “We’re only short seven votes to pass this legislation. Of the 13 supporters of the Climate Stewardship Act who were up for reelection, only Daschle lost,” she said, adding that senators-elect Barack Obama, D-Ill., and Ken Salazar, D-Colo., could count as new votes in their favor.
A McCain staffer told Muckraker that the Arizona senator, too, is feeling confident about the bill’s future: “His hopes aren’t dashed. If anything, momentum is building. There are a whole new set of pressures bringing this issue to the fore … I think the debate is more alive than it ever has been … There are many more briefings on the Hill [on climate change] now than in the past.”
Jon Coifman, director of communications at the Natural Resources Defense Council’s Climate Center, agreed that despite the formidable anti-environment forces on Capitol Hill, there are plenty of reasons why climate will be a front-burner issue over the next four years. For one, the Kyoto Protocol will go into effect throughout the vast majority of the industrialized world in February, and much as the Bush administration may wish it weren’t so, the treaty’s implementation will have real effects on the U.S. business community given that many major U.S.-based multinational companies (including most of the Fortune 500) will have to comply with greenhouse-gas limits at foreign facilities located in signatory nations.
“There are more and more industry groups who think that domestic greenhouse-gas regulation is inevitable,” said the McCain staffer. “They believe that the potential for regulation in the next five years is very likely, and they want to be prepared.”
Further fueling the debate will be Bush buddy Tony Blair, whose nation will assume the rotating presidency of the G8 next year and who has stated his intention to make global warming one of the top two issues the body will address in 2005. “Our most important ally in Iraq is saying [to Bush], ‘You’ve got to address this issue,’” said the McCain staffer. “That carries a lot of weight. Sen. McCain is hopeful that the pressures from Tony Blair and Kyoto might persuade the president to change his approach to climate-change policy.” Those may be far-fetched hopes, however; this week the Independent reported that Bush “reprimanded” the British prime minister for his recent tough words on the climate issue and his plan to put it atop the G8 agenda.
But if pressure from abroad isn’t enough, there will also be pressure from within. A flurry of state and regional initiatives are in the works, including a market for trading carbon pollution credits that will go into effect among nine Northeastern states as well as a mandatory cap on greenhouse-gas emissions from automobiles in California. The latter was supported by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, but can only go into effect once the Bush EPA signs off on it. “Schwarzenegger and Bush will come nose-to-nose on this issue. It will be very interesting to see how these two allies duke it out,” said Coifman.
Schwarzenegger and McCain are both outspoken members of a small but growing group of pro-environment Republicans on the Hill and in state governments, including Sens. Lincoln Chafee (R.I.), Olympia Snowe (Maine) and John Sununu (N.H.), as well as New York Gov. George Pataki and perhaps even former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. (Not a whole lot has been reported about Giuliani’s record on the environment, but he collaborated with Pataki on a few pro-environment projects while mayor and is known to be moderate in many of his views.) Of those, at least two — McCain and Giuliani — may vie for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008, which could put Bush ideologically at odds with his party’s pick for a successor.
Patrick Michaels, an environmental fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute who teaches environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, griped that McCain’s climate-change initiative is nothing more than a political gambit to position himself for a presidential campaign. “He is doing all this strictly for political gain,” Michaels told Muckraker. “He needs something to separate him from the Republican competition for 2008. He wants to be the GOP authority on this issue, and my sense is that he’s going to do everything he can in the next four years to make his mark on this issue.”
McCain has been tenacious enough in pressing for action on global warming that it’s hard to believe it’s all a political ploy. But some folks deeply concerned about the climate wish he had been more tenacious still and supported the presidential candidate who actually would have done something about this looming problem.
The newly empowered Republican majority on Capitol Hill will grease the skids for plenty of legislation that’s sure to gall environmentalists and delight developers, but the most galling and delighting of all could be sweeping changes to the 30-year-old Endangered Species Act.
Business leaders, top Bush officials and many Republicans in Congress have been arguing for the past four years, if not longer, that this cornerstone environmental law is outdated and ineffective, in particular its critical-habitat provision, which constrains development in certain biologically sensitive areas deemed necessary to species rehabilitation.
The top priority next year for the House Resources Committee, chaired by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Calif., will be to “completely revamp this skewed … and broken [critical-habitat] provision that offers little if anything to the effort of species recovery,” said committee spokesperson Brian Kennedy.
Another focus, according to Kennedy, will be a proposal that would require government data related to listing and rehabilitating endangered species to be peer reviewed by outside scientific panels, with panelists selected by the interior secretary. Though currently panels are not mandated, they are convened regularly by biologists within the Fish and Wildlife Service. Environmentalists argue that the peer-review process could be used as an obstacle to species listing, particularly if panel members are appointed by political (rather than scientific) officials who might favor a more development-friendly lineup.
Kennedy believes the prospects for reform are “frankly looking very good,” despite failed attempts in the past to rewrite the critical-habitat provision: “Not only has the makeup of the House and Senate changed for the better, there’s consensus that the law needs to be revamped … We’re going to capitalize on it.”
The House Resources Committee in July OK’d the Critical Habitat Reform Act, introduced by Rep. Dennis Cardoza D-Calif., but for scheduling reasons the bill never made it from there to a floor vote in the full House. Cardoza is among a number of pro-development Democrats who contribute to the growing “consensus” on ESA reform to which Kennedy referred. His bill proposed much of what Pombo and other Republicans want, and will likely be the boilerplate for critical-habitat reforms going forward. It shifts the deadline for designating critical habitat from the time when a species is listed to the time when the recovery plan is put in place — a reasonable notion, enviros acknowledge, except that it could enable the DOI to indefinitely stall the process of designating habitat.
Cardoza’s legislation would also limit the size of necessary critical habitat to the amount of territory currently inhabited by an ailing species, while enviros argue that extending the habitat is critical to the rehabilitation process. “Habitat loss and destruction is the No. 1 reason why species are imperiled,” said Brian Nowicki, conservation biologist at the Center for Biological Diversity. “Clearly, if a species is close to extinction, it’s occupying a habitat far smaller than it was when it was healthy. How can we expect a species to rebound if we don’t give it expanded habitat to do so?”
According to Nowicki, the majority of lawsuits waged over endangered-species protection invoke critical habitat or listing. If the critical-habitat provision were stripped of its teeth as proposed, he said, it would make it very difficult for environmentalists to impose legal checks and balances on endangered-species management.
The Bush administration, which complains of being bogged down in ESA lawsuits, would be all too pleased to curtail the litigation, but enviros say such suits are the only way to ensure that the act is implemented. They point out that the Bush administration has given protection to only 31 new endangered and threatened species — a trifling few compared with the 521 species listed under President Clinton and the 234 listed under the first President Bush. “Every single species listed under [George W.] Bush has been the result of a court order, petition or settlement,” said Nowicki. “There’s not a single one they’ve done proactively.”
Kennedy counters that the emphasis should be on how many species are recovered, not how many are listed, and that the listing process is totally flawed given that less than 1 percent of the 1,200-some species listed in the past three decades have been recovered and de-listed. “It’s like we’re checking [patients] in willy-nilly but we’re not checking them out. It’s totally dysfunctional. We’re heading toward an implosion in the [ESA] system.”
Enviros dismiss this line of reasoning. “This is a preposterous complaint,” said Nowicki. “No scientist will tell you that these species on the brink of extinction can be turned around on a dime. It’s only reasonable to assume that it will take 15, 20 years at least to bring a species back from the edge.” Another common complaint about the ESA is the burden it places on private landowners. Some 75 percent or more of listed species are believed to have habitat on privately owned land, which Kennedy says has led to the “Shoot, shovel and shut up” phenomenon, where landowners take steps to get rid of an endangered species on their land or manage their land so it’s not habitable by endangered species — that way they avoid getting regulated and penalized. Herein lies the basis for the GOP argument that there should be voluntary, incentive-based programs that encourage landowners to protect species by giving them federal grants to preserve habitat, instead of slapping them with regulations and costly lawsuits. In fact, such ideas go back further than the Bush administration. Clinton-era Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt was a strong supporter of landowner incentives, as well as revamping the critical-habitat program. To its credit, the Bush administration has increased the budget for such incentive-based programs more than fourfold, from roughly $28 million in 2000 to roughly $121 million in 2004.
Environmentalists applaud these efforts, but argue that the carrot cannot be offered without wielding the stick. “Their logic for removing penalties is hopelessly bogus,” said Brent Plater, staff attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity. “It’s like saying we shouldn’t regulate child molesters because they’ll continue to do horrible deeds in darker shadows. Instead we should reward them for not doing crimes.”
Still, Nowicki and Plater agree that the ESA has some problem areas that could use improvement, but not the kinds of drastic fixes GOP leaders are pushing for. For example, they’d endorse a proposal to allow critical-habitat designation to occur after a recovery plan is in place, but only so long as it included mandatory deadlines within a reasonable timeframe.
Unfortunately for enviros, Republican leaders of the 109th Congress don’t seem too interested in compromise. According to Kennedy, critical-habitat and peer-review issues are just the beginning of the reforms they will push for. “These are the areas where we have most consensus for change, [but] they will be starting points for a bigger and broader discussion” on revamping ESA, he said. Other priorities will include increasing the role of states in endangered-species management, a subject that troubles enviros because species habitat often straddles state borders.
Plater worries that eventually the whole act will be dismantled: “There is a very strong push from developers to get Congress to repeal the Endangered Species Act, one piece at a time,” he said. “This is a make-or-break moment for the environmental movement. If [reformers] are successful, everything I’ve dedicated my life to protect will be lost.”
A day after winning the presidential election last week, George W. Bush made this now-legendary — and, to some, menacing — statement: “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.” Without dwelling on the notion that conservatives are supposed to protect and grow capital, not fritter it away, environmentalists are wondering just where and how President Bush is going to spend his political booty in the natural-resource realm.
In much the same way he spent his more limited allowance in the last go-round, according to U.S. EPA chief Mike Leavitt. As reported in Greenwire last Friday, Leavitt told the press that the Bushies will proudly stay the course on their environmental agenda — one widely condemned by environmentalists, but newly bolstered by the election. “We now have a clear agenda, one that’s been validated and empowered by the people of this country,” he said.
If past is indeed prologue in the Bush administration, say enviros, it’s fair to assume that a key beneficiary of the president’s newfound capital will be the energy industry. During Bush’s first term, efforts to weaken clean-air regulations and expedite oil and gas drilling were regarded as paybacks for campaign contributions. This time around, the energy and natural-resources sector made record donations to Bush’s campaign — a total of $4.4 million for the 2004 cycle, according to the latest data from the Center for Responsive Politics, compared with $2.8 million in the 2000 campaign.
“Right now Karl Rove is saying, ‘First things first, George. These are the folks that floated our campaign, we need to give them our thanks,’” said Dan Becker, director of the Sierra Club’s Global Warming and Energy Program.
Now that the Republicans have gained four seats in the Senate, giving them a 55-45 advantage, there’s a good chance that the 109th Congress will enable President Bush to hand his corporate contributors one of the most sought-after prizes of all: Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Bush is also better positioned to get Senate approval for his stalled-out energy bill, which has been widely criticized on both sides of the aisle as pork at its worst, with its billions of dollars in subsidies for fossil-fuel producers and other special interests.
There have been rumblings on Capitol Hill that the energy bill could come up for consideration during the lame-duck session that will begin on Nov. 16, even before the 108th Congress adjourns at the end of this year. Lame-duck sessions are typically more rushed and insulated from media scrutiny than other sessions, which could be advantageous when pushing forward a highly contentious and complex piece of legislation.
But most observers think the energy bill won’t get off the ground until 2005. “No one expects the Republicans to go to great lengths to move it now when they can just rewrite it next year, and they’ll have the advantage of a bigger margin,” said Karen Wayland, legislative director for the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Indeed, energy-bill advocates insist that the new Republicans who’ll be taking office in January will put them in good stead: “We have more than enough votes for an energy bill,” Sen. George Allen, R-Va., chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, declared at a press conference last Wednesday.
Scott Segal, a lobbyist for the industry group Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, shares Allen’s optimism. “Things are definitely looking up for an omnibus energy bill,” he told Muckraker. “Not only is there a larger operating majority for Republicans, you’ve got to consider the cost of energy: We’ve had sustained oil prices above $50 [a barrel], which is a real red-flag zone, and natural gas at three times the historical average. This could very well stimulate the passage, particularly among moderate Democrats and more liberal Republicans.”
A big sticking point for the energy bill, though, is its MTBE provision, which would indemnify producers of the gasoline additive MTBE against water-pollution lawsuits. “The energy bill got jammed on the MTBE provision and never got unstuck,” said Bill Wicker, spokesperson for Democrats on the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. “Even though there are nine new senators coming to town [seven Republicans, two Democrats], nearly all of them will vote the same way on this issue as their predecessors.”
It’s true that extra support for the bill in the Senate will come from Richard Burr of North Carolina (replacing Democrat John Edwards), Mel Martinez of Florida (replacing Democrat Bob Graham), and Jim DeMint of South Carolina (replacing Democrat Fritz Hollings). But Republican John Thune, who will take the place of Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, the Democrat from South Dakota, won’t amount to a gained vote because Daschle was a strong supporter of the energy bill. Two more GOP gains are canceled out by Democrat Barack Obama of Illinois (replacing Republican Sen. Peter Fitzgerald) and Democrat Ken Salazar of Colorado (replacing Republican Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell). Salazar is from a strong oil and gas state, so his pro-environment vote on this bill is not guaranteed, but Becker, whose organization endorsed Salazar’s campaign, says it’s very likely.
Moreover, peer pressure from reenergized GOP colleagues won’t easily sway some New England Republicans: “John Sununu and Judd Gregg are Republican senators from New Hampshire who voted against the bill because of the MTBE provision,” said Becker, “but New Hampshire is currently suing MTBE manufacturers because of water contamination in the state, so switching their vote would undermine their state’s legal position.” Also, the Republican senator from Nevada, John Ensign, is unlikely to change his no vote because the bill is loaded with subsidies for the nuclear-power industry and could therefore lead to the generation of more nuclear waste. As the Bush administration already wants to dump existing nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain in Nevada, to the ire of Ensign’s constituency, a nuke-friendly energy bill isn’t likely to go over well in the Silver State.
According to Wicker, many folks on both sides of the aisle now think the energy bill should be broken down into smaller digestible bites, and the MTBE provision dropped. “That’s far more realistic than trying to force everyone to swallow one gargantuan bill whole,” even with the new Republican votes, he said.
The piecemeal strategy could prove successful on many fronts, including on the Arctic Refuge. “The vote numbers effectively haven’t moved on MTBE [given the new makeup of the Senate], but the numbers have moved on ANWR,” said Wicker.
Here’s why: While Daschle voted for the energy bill, he was a steadfast opponent of drilling in ANWR; his successor will support both. And while Obama will almost certainly vote against drilling in ANWR, his predecessor Peter Fitzgerald was one of the few Republicans who also opposed it, meaning that Obama adds no new votes to the ANWR opposition. Also, Republicans are much more vulnerable to peer pressure on this issue given that there are no regional reasons (such as MTBE contamination or Yucca Mountain) for them to oppose it.
According to Wicker, the congressional leadership is expected to make opening ANWR a part of the budget reconciliation process early next year by tacking the ANWR provision onto a budget bill that cannot be filibustered, so it would need only 50 votes to pass rather than the 60 necessary to avert a filibuster. “They tried to do this in 2003 and failed, but the reality is that with four new Republican votes, open-ANWR proponents have the wind at their back,” he said.
Becker of the Sierra Club said this may be just what environmentalists need. “The public opposition to drilling in the Arctic Refuge is huge. People have come to associate it with greed rather than need.”
And historically the perception of greed has galvanized public opposition to initiatives that are overly friendly to industry and unfriendly to the environment and public health. Lawmakers and business lobbies overreach, and then get slapped by public opinion. This is precisely what happened with the MTBE liability exemption, for instance. It’s what happened during Bush’s first term when the EPA tried to weaken standards for arsenic in drinking water and exempt millions of acres of wetlands from protections — initiatives that stirred up so much controversy they simply couldn’t survive.
“Right now,” said Becker, “greed is the best friend that the environment has.”
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