Crimes Against Nature Read online

  Crimes

  Against

  Nature

  How George W. Bush

  and His Corporate Pals Are

  Plundering the Country

  and Hijacking Our Democracy

  ROBERT F. KENNEDY, JR.

  To my wife, Mary Richardson,

  who encourages me with her love, patience, and faith;

  inspires me with her energy; and is the best

  environmentalist in our family

  Contents

  Introduction

  1 The Mess in Texas

  2 Back to the Dark Ages

  3 The First Round

  4 Cost-Benefit Paralysis

  5 Science Fiction

  6 Blueprint for Plunder

  7 King Coal

  8 Killing the Energy Bill

  9 National Security

  10 What Liberal Media?

  11 Reclaiming America

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Author

  Also by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

  Credits

  Cover

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Earlier this year I was invited to speak at the Round Hill Club in Greenwich, Connecticut. If Greenwich is the Republicans’ Mecca, then the Round Hill Club is the Kaaba. In the foyer I passed beneath an oversized photograph of Senator Prescott Bush, a former Greenwich resident and the current president’s grandfather. Somebody pointed to an anteroom and commented: “That’s where George met Barbara,” referring to the president’s mom and dad. It was the club’s annual meeting — always well attended — and as I stepped to the podium I looked out over a sea of skeptical faces, the faces of affluent conservatism. I spoke for an hour — about why the environment is so important to the physical and spiritual health of our nation and its people, about how a wholesome environment and a healthy democracy are intertwined, and about the way that President Bush is allowing certain corporations to destroy our country’s most central values. I pulled no punches, and I got a standing ovation.

  A month before, I got a similar response at the Woman’s Club of Richmond, Virginia, where someone boasted that no member had voted for a Democrat since Jefferson Davis. They told me it was the first standing ovation there in 38 years.

  Earlier that week I had spoken at an oil-industry association meeting in the Northwest, and I received an equally enthusiastic response.

  I got those reactions not because I’m a great speaker (I’m not), but because I talked about the values that define our community and make us proud to be Americans — shared values that are being stolen from us. Those oil executives, Richmond Republicans, and Round Hill Club members have the same aspirations for their children as I have for mine: clean air and water, robust health, beautiful landscapes in which to play and grow and be inspired, and a community that stands for something good and noble.

  I want to be very clear here: This book is not about a Democrat attacking a Republican administration. During my two decades as an advocate for the Natural Resources Defense Council, Riverkeeper, and the Waterkeeper Alliance, I’ve worked hard to be nonpartisan. The fishermen and farmers whom I represent as an attorney run the political spectrum, and I’ve supported both Democratic and Republican leaders with sound environmental agendas.

  Moreover, I don’t believe there are Republican or Democratic children. Nor do I think that it benefits our country when the environment becomes the province of one party, and most national environmental leaders agree with me. But today, if you ask those leaders to name the greatest threat to the global environment, the answer wouldn’t be overpopulation, or global warming, or sprawl. The nearly unanimous response would be George W. Bush.

  You simply can’t talk honestly about the environment today without criticizing this president. George W. Bush will go down as the worst environmental president in our nation’s history. In a ferocious three-year attack, his administration has launched over 300 major rollbacks of U.S. environmental laws, rollbacks that are weakening the protection of our country’s air, water, public lands, and wildlife.

  Such attacks, of course, are hardly popular. National polls consistently show that over 80 percent of the American public — with little difference between Republican and Democratic rank and file — want our environmental laws strengthened and strictly enforced. In a March 2003 memo to party leadership, Republican pollster Frank Luntz noted: “The environment is probably the single issue on which Republicans in general and President Bush in particular are most vulnerable.” He cautioned that the public is inclined to view Republicans as being “in the pockets of corporate fat cats who rub their hands together and chuckle maniacally as they plot to pollute America for fun and profit.” If that view were to take hold, Luntz warned, “not only do we risk losing the swing vote, but our suburban female base could abandon us as well.” In essence, he recommended that Republicans don the sheep’s clothing of environmental rhetoric while continuing to wolf down our environmental laws.

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  White House strategists grasped that lesson long before the Luntz memo. The administration has gone to great lengths to keep the president’s agenda under wraps, orchestrating the legislative rollbacks almost entirely outside of public scrutiny. It has manipulated and suppressed scientific data, intimidated enforcement officials and other civil servants, and masked its agenda with Orwellian doublespeak. Bush’s “Healthy Forests” initiative promotes destructive logging of old-growth forests. His “Clear Skies” program suggests repealing key provisions of the Clean Air Act. The administration talks about “streamlining” and “reforming” regulations when it means weakening them, and “thinning” when it means logging or clear-cutting. Cloaked in this meticulously crafted language that is designed to deceive the public, the administration — often unwittingly abetted by a toothless and negligent press — intends to effectively eliminate the nation’s most important environmental laws by the end of its term.

  But this book is ultimately about more than the environment. It’s about the corrosive effect of corporate cronyism on free-market capitalism and democracy — core American values that I cherish. There are, of course, good and even exemplary corporations in every sector. Even in the oil business, companies like BP, Shell, and Hess have acted aggressively to deal with global warming and have behaved responsibly toward the environment. But corporations, no matter how well intentioned, should not be running the government.

  This administration, however, in its headlong pursuit of private profit and personal power, has sacrificed respect for the law, private property rights, scientific integrity, public health, long-term economic vitality, and commonsense governance on the altar of corporate greed.

  Our government has abandoned its duty to safeguard our health and steward our national treasures, eroding not just our land, but our nation’s moral authority and capacity to fulfill its historic mission — to create communities that are models for the rest of humankind. After all, we protect nature not (as Rush Limbaugh likes to say) for the sake of the trees and the fishes and the birds, but because it is the infrastructure of our communities. If we want to provide our children with the same opportunities for dignity and enrichment as those ourparents gave us, we’ve got to start by protecting the air, water, wildlife, and landscapes that connect us to our national values and character. It’s that simple.

  The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. During his tenure in Texas, George W. Bush had the grimmest environmental record of any governor in the country: the Lone Star State ranked number one in both air and water pollution. In his six years in Austin, Governor Bush championed a short-term, pollution-based prosperity that enriched his
political contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is doing the same thing to the citizens in the other 49 states.

  The present cabinet boasts more CEOs than any in history. Most come from the energy, extractive, and manufacturing sectors that rely on giant subsidies and create the worst pollution. Almost all the top positions at the agencies that protect our environment and oversee our resources have been filled by former lobbyists for the biggest polluters in the very businesses that these ministries oversee. These men and women seem to have entered government service with the express purpose of subverting the agencies they now command. The administration is systematically muzzling, purging, and punishing scientists and other professionals whose work impedes corporate profit taking. The immediate beneficiaries of this corrupt largesse have been the nation’s most irresponsible mining, chemical, energy, agribusiness, and automobile companies. The American people have been the losers.

  Environmental injury is deficit spending — loading the costs of pollution-based prosperity onto the backs of the next generation. In 2003 the Environmental Protection Agency announced that for the first time since the Clean Water Act was passed 30 years ago, American waterways are getting dirtier. In Lake Erie, painstakingly resurrected by the Clean Water Act, the infamous dead zone is expanding once again. More raw sewage is flowing into our rivers, lakes, and streams as the White House throws out rules designed to end sewer-system overflows. Bush’s policies promote greater use of dangerous pesticides, deadly chemicals, and greenhouse gases, and encourage the filling of wetlands and streams. The administration has removed protections from millions of acres of public lands and wetlands and thousands of miles of creeks, rivers, and coastal areas.

  I am angry both as a citizen and a father. Three of my sons have asthma, and on bad-air days I watch them struggle to breathe. And they’re comparatively lucky: One in four African American children in New York City shares this affliction, and many lack the insurance and high-quality health care that keep my sons alive and active.

  2 Sadly, too, few children today can enjoy that quintessential American experience, going fishing with Dad and eating their catch. Most bodies of water in New York — and all freshwater bodies in 17 other states — are so tainted with mercury that one cannot eat the fish with any regularity. Forty-five states advise the public against regular consumption of at least some local fish due to mercury contamination.

  I often take my children to hike, fish, and canoe in the nearby Adirondack Mountains, the oldest protected wilderness on Earth. Since the area was declared “forever wild” in 1885, generations of Americans might reasonably have expected to enjoy its unspoiled rivers and streams. But 500 lakes and pools (out of 2,800) in the Adirondacks have now been rendered sterile by acid rain.

  The mercury and the pollutants that cause acid rain and provoke most asthma attacks come mainly from the smokestacks of a handful of outmoded coal-burning power plants. These discharges are illegal under the Clean Air Act. But President Bush recently sheltered these plants from civil and criminal prosecution, and then excused them from complying with the act. Amazingly, his administration is instead relying on a cleanup schedule written by polluters for polluters that will leave the United States with contaminated air, poisoned water and fish, and sickened children for generations. The energy industry, by the way, gave $48 million to President Bush and his party during the 2000 campaign, and have ponied up another $58 million since. They are now reaping billions of dollars in regulatory relief. But generations of Americans will pay that campaign debt with poor health and diminished lives

  Furthermore, the addiction to fossil fuels so encouraged by White House policies has squandered our Treasury, entangled us in foreign wars, diminished our international prestige, made us a target for terrorist attacks, and increased our reliance on petty Middle Eastern dictators who despise democracy and are hated by their own people.

  Several of my own lawsuits have been derailed by George W. Bush and friends. As he began his presidency, I was involved in litigation against the factory-pork industry, which is one of the largest sources of air and water pollution in the United States. Industrial farms illegally dump millions of tons of untreated fecal and toxic waste onto the land and into the air and water. Factory farms have contaminated hundreds of miles of waterways, put tens of thousands of family farmers and fishermen out of work, killed billions of fish, sickened consumers, and subjected millions of farm animals to unspeakable cruelty.

  On behalf of several farm and fishing groups, we sued one of the largest hog conglomerates, Smithfield Foods, and won a decision that suggested that almost all large factory farms were violating the Clean Water Act. Then the Bush administration ordered the EPA to halt its own Clean Air Act investigations and weakened the Clean Water rules, neutralizing my lawsuits and allowing the industry to continue polluting indefinitely.

  For 20 years, as attorney for Hudson Riverkeeper, I’ve worked with commercial and recreational fishermen and river-front communities to force General Electric to clean up the polychlorinated biphenyls that the company has dumped into the river for decades. These PCBs have put hundreds of commercial fishermen out of work, dried up the river’s barge traffic (because the shipping channels are too toxic to dredge), contaminated waterfront towns, and infected virtually every person in the Hudson Valley. (My own PCB levels are double the national average!) In February 2002, we finally forced the EPA to sign the long-awaited order requiring the company to dredge the river and recover its PCBs. But our celebration was short-lived.

  In October 2003, after President Bush failed to renew an environmental tax on oil and chemical companies, Superfund went bankrupt. With no money in the fund, the EPA has lost its leverage to force General Electric to act. The EPA’s principal leverage over recalcitrant polluters was Superfund’s treble damages provision, which allows the agency to use the fund to clean up the site and then charge the polluter three times its costs. “I do not believe that the Hudson will ever be cleaned up by General Electric, except under threat of the treble damages provision, and that no longer exists,” says Janet MacGillivray, the EPA’s former assistant regional counsel. “The company has already avoided responsibility for thirty years. Without that leverage, General Electric could conceivably litigate this case for decades.”

  3 Without that cleanup, the Hudson, according to the best federal science, will be polluted for my lifetime and that of my children, its fish unsafe to eat for the next century. Thanks to President Bush’s decision, one out of every four Americans lives within a few miles of a Superfund site that may never be cleaned up.

  The fishermen, farmers, and other working people whom I represent are by and large traditional Republicans who live by Teddy Roosevelt’s precept: “The nation behaves well if it treats the natural resources as assets which it must turn over to the next generation increased, and not impaired, in value.”

  4 Without exception, these people see the current administration as the greatest threat not just to their livelihoods but to their values, their sense of community, and their idea of what it means to be American. Why, they ask, is the president allowing coal, oil, power, chemical, and automotive companies to fix the game?

  The Mess in Texas

  As you fly over the Houston Ship Channel at twilight, thousands of flares seem to ignite in the approaching darkness. Smokestacks from more than a hundred massive chemical factories, oil refineries, and power plants have suddenly become steel towers of light and fire. From the air, it’s not hard to understand why some call this area the “golden triangle.” This concentration of industry, which includes a 3,000-acre ExxonMobil facility — the planet’s largest oil refinery — generates enough wealth for its owners to make the Texas economy bigger than the gross domestic product of most nations.

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  It is a different scene on the ground. There the twilight flares rumble, the ground shakes, the air hisses. Plumes of black smoke belch upward and acr
id odors permeate the atmosphere. The smell of money, some call it. But from this earthly vantage point — especially for low-income residents living downwind in eastern Harris County — it is less a golden triangle than a scene out of Dante’s Inferno.

  The ubiquitous highway signs warning “Don’t Mess With Texas,” haven’t deterred the state’s polluters one bit. Here are some basic facts about the Lone Star State: According to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, fully one-quarter of Texas’s streams and rivers are so polluted that they do not meet standards set for recreational use.

  2 Half of the state’s 20 million people reside in areas where the smog pollution surpasses federal limits.

  3 In 1999, Houston overtook Los Angeles as America’s smoggiest city. Texas also ranked first in toxic releases to the environment, first in total toxic air emissions from industrial facilities, first in toxic chemical accidents, and first in cancer-causing pollution.

  4 Also in 1999, 15 of the nation’s 30 highest smog readings were all taken in Texas.