Crimes Against Nature Read online

  30 After one meeting with Enron CEO Kenneth Lay, Cheney dismissed the request of California’s Governor Gray Davis to cap the state’s energy prices. According to evidence obtained by Congressman Henry Waxman of California, the task force “considered and abandoned plans to address California’s energy problems in its report.”

  31 Davis told me he’d met with Bush three times and with Spencer Abraham “many, many times” during that period to implore them to exercise federal authority to cap California energy prices. Bush refused, telling Davis that he believed in free markets.

  32 That denial would enrich companies like Enron and Diane Allbaugh’s client, Reliant Energy Services (which has since been indicted for orchestrating the California energy scam) and nearly bankrupt California.

  Energy companies that had not ponied up remained under pressure to give to Republicans. When Westar Energy’s chief executive was indicted for fraud in December 2003, investigators found an e-mail written by Westar executives describing solicitations by Republican politicians for a political action committee controlled by Tom DeLay as the price for a “seat at the table” with the task force.

  33

  When it was suggested that access to the administration was for sale, Cheney hardly apologized. “Just because somebody makes a campaign contribution doesn’t mean that they should be denied the opportunity to express their view to government officials,” he said in an interview with the Associated Press.

  34

  Cheney’s ironfisted control of information extended to his relationship with the president. In one of the most frightening passages in Suskind’s book, O’Neill describes how Cheney directed testimony by cabinet officials to persuade President Bush of a looming national energy crisis that would justify giant tax breaks for big oil and big coal, new subsidies for the nuclear industry, and relief from environmental regulations for everyone. At the meeting, each cabinet official made a pre-arranged statement cleared by Cheney’s office and intended to add to the drumbeat of urgency. Cabinet officials were forbidden from engaging in free-ranging discussion in front of the president and were told that he would not read their reports or memos.

  According to O’Neill, the president accepted Cheney’s recommendations without apparent curiosity or question. By the end of the meeting, having persuaded the president that the nation was facing a crisis, Cheney had a blank check for the obscene subsidies and deregulation that would be his gift to the energy industry.

  Of course, although they met with hundreds of industry officials, Cheney and Abraham refused to meet with any environmental groups. But Cheney did make one exception to his policy of secrecy. On May 15, 2001, the day before the task force sent its plan to the president, CEOs from wind, solar, and geothermal energy companies were granted a short meeting with Cheney. Afterward, they were led into the Rose Garden for a press conference and a photo op.

  35

  Comparing the final report with documents obtained by the NRDC, it’s clear that the big energy companies all but held the pencil as the task force crafted its report.

  36 The plan included several provisions authored by Chevron, including one that would make it much easier for certain companies to get EPA permits. A March 20, 2001, e-mail from the American Petroleum Institute to task force staffers contained a draft for an executive order that would require agencies to weaken environmental safeguards that might impact energy supplies, distribution, or use. Two months later, President Bush issued Executive Order 13211, which adopts the American Petroleum Institute’s recommendations verbatim.

  Cheney’s task force also had at least 19 contacts with officials from the nuclear energy industry — whose trade association, the Nuclear Energy Institute, donated $100,000 to the Bush inauguration gala and $437,000 to Republicans from 1999 to 2002.

  37 Its payback? The report recommended loosening environmental controls on the industry, reducing public participation in the siting of nuclear plants, and adding billions of dollars in subsidies for the nuclear industry.

  38

  Robert Allison, the chairman of Anadarko Petroleum, and the fourteenth biggest Republican Party donor, met directly with Cheney on February 8, 2001, to petition for expanded oil and gas exploration and production on federal lands.

  39 His proposal made it into the final energy plan.

  In a field of ferocious corporate advocates, Southern Company was among the most adept. The company, which contributed $1.6 million to Republicans from 1999 to 2002, met with Cheney’s task force seven times.

  40 Faced with a series of EPA prosecutions at power plants violating so-called New Source Review (NSR) standards, the company retained Haley Barbour, former Republican National Committee chairman and now governor of Mississippi,

  41 and Marc Racicot, current Republican National Committee chairman and former governor of Montana, to lobby the administration on its behalf.

  42 Chief among their requests was avoiding limits on carbon dioxide pollution from power plants and the gutting of the NSR rule. This rule, which most environmentalists consider the heart and soul of the Clean Air Act, requires the 1,500 dinosaur power plants that were grandfathered under the Clean Air Act to install modern pollution equipment whenever they upgrade or expand. Despite the fact that every year thousands of citizens in each state die prematurely of respiratory illnesses that can be linked to polluted air from grandfathered plants, several companies had tried to dodge the NSR requirement and were prosecuted criminally by the Clinton Justice Department; Southern owned 8 of the 51 power plants targeted by prosecutors.

  43

  Barbour and Racicot repeatedly conferred with Abraham and Cheney. They were joined by Edison Electric Institute, whose director, Tom Kuhn, a Bush Pioneer, is a former college roommate, fundraiser, and close personal friend of the president. Edison, the electric industry’s major lobbying arm, contributed $598,169 to Republicans between 1999 and 2002,

  44 and its members have given $19.7 million to Republicans since 1998.

  45

  The White House forced the Justice Department to drop the prosecutions. Justice lawyers were “astounded” that the administration would interfere in a law enforcement matter that is “supposed to be out of bounds from politics.”

  46 The EPA’s chief enforcement officer, Eric Schaeffer, resigned. “With the Bush administration, whether or not environmental laws are enforced depends on who you know,” Schaeffer told me. “If you’ve got a good lobbyist, you can just buy your way out of trouble.”

  47

  Among the report’s recommendations were exempting old power plants from Clean Air Act compliance and adopting Barbour and Racicot’s arguments about NSR and carbon dioxide restrictions. Barbour repaid the favor that week by raising $250,000 at a May 21 GOP gala honoring Bush; Southern donated $150,000 to the effort.

  Cheney wasn’t embarrassed to reward his old cronies at Halliburton, either. The company donated $1,030,062 to Republican candidates between 1997 and 2002, and gave all of its soft-money contributions ($535,660) to the party.

  48 The final draft of the task force report praises a gas recovery technique controlled by Halliburton. The technique, used in coal-bed methane drilling, has been linked to the contamination of aquifers and is currently being investigated by the EPA. A discussion of the human health and environmental risks associated with the process had appeared in earlier drafts.

  49 Somehow, that got edited out of the final report.

  O’Neill watched the task force proceedings with increasing dismay as incentives to pollute were piled onto the list of recommendations. “Industry has the ability to fix these things, and it does not cost more money,” he told me. “It takes energy and technology and leadership. Pollution is a leadership failure.”

  50

  Conspicuously missing from the task force report is a thoughtful discussion of conservation. “Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue,” Cheney explained in a Toronto speech a month before the report was made public, “but it
should not be the basis of comprehensive energy policy.”

  51

  The vice president has his blinders on. Conservation is indeed the fastest way to reduce our dependency on foreign oil. Since 40 percent of the oil used by the United States fuels light trucks and cars, making our vehicles more fuel-efficient is the smartest energy investment. A 1-mile-per-gallon improvement would yield double the oil that could ever be extracted from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge — and would do it without destroying the country’s last great wilderness.

  52 A 2.6-mpg improvement would produce more oil than Iraq and Kuwait imports combined. An 8-mpg increase would eliminate the need for all Persian Gulf imports.

  53 The $20 billion that we would no longer have to send to the Middle East would help balance our trade deficit and provide a permanent economic stimulus package. With every American pocketing hundreds of dollars in annual savings, conservation would produce more oil per dollar spent and create far more American jobs than drilling in the Arctic and Saudi Arabia.

  I drive a minivan that gets 22 miles per gallon and spend $2,300 for gasoline each year. A 40- mile- per- gallon car would leave $1,000 in my pocket every year. Remember when President Bush sent us each a $300 check and called it an economic stimulus package? What would it mean for economic stimulus if we were all getting hundreds of dollars every year in fuel savings — and all without gutting the Social Security Trust Fund?

  In 1979, President Carter implemented “corporate average fuel economy” or CAFE standards that encourage carmakers to make more fuel-efficient cars. After CAFE, fuel economy rose 7.5 miles per gallon and helped turn an oil shortage into a glut.

  54 In 1986 President Reagan rolled back those standards as a favor to big oil and Detroit.

  55 According to a recent report by economist Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, the nonprofit energy research outfit, if the United States had continued to conserve oil at the rate it did from 1979 to 1985, it would no longer have needed Persian Gulf oil after 1986.

  56 Had we continued this wise course, we might not have had to fight the Persian Gulf war, and we would have insulated ourselves from price shocks in the international oil market. Fuel efficiency is sound national energy policy, economic policy, and foreign policy all wrapped into one.

  The United States, which uses 25 percent of world’s oil and sits on 3 percent of global reserves (compared with the Persian Gulf states’ 65 percent), can never drill its way out of dependence on foreign oil.

  57 Even the conservative Cato Institute called the Bush-Cheney claim that Arctic oil would reduce gas prices and dependency on foreign oil “not just nonsense, but nonsense on stilts.”

  58

  Of course, the one thing conservation does not do is create massive profits for corporations. CAFE standards force car manufacturers to put money into R&D to come up with better-designed cars; oil companies, for their part, sell less product. Since 1990, $80 million of checkbook diplomacy between the automobile industry and Washington has dulled America’s political commitment to fuel efficiency and bought Detroit political connections that rival those of big oil.

  59 Now Dick Cheney would rather let oil companies plunder our natural heritage than make auto companies clean up the world’s most inefficient gas guzzlers.

  As Cheney pushed for passage of his task force recommendations in Congress, Republicans simultaneously refused to renew the tax deduction that had encouraged Americans to buy gas-saving hybrid cars, while the Bush administration weakened efficiency standards for everything from air conditioners to automobiles. They also created an obscene $100,000 tax break for Hummers and the 38 other biggest gas guzzlers. As a result, the United States has its worst energy efficiency in 20 years.

  60

  If the president is serious about ensuring our national and economic security, we should immediately set a course to raise fuel economy standards to 40 miles a gallon by 2012, and 55 by 2020. This would give automakers ample time to adjust their production. He should also close the sport-utility vehicle loophole by holding SUVs and minivans to the same fuel economy standards as cars; automakers already have the technology to achieve this. Along with the other benefits, higher fuel economy standards could bring increased demand for efficient cars and the technologies needed to build them, leading to an increase in motor-vehicle-related jobs.

  The Bush-Cheney energy plan will make us more dependent on foreign oil, and it will place our hopes for national energy security in an aging, insecure Arctic pipeline that is a sitting duck for terrorists. There is no reason to wait 10 years for Arctic oil to come on line or 20 years for hydrogen fuel cells — President Bush’s only solution to long-term oil dependence — when a relatively small investment in conservation would quickly reduce American demand for oil.

  But no one on the task force, and certainly no one consulting with it, had any interest in reducing American demand for oil. Instead, Dick Cheney’s task force report promotes increasing consumption. Indeed, Bush views his massive tax cuts as a way of helping Americans pay for inflated energy bills and further enrich his oil-industry chums. “If I had my way,” he declared at a May 2001 White House press conference, “I’d have [the tax cuts] in place tomorrow so that people would have money in their pockets to deal with high energy prices.”

  61

  For two years after the energy task force report was released, Senator Tom Daschle and a Democrat-controlled Senate fought to block the Cheney energy plan in Congress. While Daschle and his colleagues were wrangling, however, the White House managed a historic end run around the democratic process. Through a variety of stealth tactics, the administration and its corporate toadies within the federal agencies implemented most of the plan’s more grievous provisions. These under-the-radar moves were so successful that Energy Secretary Abraham, in a speech to the U.S. Energy Association in June 2002, reported that the administration had already put into effect three-quarters of the task force’s 105 recommendations.

  62

  In October 2001, for instance, the Bush White House eliminated a Clinton administration regulation granting veto power to the Interior Department for mining permits that would cause “substantial and irreparable harm” to the environment.

  63 The White House later announced it would weaken plans to regulate three major pollutants — mercury, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide. On August 27, 2002 — while most of the country was heading off for the Labor Day weekend — the administration announced that it would redefine air pollution so that carbon dioxide, the primary cause of global warming, would not be subject to regulation under the Clean Air Act.

  64 The next day, the White House weakened the Clean Air Act’s New Source Review provision.

  65 Although the regulation may be reversed in the courts (the NRDC is suing), the damage will have been done and power utilities such as Southern Company will escape criminal prosecution.

  One of my lawsuits, a 14-year power plant case, was another casualty. In 1990, several Waterkeepers from across the country sued the EPA to force the agency to stop massive fish kills at power plants. Using antiquated technology, power plants often suck up the entire freshwater volume of large rivers, killing obscene numbers of fish. Just one facility, the Salem nuclear plant in New Jersey, kills more than 300 billion Delaware River fish each year, according to Martin Marietta, the plant’s own consultant. Nationally, power plants kill over a trillion fish a year, contributing to the collapse of global fisheries. These fish kills are illegal, and in 2001 we finally won our case. A federal judge ordered the EPA to issue regulations restricting power plant fish kills. But soon after the Cheney task force released its report, John Graham and industry lackeys at the EPA replaced the proposed new rule with clever regulations allowing business to proceed as usual.

  The carnage never stopped. By summer 2003, the body of environmental law that had been carefully constructed over the last three decades had become a virtual piñata for energy moguls, delivering new gifts with e
very blow. In August, the administration proposed limiting the authority of states to object to offshore drilling decisions and ordered federal land managers across the West to ease environmental restrictions for oil and gas drilling in national forests. It also proposed removing federal protections for most American wetlands and streams. “It’s almost like they want to alienate people who care about the environment,” said one astounded Republican, Congressman Christopher Shays of Connecticut, “as if they believe that this will help them with their core.”

  66

  Perhaps the most galling concession that Bush made to the energy industry, however, was his announcement that he would refuse to support Superfund. The move went largely un-heralded because the president announced the change in his 2003 budget request, disguised as a “reform” of the Superfund program.

  67