Crimes Against Nature Read online

  61

  I’ve had many brushes with Norton’s crew of hardheaded ideologues. They are convinced that our government and its laws are illegitimate and that the illegitimacy makes it permissible for them to violate all the rules. I have seen them subvert the law, corrupt our democracy, and distort science. I have witnessed their willingness to break promises and deceive those they are appointed to serve.

  In the summer of 2003, my cousin Maria Shriver’s husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, approached me out on Cape Cod. He was determined, he said, to be “the best environmental governor in California history.” I agreed to help him and worked with a group of sympathetic Republicans and Democrats in California to draft Arnold’s environmental platform. Among the key provisions was support for the Sierra Nevada Framework. The plan was the product of a decade of grueling work by government, the timber industry, and environmental groups to manage the Sierra Nevada forests. But Wise Use radicals at Interior opposed any restrictions on the exploitation of public lands.

  Immediately after the election, David Drier, a conservative Republican congressman from California, asked Schwarzenegger, at the behest of the White House, to abandon support for the Framework. Schwarzenegger refused, but noted that if changes to the Framework were warranted by new information or science, the Framework should be modified by the same thoughtful, inclusive stakeholder process that had resulted in the original plan. This seemed to appease the White House. Karl Rove promised that no federal action would be taken on Framework protections, especially logging, without extensive discussions with the state and all stakeholders.

  And yet, late in the afternoon of January 21, 2004, Governor Schwarzenegger received word that the U.S. Forest Service would announce a new plan for the Sierra Nevada, tripling logging levels over the Framework agreement. Schwarzenegger’s office and California EPA commissioner Terry Tamminen tried frantically to reach administration officials, but all calls went unanswered. As if to emphasize its contempt for the process, the Forest Service held a press conference in the Sacramento Hyatt, directly across the street from the governor’s office, to announce its plan. Republicans and Democrats alike in the Schwarzenegger administration were furious at the betrayal and astounded by such hardheaded arrogance. So much for states’ rights.

  There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of a democracy. One is to look at how much the public is included in community decision making. Another is to evaluate access to justice. The most telling aspect of a government, however, is how it distributes the goods of the land. Does it safeguard the commonwealth — the public trust assets — on behalf of the public? Or does it allow the shared wealth of our communities to be stolen from the public by corporate power? The environmental laws passed after Earth Day 1970 were designed to protect the commons. Since then, life has dramatically improved in America. Children have measurably less lead in their blood and higher IQs as a result. We breathe cleaner air in our cities and parks and swim in cleaner water in our lakes and rivers. These laws have protected the stratospheric ozone layer, reduced acid rain, saved threatened wildlife such as the bald eagle, and preserved some of the last remaining wild places that make this country so beautiful. In other words, they protect the America that we all hold in common.

  But George W. Bush’s policy advisers somehow don’t see the benefits we’ve received from our investments in our country’s environmental infrastructure. All they see is the cost of compliance for their campaign contributors — a group that is led by the nation’s most egregious polluters. This myopic vision has led the White House to abandon its responsibility to protect the public trust.

  Former Interior Secretary James Watt once promised, “We will mine more, drill more, cut more timber.”

  62 In April 2001, a retired James Watt told the Denver Post, “Everything Cheney’s saying, everything the President’s saying, they’re saying exactly what we were saying twenty years ago, precisely. Twenty years later, it sounds like they’ve just dusted off the old work.”

  The First Round

  During his presidential campaign, Bush threw a bone to environmentally conscious soccer moms and centrist Republicans. Global warming, he said in his second debate with Al Gore, “needs to be taken very seriously.”

  1 While he opposed the Kyoto Protocol,

  2 the international agreement to slow down global warming, he proclaimed that under his leadership the United States would tackle the problem by strictly regulating CO2, the principal greenhouse gas, projecting the image of a man determined to take a thoughtful approach to the environment.

  3 As it turns out, he left this campaign promise on the stump.

  Barely three months into office, Bush walked away from his pledge. It was, quite possibly, an unprecedented turnaround — I can’t remember a president who’s violated a major campaign promise so soon after his election, scorning the mandate that put him in office.

  4 The move revealed the depth of industry clout at the White House. But as Bush and his advisers would learn, backpedaling on the environment doesn’t play well in Peoria.

  The “greenhouse effect” was first predicted in 1896, in a paper written by a Nobel Prize–winning Swedish chemist named Svante Arrhenius.

  5 In 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen riveted the world when he testified before Congress that greenhouse gases were warming our climate with dire consequences for the future.

  6 Since then we have developed better computer modeling and collected reams of scientific evidence — and seen 10 of the warmest years on record.

  7 The ranks of the skeptics have thinned to a small army of industry-funded charlatans whose voices are amplified through the bullhorn of Rush Limbaugh and the shills at the Heritage Foundation.

  Scientists agree that we are now pumping out vastly more CO2 than the Earth’s system can safely assimilate. The surplus gases create an invisible blanket in the atmosphere that prevents heat from being released to outer space, and as that heat builds up it changes the energy balance in the world, and that changes everything. During the Senate floor debate on the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act in October 2003, Senator John McCain held up satellite photographs of the North Pole showing a dramatic 20 percent shrinkage of the Arctic Sea ice over the previous twenty-five years.

  8 But you don’t need a satellite to know the world is changing.

  Glaciers are shrinking worldwide, except at the very highest altitudes. The mountain ranges from the Alps to the Rockies, the Himalayas to the Andes, are losing their snow pack, a trend already seriously impairing regional water supplies. The fringes of Antarctica’s ice are melting. The 20,000-year-old permafrost of the northern tundra is softening. Ironically, Alaska’s North Slope oil industry is being impeded by shortened operating seasons.

  9 During the summer of 2003, 19,000 people died in Europe due to the hottest temperatures in at least 500 years.

  10

  Temperatures are higher everywhere: in both hemispheres, on the earth’s surface, within the soils, in the depths of the ocean, in the upper atmosphere, and within the ice sheets. Despite fluctuations, intense winter cold is less common in places like New York. Higher temperatures have increased evaporation from the ocean surface and intensified precipitation; gully-washer rainstorms, floods, and heavy blizzards are more frequent and destructive.

  11 In North Carolina, the entire hog industry was built on the assumption that hundred-year floods came only once each century. But in the last ten years, three hundred-year floods have caused enormous economic and environmental woes. Warmer water is beginning to eradicate coral reefs worldwide — most of them may be gone by 2050.

  12 Sea levels are rising, and coastal erosion is a growing crisis.

  Even the timing of the seasons has begun to change. Ecosystems are starting to shift. Plants, animals, and insects are appearing in places they didn’t before.

  13 I regularly see black vultures now in upstate New York, but all my bird books describe its northern range as Virginia
. Birds are laying their eggs at different times.

  There is growing evidence that dramatic climate change may occur suddenly, a development that has even gotten the Pentagon’s attention.

  14 A report commissioned by Andrew Marshall, the father of Star Wars and the military’s graybeard expert on future strategic threats, describes the human disasters that would occur if the climate shifted abruptly in a decade or two, as happened some 12,000 years ago. According to this scenario, most of Holland and Bangladesh would be submerged by violent storms and rising seas. Northern Europe would freeze because of disruptions to the Gulf Stream. Millions of environmental refugees would gather at the frontiers of the developed world, driven by wars, famines, and floods. Nuclear conflict, megadroughts, and widespread rioting would erupt across the world. Nations might be forced to expand their military power to defend dwindling food, water, and energy supplies. The report paints a picture of the United States as a giant gated community insulating itself from the world it helped create, isolated and despised by its angry, jealous neighbors. Although this outcome is presented as a worst-case scenario, climate change “should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a U.S. national security concern.”

  15

  The first major international attempt to tackle global warming was the Rio Climate Treaty, signed by the first President Bush in 1992 and ratified by the U.S. Senate that year. The Rio treaty contained plans to return CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions to their 1990 level by 2000. In 1997, the Rio participants proposed a more detailed set of actions, the Kyoto Protocol, which requires that developed nations reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases 5 percent below the 1990 level during the period 2008–2012.

  16

  President Bush’s campaign promise to regulate CO2 would have been a big step toward meeting the pledges that the United States made in the Rio treaty. Thanks to industry lobbying, CO2 was not listed as a pollutant in the original Clean Air Act, so by 2000 it was still unregulated. The Clean Air Act, however, authorized the federal government to regulate all air pollutants, even those not specifically listed in the original act itself. The EPA had used this authority to develop regulations for toxic pollutants like lead, sulfur dioxides, and particulates that cause respiratory disease. Bush’s promise indicated that he would add CO2 to that list.

  After Bush took office, his newly minted EPA director, Christine Todd Whitman, put global warming at the top of her agenda. The White House had sold the former New Jersey governor to the American public as an environmental moderate, citing her participation in a lawsuit by several eastern states against an Ohio Valley power plant.

  From my front-row seat across the Hudson River, she had not seemed very moderate. She had signed on to that power plant lawsuit reluctantly. In fact, as governor from 1993 to 2001, she was one of the nation’s leading advocates of pollution-based prosperity, cutting the state’s Department of Environmental Protection budget by 30 percent, firing virtually all of the agency’s enforcement attorneys, and relaxing enforcement of pollution laws in favor of “voluntary compliance” (which works about as well as “voluntary taxation”). She abolished New Jersey’s renowned environmental prosecutor’s office and dismantled some of the state’s most important environmental laws. She replaced the state’s public advocate with a business ombudsman and declared New Jersey “open for business.” To the public and Congress, however, Whitman looked moderate next to the Wise Use fanatics that were being handed the other top jobs. Her nomination passed the Senate 99–0.

  17

  Still, Whitman was not part of the Texas clubhouse crowd that formed the president’s inner circle. As Ron Suskind reveals in his best-seller, The Price of Loyalty, only a favored few in the new administration had the ear of the president. A month into her appointment, Whitman was still trying to clarify the president’s views on U.S. environmental policy.

  18

  As a result, Whitman was unsure what message she should bring to her first major international meeting, in Trieste, Italy, in early March 2001. The meeting was intended to prepare the eight leading industrialized nations for the official Kyoto Protocol meetings that summer. Despite Whitman’s abysmal environmental record, she recognized climate change as a genuine global crisis and, according to Suskind, she chose this issue to cultivate a reputation as an environmental steward.

  19

  Whitman turned to Paul O’Neill at Treasury. Although energy and the environment aren’t Treasury’s principal baili-wicks, O’Neill could claim a credible expertise in global warming. He told me that in his former job as CEO of Alcoa, he had worked successfully to eliminate two potent greenhouse gases from the aluminum smelting process. “I once told my board, ‘We are environmentalists first and industrialists second,’ ” he said. “I believed this in my heart and I had a place to act on my beliefs.”

  20

  In 1998, O’Neill had given a major speech on global warming to the aluminum industry that was later published as a booklet. Even then, he was frightened by the potential impacts of climate change. His overall message was that global warming, along with nuclear holocaust, must be taken more seriously than any other political issue. “If you get welfare reform wrong,” he said, “you get a second chance — civilization doesn’t go down the drain.”

  21

  Try as they might, however, neither O’Neill nor Whitman could engage the president on the topic. While O’Neill had weekly meetings with the president — more access than any cabinet official save Donald Rumsfeld — he came to feel that the president didn’t listen or deliberate in an analytical way.

  22

  According to Suskind, Whitman finally managed a meeting with Andrew Card and Condoleezza Rice to prepare a strategy on global warming. They agreed with her suggestions on what to say in Trieste: The White House was preparing to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant. That would make it appear that the United States, which emits 25 percent of the world’s CO2, was taking global warming seriously without committing the administration to the Kyoto Protocol. Whitman, confident that she had the White House’s blessing, stated this position on CNN’s Crossfire and in press conferences.

  23

  Just days later, four right-wing Republicans with strong industry ties — Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, Wise Use icon Larry Craig of Idaho, South Carolina’s Jesse Helms, and Pat Roberts of Kansas — sent a letter to the president, complaining about Whitman’s press appearances and demanding a “clarification of your administration’s policy on climate change.” O’Neill told Suskind that he was almost certain the senators’ letter had been prompted and possibly even written by Dick Cheney.

  24

  Whitman, furious that she was being outmaneuvered, scrambled to schedule a meeting with the president. But the moment she arrived in the Oval Office, before she could even launch into her speech, Bush cut her off. “Christie, I’ve already made my decision.” He held up a letter — a letter both O’Neill and Whitman believe that Cheney wrote — all ready to send back to the Republican senators, and began reading from it.

  The president would oppose Kyoto, the letter said, because it exempted 80 percent of the world, including China and India, and it was an “unfair and ineffective means of addressing global climate change concerns.” As for his campaign promise to regulate CO2 in the United States, the letter explained that he had changed his mind. He argued that the Kyoto agreement would “cause serious harm to the U.S. economy,” and emphasized the importance of energy development.

  25

  As soon as Bush had read the letter, he signaled for her to leave. In a few moments, it would be sent to the senators and released to the world. Whitman was stunned. She wandered into the anteroom outside the Oval Office, Suskind reports, where one of the secretaries was handing a document to Vice President Cheney. “Mr. Vice President,” the secretary said, “here’s the letter for Senator Hagel.” Dick Cheney picked up the letter, now freshly signed by the president, and brushed past Whitman on his way to Capi
tol Hill.

  26

  As O’Neill related to Suskind, “It was a clean kill. She was running around the world, using her own hard-won, bipartisan credibility to add color and depth to his campaign pronouncements, and now she ended up looking like a fool.”

  27

  By March 2001, the president had officially walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, and the United States had pulled out of all debate and negotiations with the rest of the world on global warming. O’Neill and Whitman were not the only ones in shock. Some of my colleagues at the NRDC had worked for more than a decade with Republican and Democratic administrations, international scientists and environmentalists, and world leaders from over 100 nations to iron out an agreement that would balance environmental and economic needs against the planet’s greatest crisis. Now the administration had not just changed the game plan — it had walked off the field. Its only proposal for dealing with global warming was denial. And its sole rationale appeared to be a desire to placate the coal and power industries and the Wise Use antiregulatory fanatics.