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Is Al Gore Manning the Bush EPA?

CAPITALISM MAGAZINE.COM
by Michelle Malkin
August 13, 2001
Source

When the Bush administration lands on the same side of an issue as The New York Times editorial board, Sen. Hillary Clinton and the Sierra Club, it's time to clear out the cockpit. The administration's latest junk science decision should cause Bush supporters to wonder: Is Al Gore secretly manning the EPA?

Last week, Bush's Environmental Protection Agency ordered General Electric Co. to fork over nearly half a billion dollars to dredge up long-buried chemicals from New York's Hudson River. That's exactly what the Clinton-Gore administration proposed in an eleventh-hour decree last year -- despite heated opposition from local residents, flimsy evidence of harm from the chemicals, probable injury to the natural habitat, and certain damage to the economy.

This massive, federally mandated cleanup will ruin the landscape and cost precious jobs in blue-collar communities along the river, but it will keep Beltway bureaucrats, lawyers and eco-whiners employed for decades. "This is a tremendous environmental victory," crowed Chris Ballantyne of the Sierra Club. A Times editorial called EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman's decision "admirable." Sen. Clinton declared dredging "the right position, based on the science, to take."

The pro-dredgers claim that PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) embedded in the river bottom pose a grave cancer risk and must be completely eliminated. GE produced the chemicals in the manufacturing of electrical transformers. The company legally disposed of its PCB-contaminated waste into the Hudson from the 1940s until 1977, when the chemical was banned.

Since that time, the tainted sediment has been buried by layers and layers of mud. Commerce and tourism on the banks are healthy; locals swim freely and safely in the river; and at least one town along the targeted area taps the river for drinking water. A review of the current scientific literature shows there is no credible evidence of increased human cancer risk from exposure to trace levels of PCBs. Studies of workers exposed to high PCB levels and studies of people who ate PCB-contaminated fish showed no increased cancer risk when compared to non-exposed populations.

Now, it's true that PCBs can cause cancerous tumors in animals -- but only after you inject enormous doses of the chemical into lab mice over prolonged periods. "But what about the fish?" the enviros wail. What about them? Thanks to sensible, minimally disruptive remediation efforts over the past three decades, fish populations are thriving. That might not be the case if the Clinton-Gore-Bush-Whitman plan goes through.

The proposed "cleanup" would involve dredging some 2.65 million cubic yards of contaminated sediment from the Hudson -- 19 hours a day, six days a week, six and a half months a year for an estimated five years. At least two new hazardous waste plants would be built on the river or its banks to process the PCBs, and an estimated 45,000 tons of waste a day would be hauled out to non-existent landfills (sure to be opposed by the same NIMBY enviros that created this mess).

According to the grass-roots activist group CEASE (Citizen Environmentalists Against Sludge Encapsulation), which has opposed dredging for nearly a quarter-century, the EPA project would also destroy 97 acres of prime aquatic habitat, killing or displacing all of the creatures that live there, and destabilize or destroy 17 miles of Hudson River shoreline.

Tim Havens, a small businessman who heads CEASE, told me this week he was "overwhelmingly disappointed" in the Bush administration's decision to carry out the Clinton-Gore plan. Havens blasted the EPA's arrogant secrecy and shoddy science. Whitman has never visited the affected counties and didn't even pay residents the courtesy of informing them of the decision before telling the press.

"We're staunch Republicans in these communities -- working class citizens, small businesspeople, farmers, homeowners and housewives," Havens told me. "We're the backbone of the American economy, and we thought Bush and his people would be a lot friendlier. They decided to take the easy way out." Havens warns: "We'll remember in November" when Bush ally and dredging proponent, GOP Governor of New York George Pataki, is up for re-election.

On the science, economics and politics of this dredging debacle, one thing's crystal clear: The Bush administration has mucked up big time.

Bush's Environmental Guacamole

Townhall.com
By Michelle Malkin
April 27, 2001

Christie Todd Whitman has committed some of the Bush administration's biggest gaffes to date -- most infamously, her ill-fated crusade to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions at all costs to thwart alleged global warming.

Bush Republicans are right to thwack Whitman for espousing a radical agenda that defies basic principles of limited government and economic common sense. But I'm not going to join the pinata party. There is neither sport nor valiancy in assaulting such an easy target.

The liberal Republican ex-governor of New Jersey and current head of the Environmental Protection Agency has never hidden her true colors. It's no surprise that she has embraced the EPA tradition of kowtowing to the eco-lobby and promoting junk science. President Bush knew of her green streak when he nominated her to head the EPA. So did every Republican on Capitol Hill -- yet, not a single one of them spoke against Whitman when she was confirmed unanimously by the Senate in January. The GOP has only itself to blame for the curse of Christie.

As the president embarks on his next 100 days, conservatives must reckon with the Bush administration's chief bungler on environmental issues -- not Whitman, but Bush himself.

To date, Bush has upheld Clinton-Gore era regulations on everything from lead and land grabs to washing machines and wetlands. The White House continues to perform reverse somersaults on extremist enviro pet causes such as tightening diesel and arsenic regulations to ridiculous, costly and unscientifically justified levels. Most alarming of all is the president's straddling on Al Gore's favorite hobby horse, global warming.

Bush initially scored points with conservatives when he opposed the Kyoto protocol, the international treaty on greenhouse gases drafted by scare-mongerers at the United Nations. The plan pushes draconian regulatory actions on industry despite any scientific consensus that a crisis actually exists. Whitman was excoriated for defending the basic principles of Kyoto. But it seems she's only echoing the true views of her boss. Witness Bush's remarks made in a Washington Post interview just this week:

Q: Understanding your objections to the Kyoto protocol, what do you plan to do to demonstrate that the United States is not walking away from that issue?
A: Well, that's a great question because that's the very question every one of these leaders have asked me, and my answer's always the same ... They've got to understand that the environment is of concern to this administration, that we're, I think, the first administration to ever set up mandatory reductions in ... nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and mercury, along with other decisions I made.

(Other nations) appreciate the fact that ours is an administration that said wait a minute, the spirit is fine but the details aren't going to work and let's work together to come up with a better protocol, a better way, and we will.

Boasting about imposing "mandatory reductions" of any kind is frighteningly Gore-ific. As Bush himself reminded Gore during the campaign, the jury is still out on the primary cause of global warming (human or natural) and whether the effects might actually do more good than harm. And what exactly does Bush mean when he says the "spirit" of Kyoto is "fine"? The spirit of Kyoto is infected with what environmentalists call the "precautionary principle." This is the idea that nothing should be used, sold, emitted or otherwise approved by the world's governments until and unless it's proven safe.

If we had applied that cowering standard in the past, we wouldn't have open-heart surgery, penicillin, skyscrapers or the combustion engine. Too much caution can be as dangerous as too little. And spending billions of dollars reducing the theoretical risks of global warming means fewer resources for the real and deadly environmental risks that now plague underdeveloped nations -- like diarrhea and malaria.

Bush was supposed to restore rationality to America's approach to environmental risk in the modern world. Instead, he has sought vainly to score points with soccer moms, Sierra Club dads and MTV deadheads. The result is a pale green policy mish-mash of environmental guacamole that's thoroughly indigestible.