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.1

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 our parents 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 riverfront 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?

1

The Mess in Texas

A

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.1

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 acrid 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.5 Every major urban area—Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, El Paso, and Longview—either failed to meet the EPA’s minimum air quality standards, or was on the verge of failing.6

“ The level of damage to human health is extraordinary,” says Tom Smith, director of the Texas office of Public Citizen, a consumer advocacy organization. He cites a recent mayoral study estimating annual pollution-related health care costs of between $2.9 and $3.1 billion in the Houston metropolitan area alone.7 Air pollution kills an estimated 435 people a year in the city.8 “We lead the nation in childhood asthma,” says Lanell Anderson, a resident of Clear Lake, a town south of Houston that’s surrounded by chemical plants. “We lead the nation in childhood cancer. . . . Our cup runneth over.”9

Texas has long been one of the most polluted states in the country, but rather than remedy the situation, George W. Bush set out to destroy virtually all attempts to clean up the state’s tainted air, water, and land. During his six-year reign as governor, from 1994 to 2000, Texas dropped to number 49 in spending on the environment.10 Under his watch, Texas had the worst pollution record in the United States. It sent the most toxic chemicals and carcinogens into the air. It had the highest emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), accounting for at least 10 percent of the national total. It had the most chemical spills and Clean Water Act violations, and produced the largest volume of hazardous waste.11 As New York Times columnist Bob Herbert put it shortly before Bush received the Republican nomination in 2000, “Mr. Bush’s relationship to the environment is roughly that of a doctor to a patient—when the doctor’s name is Kevorkian.”12

The anti-environment agenda of today’s White House was honed and perfected during Bush’s gubernatorial years. It was in Texas that he developed the tactics and policies that guide his autocratic leadership today: closed-door meetings with industry insiders who are among his biggest campaign contributors; reliance on pseudo-scientific “studies” by right-wing think tanks; emasculation of regulations that cut into industry profits; citizens muzzled in debates that affect their communities.

Soon after becoming governor, Bush declared tort reform an “emergency issue” and appointed judges who made it all but impossible for Texans to bring class action lawsuits against polluters. In 1995 he pushed through the Private Real Property Rights Preservation Act, a radical “takings” bill that would make taxpayers pay polluters’ cost of complying with pollution laws. According to this view, corporations should be able to do what they want with their private property; if the state cuts into their profits by forcing them to adopt pollution-control measures, the state (i.e., the public) should pay. This perverse doctrine reverses a millennium of western property law that holds that owners can use their property as they please, but never in a way that diminishes their neighbors’ property or the public trust properties like air and water. Leading the charge for this radical new approach was right-wing private-property advocate Marshall Kuykendall, who complained at a public forum that the last time the federal government took our property without compensation is “when Lincoln freed the slaves.”13

In another foreshadowing of his presidency, Bush installed a pro-industry troika to run the state’s environmental agency, the Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission. Bush selected Barry McBee, a lawyer with a host of oil-industry clients, to chair the TNRCC. At his previous position at the Texas Department of Agriculture, farm labor and environmental groups accused McBee of helping to dismantle a program that kept farmworkers out of fields that were still “hot” after pesticide applications. The second appointee was Ralph Marquez, a former Monsanto executive and lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council. Marquez quashed a plan to issue health warnings to Houston residents on high-smog days and later testified before a congressional committee that ozone “is a relatively benign pollutant.”14 Bush’s third appointment was a cattleman named John Baker, former official of the Texas Farm Bureau, a sworn enemy of pesticide regulations.15

The new TNRCC came to be known by the moniker “Train Wreck.” Until this new regime was in place, all Texas citizens had the right to challenge pollution permits required by companies for their waste disposal. This right is one of the few recourses that regular folks have to protect their health, homes, and communities from the ravages of pollution. The new TNRCC soon eliminated this policy, as well as the long-standing practice of making surprise inspections of industrial plants. It discovered loopholes in all kinds of federal and state environmental regulations. On Halloween 1995, for example, the TNRCC announced Texas’s plan to revise the Ozone National Ambient Air Quality Standards, an EPA directive that requires states to monitor for unsafe levels of ozone. The TNRCC decided it would mathematically average ozone pollution across large areas, in hopes that, in the words of Neil Carman, a former agency staffer, it could make “exceedances disappear by massaging the high numbers.” Carman is now Clean Air Director for the Lone Star chapter of the Sierra Club.16

Slashing the TNRCC’s budget by 20 percent, Bush ensured that the commission couldn’t possibly fulfill its duty as the state’s environmental watchdog. Texas virtually ceased monitoring water quality after Bush’s election, for example, despite the fact that Texas had far more facilities discharging into waterways than any other state.17 The Environmental Working Group, a national nonprofit research organization, reported that Texas also had the worst record in the country for inspecting companies that violated the Clean Water Act.18 Indeed, so little money was spent on protecting waterways that “almost nothing is known about the quality of 25,000 out of 40,000 miles of the state’s permanent rivers and streams,” according to the Texas Environmental Almanac in 1995. Even when the TNRCC did know of toxic water, it often failed to disclose its findings to the public. When the commission learned of high mercury levels in the Rio Grande River near Laredo, for example, it refused to inform residents.19 In 1999, the Natural Resources Defense Council named Texas as one of six “beach bum” states for a second consecutive year—because the state had no monitoring system designed to alert swimmers to potential pollution-related health risks.20

But it is Governor Bush’s record on air pollution that is most appalling. When the Texas Clean Air Act of 1971 became law, more than 1,000 industrial facilities were “grandfathered,” or exempted from the new pollution regulations. The idea was that these grandfathered plants would eventually either modernize or become obsolete and close down. This was wishful thinking at best: In reality, companies that didn’t have to spend money on pollution control had a competitive edge over their regulated competitors.21 And with little incentive to modernize, they didn’t. While their competitors had to apply for a permit to pollute, running the gauntlet of public comment and government scrutiny, grandfathered companies just kept their outdated plants up and running.

These grandfathered polluters now create havoc for communities all over Texas. For example, some 30 miles from Dallas is the town of Midlothian, known as the “Cement Capital of America.” The largest operator is the TXI Corporation, whose emission control systems date back to 1972. The plant is powered by a generator that burns hazardous waste trucked in by other companies, a double-your-money idea that eliminates the need for natural gas to fire TXI’s kilns. The company’s own testing has revealed smokestacks belching out carcinogens at levels far in excess of EPA standards.22 According to a 1997 report in the Dallas Observer, “scientists don’t even have names for some of the substances coming out of TXI’s stacks.”23 Midlothian residents have long complained of a variety of health problems, and a 1996 report by the Texas Department of Health noted that Down’s syndrome is unusually prevalent in babies born in the area.24

Fully one-third of the state’s air pollution—903,800 tons a year by the end of the 1990s—was issuing from these grandfathered smokestacks.25 These plants emit as much nitrogen oxide as 18 million cars.26 One company, Alcoa, Inc., North America’s largest aluminum smelter, was responsible for more than 100,000 tons of toxic emissions at one of its plants in 1997. Neighboring Milam County residents maintain that the air around Alcoa’s smelter is so acidic that it eats the galvanized coating off barbed-wire fences. Neil Carman of the Sierra Club compares the situation to getting caught driving without a license, but happily finding that speed limits don’t apply to you: “You just say, ‘Well, I’m grandfathered, officer,’ and the reply is, ‘Have a good day, just don’t kill too many people.’”27

By the 1990s, the Clinton administration’s EPA had these Texas polluters in its crosshairs. This put Bush in a tight spot. In order to get the EPA off his back, he needed to put some kind of state regulations in place. Trouble was, many of the top polluters were his prime financial backers. Between 1993 and 1998 Alcoa, Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Enron, Dow Chemical, and others poured $1.5 million into the Bush campaign coffers.28

After privately conferring with these corporate backers, Bush pushed through two landmark laws, the 1995 Texas Audit Privilege and Immunity Law, and the 1999 Voluntary Emissions Reduction Permit Program. Rather like the fox guarding the henhouse, the laws allow companies to monitor their own pollution, report their violations to the government, and promise to clean up. There would be no fines, no public disclosure, no government follow-up. Imagine a world where criminals could stay out of jail simply by confessing their crime to a state agency and promising to do better in the future. That’s the law Bush came up with to cope with some of the most polluted air on Earth.

The outcome of these two laws does not bode well for the rest of America. In the summer of 2000, in a news item that received little national attention, the University of Texas released the results of its $20 million Texas Air Quality Study. The study revealed that Houston’s industries had been vastly underreporting the magnitude of their emissions. Scientists found it hard to believe the instrument readings from aircraft measuring industrial plumes. The various chemicals were 6 to 15 times higher than what the Houston Ship Channel’s factories had been reporting to state and federal agencies. Some chemicals were at levels 100 times higher.29 In 2001, the TNRCC’s draft report to the Texas legislature conceded that Governor Bush’s plan had so far resulted in zero reductions in air pollution.

This was hardly news to most Texans. Back in October 1999, in the Houston suburb of Deer Park, high school athletes exercising outside experienced severe coughing fits and difficulty breathing in the midst of one of the worst smog episodes on record. Furious parents demanded that the state notify schools to protect students from outdoor exertion during severe air pollution episodes.30 According to the Texas chapter of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), more than 290 schools were located within a two-mile radius of a “grandfathered” polluter.31 So much for No Child Left Behind.

Yet Bush no doubt considers his air pollution laws wildly successful. The CEOs of at least nine of Texas’s grandfathered polluters ponied up a minimum $100,000 pledge to become “Bush Pioneers” in support of their pal’s bid for the White House. Alcoa’s law firm, Vinson & Elkins, was also a top contributor. So was another litigator, Baker & Botts, the law firm of James Baker, who would guide Bush’s legal fight in Florida after the disputed 2000 election. The Baker & Botts client list included eight of the grandfathered polluters.32 “Pollution policy in Texas has become a cash-and-carry operation,” observes Erin Rogers, coordinator of Texas’s PEER office. “If you have the cash, you can carry on as you like.”33

When George W. Bush became president, he brought his environment-for-sale agenda with him, along with many of his Texas cronies. At the top of the list, of course, was Vice President Dick Cheney, CEO of the world’s second-largest oil-drilling services company, Texas-based Halliburton. The Energy Department’s transition team, also headed by Cheney, included three Bush Pioneers from Texas, one of whom was Enron’s former chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay. To run the Commerce Department, Bush tapped another oilman from Midland, Don Evans. Karl Rove, then a right-wing Texas political consultant with long-term ties to the Bush family, became his chief political adviser. Tom DeLay was already on Capitol Hill. DeLay, the onetime Houston pest exterminator turned House whip, once referred to the EPA as “the Gestapo of government.”34 This core group would in turn bring along their own friends of industry, such as Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa, whom Bush tapped to run the U.S. Treasury Department.

A Charge to Keep, George W. Bush’s 253-page book on his pre-presidential life and times, contains a single sentence on air and water pollution.35 That’s one more sentence than he devoted to the environment in his 2004 State of the Union speech. But as we’ll soon see, the environment has remained very much on his mind—with the lessons he learned in Texas serving as his guide.