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TODAY Monday 16 March 1998 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site.

 

TODAY IN THE WORLD: Rebellion in Tennessee

Everyone's heard of Appomattox, but Civil War addicts know that the fate of the Confederacy was sealed four months before, at the Battle of Nashville. There, in front of the Tennessee state capitol, George Thomas and the Army of the Cumberland destroyed John Bell Hood and the Army of Tennessee. The defeat left the South with no effective force other than that commanded by Robert E. Lee in Virginia, and Lee was already sorely pressed by Grant outside Petersburg. No help would come from the west, and all knew the game was up.

Now Nashville is the center of a new states-rights revolt against federal authority, and this time the Yankees can't send in George Thomas.

The Governor of Tennessee, the Hon. Donald Sundquist, says that the US Environmental Protection Agency is all wrong in its attempt to require Tennessee to produce a plan to reduce its nitrogen oxide emissions by 35%. According to an article in yesterday's New York Times by Robyn Meredith, Sundquist and the governors of nine other southern and midwestern states have written to President Clinton questioning the scientific validity of EPA's order and requesting more time "to study local pollution patterns."

Governor Sundquist (a Minnesota name!) is the loudest of the protestors, and he likes to score with three points that typify local resistance to many new federal environmental regulations: 1) The science is bad; 2) The new regs will cause acute economic hardship; and 3) The benefits of the new regs will be conferred on faraway people not worthy of our sympathy.

No canny anti-environmentalist neglects to use the "junk science" accusation these days, as Sundquist demonstrates. The EPA proposal, he says, is based on "questionable" data, and he doesn't welcome "...Big Brother coming down here and throwing a bunch of data at us that will harm our state." The harm can't be quantified yet, said the governor's spokesman on the issue, except to say that complying with the EPA would halt the state's growth within nine years. And as hard-working Tennesseans are supposed to be drastically reducing their emissions, who stands to benefit but effete downwinders in the Northeastern states? In a quote weirdly mixing 1860 and 1998, the governor's man said "We don't need an arbitrary Government promulgating intolerable acts for economic protection of a New England that can no longer compete." Yankees are trying to saddle non-Yankees with higher operating costs under the guise of environmental protection. John C. Calhoun meets Steve Forbes.

This is the politics of wind. The prevailing winds at the middle latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere blow west to east, which is to say from the factories, freeways, and coal-burning generators of the Midwest and upper South onto the more post-industrial landscapes of the Northeast. It has become a truism to say that pollution knows no boundaries, but truisms tend to be true. And this is, and will remain, a big bone of contention. Northeast Republicans like Christine Whitman and Alfonse D'Amato and Olympia Snowe and John Chaffee can't afford to be seen softening clean air protections for their constituents, and so cooperate with regional Democrats to provide a pretty solid regional power bloc to force the EPA to crack down on the big emitters to their west. Who don't like being cracked down upon. And, mind you, the EPA proposals that exercise Governor Sundquist are nowhere near as draconian as the ones that were promulgated last year but which won't go into effect until Bill Clinton is safely out of office. Buckle your seatbelts.

 

TODAY ON THE SITE

For a solid grounding on the science and politics of clean/dirty air, move over to our High Fives section and check out the websites on the subject of Air/Atmosphere recommended by Dan Lashoff, resident expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

 

Recent "Today" columns:

3/13: Good News from the Senate
3/12: Children and Cancer
3/11: Save Our Beaches!
3/10: Die Gruenen und der SDP
3/9: In Search for the Holy Grail of the Forests
3/6: My Doom, Your Gloom
3/5: The Great D. P. Moynihan
3/4: "An Earthquake in Insurance"
3/3: Salmon Farming
3/2: Our Friends the Duck Killers
2/27: Trust El Nino
2/26: That Darn Triple-A
2/25: Cutting a Deal on Endangered Species
2/24: Fire? Again?
2/23: Garbage
2/20: Population Rebellion in the Sierra Club
2/19: The Trouble With Cattle

To access more "Today" columns, click "Archives" below.