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TODAY Tuesday 17 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
newsroom
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TODAY Tuesday 17 June 1997 Each weekday. Conn Nugent on what's new in the world, on the site. |
TODAY IN THE WORLD: Air War
Things don't look good for the enviro side in the latest round of the slugfest over air pollution. The balance of power within the Administration seems to have shifted since last we looked ("Clean Air, Hot Air"), and EPA Administrator Carol Browner is now being asked to fall on her sword.
Under the Clean Air Act, the EPA is required to update its air-quality regulations. The new regulations, the law stipulates, must be grounded in scientific evidence and designed to serve one end only: the protection of public health. For years the scientists at EPA have been poring over new evidence that airborne fine particles -- tiny specks of soot, ash, and various kinds of crud -- play an important role in pulmonary diseases and may be implicated in a dramatic rise in asthma. So earlier this year Browner issued a set of proposed new regulations that would appreciably reduce the tolerated levels of particulates and would also ratchet down allowable levels of groundlevel ozone, a distinctive and particularly unhealthful component of the atmospheric soup we call smog.
No one was surprised that industries who produce particulates and ozone objected to the proposed standards. Utilities; particularly coal-burning utilities; fossil-fuel companies; automakers. And on this issue, they're joined by the AFL-CIO. What surprised the enviros was not that these interests attacked the proposals as costly and uneconomical -- standard anti-regulatory tactics -- but that they also spent large sums of money casting doubt on the validity of their scientific underpinnings. Lots of ads, lots of op eds. And, according to Greenwire, on Sunday an industry front group ran a full-page ad in the Washington Post signed by 100 physicians and scientists, asking EPA to postpone new standards "until the science shows we can be more certain that the public health will measurably benefit." That's pretty slick.
In Congress, normally pro-environment Democrats were taking heat from labor and from John Dingell and his fellow Michiganders. In the White House, almost all of the economics people -- Office of Management and Budget, Council of Economic Advisors, Treasury -- argued for less stringent standards. The President said nothing, waiting for the bureaucratic dust to settle and the political stars to align.
And on the side of the angels? Browner herself hung tough and stood behind her scientists, infuriating more malleable types. The American Lung Association was working hard -- people with emphysema get motivated about these issues -- and so were some very solid staffers from the national environmental groups. Phil Clapp and the Environmental Information Center, the self-described "war room of the environmental movement," went into high gear. But the enviros didn't have much money set aside for this fight and hadn't adequately organized a prestigious and mobile team of "white coats" -- doctors and scientists -- to press home the essential point that the new regs were based on sound science. And, perhaps most telling, there hasn't been much of anything from the environmental grassroots. The regs stayed a Beltway fight for too long, and recent efforts by the groups to stir up the faithful are probably too little, too late.
Acutely disappointing the enviros, Vice President Gore kept quiet. Some of his staff leaked unflattering remarks about Browner, and his longtime protÚgÚe Katie McGinty, chair of the Council on Environmental Quality, took the side of the economists. She and Gene Sperling, chair of the National Economic Council, sent a joint letter to Browner on Friday, asking her to endorse a significant weakening of the proposed standards.
But Browner may not be through if she plays her high card. She can send the undiluted proposals directly to the President and, in effect, compel him to play Solomon. Bill Clinton would then have to ponder the competing interests of public health and industrial expansion, soccer moms and UAW workers, Northeasterners and Midwesterners, and Al Gore One and Al Gore Two. Tough call for a second-termer anxious for a place in history.
TODAY ON THE SITE
New materials are now posted from Tom Turner and Jacqueline Volin for their Media Watch in the Newsroom. Their review of journalism by and about environmentalists, expanded each week by timely updates, is the widest-ranging, most acute feature of its kind, in print or on the screen.
6/16: Pray for Swelter
6/13: Treating Soil like Dirt
6/12: Cheap Oil and Bargain Cars
6/11: More Taxes
6/10: Clean Air, Hot Air
6/09: Swimming
6/06: Enviros and Transpo
6/05: Fabulous Ethanol
6/04: Swine and Federalism
6/03: A New Measure
6/02: My Front Yard
5/30: Funders
5/29: Quantification
5/28: Over the Top
5/27: Solar Hippies
5/23: Spiffy Cars, Clunker Bikes
5/22: Petroleum Heresy
5/21: We Irish
5/20: Shallow Backpackers
5/19: Songbirds
5/16: Fat, Fat, Fat
5/15: Our Forthright Administration
5/14: Coral Reefs of the Sahara
5/13: (Life Before) Death and Taxes
5/12: Kids
5/09: Free Trade and Hormones
5/08: Sherry Boehlert, Republican
5/07: Fort Davis, West Texas
5/06: Europe (yawn)
5/05: Divorce, Mothers, Equality
5/02: Killer Grannies and the Highway Bill
5/01: China
4/30: Pity the Mangrove
4/29: Grizzlies off Battery Park
4/28: Mighty Monsanto
4/25: Growth
4/24: Refrigerator Wars
4/23: The Day the Earth Day Stood Still
4/22: Doorman Ecology
4/21: Toyota Steps Out
4/18: Victims of Extremism
4/17: Our White Guy Problem
4/16: Coca-Cola and the Merrit Parkway