Meet The New Energy Law, Same As The Old Energy Law
So the nation is about to get a new energy law.
According to John Broder, writing for the NYTimes Co. (12.14.07), “Industry Flexes Muscle, and Weakened Bill Passes Senate.”
Last week, I had read that the bill was 1000 pages in length. Despite the corporate culture drumbeat about landmark increased motor vehicle efficiency standards, that piece of information of itself should have been sufficient to force the conclusion that nothing good could possibly emerge. On the contrary: what could our public servants fill those pages with except even more poisonings, destructions, and tyrannies?
A thousand pages? Clearly, no Earthling had read the bill. No representative. No journalist. No pundit. No candidate. And just as clearly, few elected officials hands had ever fondled a clause.
What the NYTimes Co. reported on Friday was that the bill that cleared the Senate was “pared-down” legislation. Why pared-down? “…the oil industry and utilities…the Edison Electric Institute…the National Association of Manufacturers, the US Chamber of Commerce…” were, I reckon, merely asserting their First Amendment “rights.”
Courageous Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted that “it would pass overwhelmingly early next week.” She could be confident because “A White House spokesman said President Bush was pleased that the bill was ‘moving in the right direction’ and that he would sign it if he could remember how to spell his name.”
An add-on to the NYTimes article mentioned that Congress reached a SEPARATE agreement “on a major energy package that it plans to enact outside the energy bill…to be included in a broad govt spending bill…would authorize the Energy Dept to guarantee loans for various energy projects, making financing far easier…would guarantee loans of up to $25 billion for new nuclear plants and $2 for a uranium enrichment plant.. It would also provide up to $10 billion for plants to turn coal into liquid vehicle fuel and $2 billion to turn coal into natural gas. And $10 for renewable energy projects. (Not my mother’s idea of appropriate solar, I’m sure!)
Whatsamatter? The 1000 page energy bill wasn’t fat enough to include all this other stuff? But I digress. The reporter pointed out: “Environmental advocates were generally pleased with the passage off the new vehicle fuel-economy standards and the biofuel provisions. Dan Becker, an environmental consultant who has been working on auto efficiency issues for nearly 20 years, called passage of the bill the biggest environmental victory since enactment of the Clean Air Act of 1990.”
The biggest environmental victory since the Clean Air Act of 1990? Wowiezowie. It’s history in the making. But BAD history piled up upon BAD history. What WAS the “Clean Air Act of 1990″? Dan Becker should know. He was there 18 years ago, working for the Sierra Club. But in case you don’t go back that far, here are some excerpts from an article I wrote in 1991.
I had been one of the few Earthlings actually reading every draft and version of the proposed Clean Air Act Amendments. With this knowledge about the words that were really and truly in the bills, I wrote a number of articles, primarily to alert community activists who obviously were being sold down the river from the get-go. Do keep in mind that by the end of the 1980s, a strong and vigorous anti-toxic struggle had emerged from communities — starting off in the Southeast, moving to the Northeast, and then spreading across the nation — and I thought, maybe, that these folks would force their “friends” in Washington DC to be a little honest.
Here are some excerpts from what I wrote after the president signed the bill into law. I titled my article THE SONG AND DANCE OF THE 1990 CLEAN AIR ‘ACT’. It appeared in New Solutions, A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, Winter 1991
The words that follow [posted here] describe what happened almost two decades ago. The same is happening TODAY with this current “energy” stuff. The same will keep happening over and over with every other “issue” until there is no air to breathe, no water to drink, no work for anyone, no Earth to stand on. And our leaders — especially our “friends” — will continue declaring that their treasons and stabbings in the back are the greatest victories since the last time they screwed the people, and screwed the planet.
And now, down memory lane. Alas, it’s not a nice journey.
- Posted by Richard Grossman, CELDF
(Read Grossman’s Essay Commentary from 1990 in the Comments section)
on December 29th, 2007 at 4:58 pm
“The Clean Air Act of 1990 is law now…the public — and the planet — are the losers. So is the democratic process. And the environmental movement. [It] does not do much to stop or cut back the production of poisons. Administration and Congressional leaders met many times in secret during these last 18 months to craft these bills which deny citizen access to industrial decision-making and which concentrate authority in appointed bodies far from citizens’ reach. Yet environmental leaders in Washington nevertheless have urged their constituents to rally behind these bills which they label as vital health and environmental protections.
[I then gave a short summary of why major changes in manufacturing and production and machine use were essential….closing with] “The chemical industry now manufactures about 500 billion pounds of [deadly] ‘products,’ and an equivalent amount of [deadly] ‘wastes’ each year….Previous ‘clean air’ acts directed the EPA to protect the public’s health. But for the last decade, the EPA has directed its efforts mostly into nurturing a ‘waste management’ and ‘toxic dumping’ industry and into keeping angry citizens at arms’ length from polluters. Illness and premature death, the destruction of ecosystems and the undermining of the nation’s productive capacity continue to be the price we pay by ceding to industry the sole right to decide what to produce and how to produce it.
“During the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush Administration forbade any attempt to put clean air on the agenda….when George Bush [the father] became president, he signaled that he wanted a new clean air law to be the ‘centerpiece’ of his environmental presidency.”
In June, 1989, “the president summoned Congressional leaders, governors, and, in his words, ‘executives of some of the most important companies and business organizations in America, along with leading conservationists,’ to the East room. He told them: ‘…this can be known as the year we mobilize leadership, both public and private, to make environmental protection a growth industry…Ours is a rare opportunity to reverse the errors of this generation in the service of the next.’ ”
…”Abetted by the Reagan-Bush Administration, industry had prevented any Congressional action on air pollution since 1977, and had blocked enforcement of the 1970 law and its 1977 amendments. The press proclaimed a new era. ‘In Washington DC, This is the Year for Clean Air,’ headlined the NYTIMES. ‘Bush, Resolving Clash in Campaign Promises, Tilts to Environment,’ the Wall Street Journal confided.
“What the press missed was that by the time the best minds and talents had gathered in the East Room, the Clean Air Coalition [made up of the big national env groups, with some labor, church, etc] already had decided to wage a campaign on their adversaries’ terms. The Coalition had chosen only to tinker with the existing regulatory framework which legalizes industrial poisoning and which disempowers citizens….The Coalition focused on existing technologies. It assured the president that adequate machines are available now to ‘control’ pollution. The Coalition did not try to get zero emissions on the table even though this was a subject of deep discussion among proponents of the 1970 Clean Air Act. It did not demand safe substitutes, or a shift in the burden of proof to those producing new or questionable substances. Other than recommending slow (until 2003 A. D. ) phase-out of some ozone destroyers, it proposed no bans, even of chemicals and industrial processes known to be killers. It validated ‘risk assessment’ as a tool of EPA decision-making, along with ‘acceptable risk,’ and ‘cost,’ as part of the best definition of “best technology.’ It also accepted cancer as the primary indicator for EPA to use to decide what action to take. “All of this contradicts positions taken by the national conservation and environmental organizations. For example, the Coalition’s May letter to the president begins: ‘Our nation faces a crisis of deteriorating air quality…We urge you to adopt a program to achieve a national goal of clean, healthy air quality before the end of the 1990s…Passing an ambitious new clean air act is our highest environmental priority in Congress.’ Yet the Coalition proposed methods which would not clean much air this decade or the next. Its actions were hardly consistent with ‘crisis’ or ‘highest priority.’
“The two clean air bills which emerged from the House and Senate total more than 1000 pages. …When the bills passed their separate houses of Congress, the Boston Globe declared them ‘a historic crackdown on air pollution.’ USA Today announced that ‘a sweeping clean air law is [ordering] industry to eliminate airborne toxics.’”
“But there was no crackdown, no sweep. The bills never were intended to give citizens new tools to help them force polluters to change their production methods or make amends for the great harm they already had caused. It was as if there had been no debate in Congress since the 1960s, as if epidemiological evidence had not been piling up, as if citizen organizers today are not demanding a new ethic and the laws to match which values people, community and ecosystems above ever more production, “The Coalition has not only embraced limited goals which contradict people’s experience, but also has validated a regulatory structure which conceals, confuses and disempowers. Both House and Senate versions of the bill concentrate greater authority in the EPA and its administrator, even though EPA stands revealed as the protector of polluters rather than of the environment. The Coalition went along with intricate defining mechanisms and permitting systems which legalize increased production and emission of poisons. It agreed to complex timetables riddled with exemptions and extensions for the steel, oil, chemical and other industries. It accepted assumptions contrary to the science and practice of public health.”
Re: the “lost jobs” language that was being celebrated: “It does nothing to protect workers and communities against industry and politician job blackmail. It does nothing to open debate on how the workers can contribute their expertise to transform these industries. It takes no steps toward even raising the idea that our citizenry must plan and carry out industrial transitions without forcing workers onto the scrap heap, without ruining and abandoning community after community.”
This law gives “no inkling of any new directions the nation should seek. No part of the bill recognizes the need to stop building millions of new cars and trucks and to substitute less destructive, less costly transportation alternatives. There is occasional lip service to something called ‘mass transit,’ but no direction, no commitment, no funding. There is nothing to help people withstand the great power of the auto industry, or to encourage the leadership of the United Auto Workers to stop shilling for dirty air. Similarly, there is no commitment to national energy efficiency or to a transition to solar power.
“The Coalition chose voluntary complicity when it agreed to play the inside game with the president’s assembled best. The Coalition seems to value credibility with the politicians and the polluters more than credibility with the polluted. The Coalition could have chosen otherwise. In the 1980s, thousands of community-based groups formed to stop the poisoning. They learned as they went along. They learned the importance of identifying the poisoners and stopping the poisoning. They understood the need to counter job blackmail, to make the poisoners liable, to gain access to production and financial information, to intervene in investment, technology, and production decisions — in other words, to challenge managerial prerogative. They learned the importance of dragging democracy past factory gates and board room doors. They understood that communities have to battle for resources to care for the afflicted and to build for an equitable and ecologically sound tomorrow. The local organizations have pursued strategies independently of national conservation and environmental groups, going up against the producers, waste dumpers, incinerator and high builders, nuclear bomb makers, and agribusiness land destroyers.
“If the talent in the East Room had set out intentionally to craft legislation aimed at undercutting these local citizen efforts, they could have not done better than these ‘clean air’ bills. The bills are a slap in the face to the people mobilizing across the country to protect their families and communities.,
“But the Coalition won’t tell. It forgot about its warning to the president that ‘the substance must match’ the promises. The politicians won’t tell. The polluters, whining to the end as they laugh up their sleeves, won’t tell. And the reporters can’t tell because they won’t bother to read the text.”
Under the heading FALSE VICTORY, I went on: “Now that the Clean Air Act is law, a great victory will be declared by the president, Congress’ environmental leaders, the institutional environmental movement, and even by the polluters. The press will dutifully report those lofty claims, label the law a noble compromise, and call it ‘the best we could get.’ Lawmakers who voted for the bill will go home and say they were ‘for’ clean air. The law and the political process which Clean Air Coalition Chair Richard Ayres called atrocious will be hailed as a model. The locus of activity will shift to highly-insulated regulatory agencies and appointed permitting boards, to detached scientific committees and unaccountable EPA offices, all far removed from community organizers who are trying to change the ways America does business. In procedures stacked against citizens and common sense, industry lawyers will challenge even the mealymouthed criteria in the bills which could save a tree or bird here or there. A handful of environmental lawyers will valiantly try to hold the line. For the next decade or longer, the environmental establishment will pour money and effort into fighting the debilitating language, suffocating structure and stacked decks of what they have wrought.
“Congress, polluters and the president will move on to amend RCRA, to focus on energy, water and the rest of their ‘environmental’ agenda. They will see the Clean Air Coalition groups sending out direct mail asking for money now that the clean air battle has been ‘won.’ This will reaffirm to them that despite all the polls, all the Earth Day hoopla, all the pundits who have declared this ‘the environmental decade,’ they still have little to fear from those groups working in isolation from the broader, community-based movement. They will be confident that, as they did with their song and dance in the clean air ‘act,’ they will be able to restrict the legislative agenda and manipulate the national environmental organizations. “The polluters will poison on. They will grow more powerful, and continue to get away, literally, with murder. They and the politicians will control debate, shape press coverage, limit what the public knows and keep their precious managerial prerogative. People, flora and fauna will go on dying from poisoned air, none the wiser for the experience.”
“The lesson here is not so much that the Clean Air Coalition lost, but that without having engaged in a real battle, it declares that it has won. In fact, it lost in a way which did not educate or energize the nation, and which creates a false sense that mechanisms are now in place to bring ‘air pollution’ under control. What must be recognized is that the Coalition never set out to stop the poisoning and destruction that have increased since national clean air laws were enacted in the 1970s. It did not try to ask publicly why this has been so. It did not seek citizen empowerment, or debates that would reveal the investment and production changes that would ‘clean’ the air. It never consulted community-based organizers to find out what laws they needed….”
[THIS] “air struggle was a major setback. It would be a disaster if the process were repeated…Community activists do not want to argue with industry and government experts over ‘acceptable’ risks. They do not want to be stuck in legal proceedings that are stacked against them and which are contrary to common sense. They do not want to be locked into [toxics] timetables which protect polluters for decades. They do want to be able to protect their communities, their children, and ecological diversity. If they are going to risk their jobs and their livelihoods by crossing their local power structures, they want to do so in pursuit of substantive changes in political power and production practices, not paper victories.
“They certainly do not need to be sold out by the very institutions which in the past helped to raise the nation’s environmental awareness.
“In 1970, Congressman Ken Heckler from West Virginia declared on the floor of the House of Representatives: “…our nation has had a sad and frustrating history of weak-kneed inaction by those who’ve been charged with protecting the divine right of every citizen to breathe clean air…We can no longer afford the pussy-footing, artful dodging, delays, end runs, and outright flaunting of the intent of the legislation which has characterized the history of air pollution control.”
“Today, 20 years later, that history is sadder, that battle more frustrating, because of this latest charade. People must acknowledge what has taken place. People must learn some lessons for a change. Only then can we make new history.”
- Richard Grossman (originally published in New Solutions, A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, Winter 1991)
on December 29th, 2007 at 10:41 pm
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on December 30th, 2007 at 2:35 am
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