The Human Race & Other Sports

George Bush Meets the Environment-Part II

To be ignorant of one’s ignorance is the malady of the ignorant.
Amos Bronson Alcott, Table Talk

This is an appendix. Not the removable kind. The kind that adds information to something previously reported. It is an appendix about George Bush and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Last week I told you about some of the things that went on between George Bush, science and the EPA. In every case George Bush won and science and the EPA lost. There are two things I didn’t tell you because one of them had not yet been made public and the other is happening as you read this. Here is what is happening as you read this. George Bush is scampering as fast as he can to make sure coal fired power plants can be built near several national parks. He isn’t personally scampering. His EPA is.

According to a recent report, the EPA is proposing a rule change to take effect before George Bush becomes nothing more than a bad memory. It would alter the way the impact of a new pollution source is calculated when determining if it can be built. Under the existing rule, peak periods of pollution are used to determine the effect of a new pollution source. If the pollution source would adversely affect a site at peak period times it could not be built. Under the proposed rule annual averages would instead be used thus making it easier to build polluting power plants near national parks.

Congress has designated 156 national parks, wilderness areas and wildlife refuges as Class-1 areas giving them maximum legal protection. Senator Lamar Alexander, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate who represents Tennessee, a state that includes the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, says that if the new rule is enacted Congress should promptly enact legislation to overturn it. In a letter to Stephen Johnson, the EPA Administrator, Mr. Alexander said the proposed rule “provides the lowest possible degree of protection” for those areas. The EPA disagrees. It says the rules are simply refinements to regulations that measure Class-1 air quality standards. When the Bush administration, the least refined in United States history, defines something as refined, warning hackles rise. Mr. Alexander’s hackles are not the only ones that rose.

Federal air-quality experts at both the EPA and the National Park Service describe the proposals as a step backward. John Bunyak, policy chief at the National Park Service’s planning and permit branch said the new rule “[C]ould allow additional pollution sources to locate in a particular area, where they wouldn’t have been under the old rule .” EPA regional staff experts say that the new rule provides “the lowest possible degree of protection” against spikes in pollution.

Echoing the staff experts’ concerns, Mark Wenzler, clean air director of the National Parks Conservation Association (NPCA), says the new rule would permit “phony pollution accounting” methods. The EPA fact sheet, in contrast, says the “proposed rules would provide greater regulatory certainty and reduce complexity without sacrificing the current level of environmental protection.”

According to the NPCA among the threatened national parks are the Great Smoky Mountains, Mammoth Cave, Capitol Reef, Zion Canyon and Mesa Verde. If the EPA rule takes effect and is not overturned, higher levels of pollution in our national parks will become, together with the war in Iraq, one of the enduring legacies of George W. Bush. It is, of course, not clear that Mr. Bush is aware of this. Here’s why.

If George Bush gets an email that he doesn’t like he doesn’t open it. That ‘s how he treated an e-mail report he got from the EPA in December of 2007. That was the month the EPA responded to a 2007 Supreme Court order that it determine whether greenhouse gases represent a danger to health or the environment. The EPA’s conclusion: greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled. Someone at the EPA thought such a conclusion should be shared with George “Ignorance is Bliss” Bush. The EPA could have saved itself the trouble. When Mr. Bush received the e-mail he hit the reply button on the White House computer and told the EPA its e-mail would not be opened. It wasn’t. As a result the EPA waited six months and then released what the New York Times described as a “watered-down version of the original conclusion contained in the un-opened e-mail that greenhouse gases are a pollutant.” Instead, according to the NYT, its recent report simply “reviews the legal and economic issues presented by declaring greenhouse gases a pollutant.” The paper further says that for five days preceding the report’s release the White House put pressure on the EPA to eliminate large sections of the e-mail it refused to open that supported regulation of greenhouse gases.

Here’s a tip for my readers. Refusing to open e-mails the contents of which you suspect you may not welcome, may work in George Bush’s White House world. It’s probably not good practice in the real world of which George Bush is not an inhabitant.

George Bush Meets the Environment [1]

Blind and naked Ignorance
Delivers brawling judgments, unashamed,
On all things all day along.
— Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Merlin and Vivien

If there were only one agency (and there’s probably not) that has consistently enjoyed the benefits lavished on it by an ignorant president who continuously diminishes its standing in the world of science, it would be the Environmental Protection Agency. No other agency has so thoroughly given in to the importunings of a president who lives in constant fear of what science might offer if left to its own devices, science being a branch of knowledge that cannot be controlled by him or Dick Cheney.

A hint of things to come started with Mr. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Treaty on global warming. That was an issue he preferred not to address since it addressed something that to Mr. Bush’s way of thinking had no address since it wasn’t the problem others thought it was and, more especially, was a problem he was prepared to address quite differently from the rest of the world.

Then came Christie Whitman’s 2003 departure from the E.P.A. that she headed from the beginning of the Bush administration. Her tenure was marked by criticism from administration critics who thought she did too little to advance regulatory remedies to extant environmental issues, and administration insiders who thought she was doing too much. Irrespective of who was right, her departure marked the beginning of a change at the EPA that continued throughout the rest of the Bush years.

In October 2003 the Agency announced a new set of rules permitting power plants, oil companies and other industries to avoid requirements of the Clean Air Act of 1970 that says, among other things, that industrial plants that upgrade facilities must install modern pollution controls. The 2003 rules provided that so long as the upgrade did not cost more than 20% of the total cost of replacing the entire facility, it would be considered “routine maintenance” rather than an upgrade. In December of that year the EPA announced that mercury emissions from coal-burning power plants should not be regulated the same as other toxic air pollutants. According to the New York Times the proposal would place legally mandated mercury regulation “under a less stringent section of the Clean Air Act that governs pollutants that cause smog and acid rain, which are not toxic to humans.

In December 2006 we learned of another of the administration’s encounters with science that involved eliminating some of the libraries maintained by the EPA, as effective a way of silencing critics as there is. (Anticipating the departure of George Bush, presumably, on June 17, 2008 the EPA told Congress that the libraries that had been closed were being reopened and books returned whence they’d gone during the Bush sponsored knowledge blackout.)

Concurrent with the library closings the EPA announced a new protocol pertaining to national air-quality standards. Instead of having independent scientists and professional scientists within the EPA set safety standards for various pollutants, staff scientists were instructed to come up with what is called “policy-relevant” science and only after that has been constructed are the professionals permitted to comment.

The most recent skirmish between science and the EPA occurred in December of 2007. California applied for a waiver from the provisions of the energy bill signed by Mr. Bush in December that established a federal goal to reduce automobile emissions by 40% by 2020. California wanted to effect a 30 percent reduction by 2016. EPA staffers believed the waiver should be granted as had other waivers sought by California. Overruling staff, Stephen Johnson, the EPA administrator, said that California’s request did not “meet compelling and extraordinary conditions” and turned down the waiver+.

In response to that decision and a decision made in March 2007 to issue smog regulations that were less strict that those recommended by an EPA science advisory board the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee began an investigation. Among other things it wanted to know if the White House had pressured Mr. Johnson.

As part of its investigation the committee subpoenaed more than 10,000 documents. Twenty-five of the sought after documents were withheld. It is those that Mr. Waxman and his committee would like to review, believing they may permit the committee to discover the level of involvement, if any, by the White House in the EPA decision. Mr. Bush refused to turn them over claiming executive privilege. Attorney General Michael Mukasey wrote a letter to the committee supporting the claim of executive privilege. He said the release of the documents could inhibit the candor of future deliberations among the president and others dealing with political issues. He could have argued that their release would have disclosed George Bush’s ignorance about matters environmental. That would be a convincing argument since most presidential observers would agree that if anyone were ever to be entitled to claim that ignorance is protected by executive privilege, it would be George Bush.

Private Sector Perks

He who doesn’t lose his wits over certain things has no wits to lose.
—Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Emilia Galotti [1772]

A clarification. In a couple of recent columns I poked a bit of fun at people like John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of the United States who was hired to monitor the conduct of a corporation for 18 months for somewhere between $24 and $48 million dollars and Tommy Thompson, the former Secretary of Health and Human Services who was recently hired to help out 9/11 workers whom he had done little to help when he was in a position to do so. I may have left the impression that it was only former employees of the federal government who get sweetheart deals after they have left their former employer. Nothing could be further from the truth. The private sector is even more creative than the public sector that is presided over by George Bush. Payments private sector employees receive after leaving their employment require nothing of them whereas both Mr. Ashcroft and Mr. Thompson have to work in order to receive their compensation.

It is impossible in a space as short as this, to chronicle all the rewards bestowed upon executives in the private sector who have left their employers. A few examples suffice. (In considering their severance packages it is well to keep in mind that while working they received somewhere in the neighborhood of 262 times the pay of the average worker so they were not threatened with impoverishment upon leaving the pay of their employers.

When Merrill Lynch & Co. decided that Stan O’Neal, its CEO, was not doing an adequate job, the board got rid of him. It gave him the 5th largest exit-pay package ever received by a U.S. executive consisting of $161.5 million in stock and retirement benefits. Home Depot’s former CEO, Bob Nardelli, received a severance package of $210 million even though the company stock did not fare well under his governance and he was liked by neither employees nor customers.

Hank McKinnell, the former CEO of Pfizer, received $213 million when he left the company and Lee Raymond of Exxon Mobil received $351 million when he left. The reason they got more than Messrs. O’Neal and Nardelli, presumably, was because their departures were not linked to poor performance. Thanks to a report in the Wall Street Journal, we now know that many companies have compensation packages for executives who neither retire nor are fired. Those are the executives who are summoned to a higher calling while still employed. They die.

According to the Wall Street Journal, many corporations provide for post-mortem severance packages that rival the inter vivos packages described above. The lavishness of these payments is not new. What is new is that as a result of a federal rule change the size of these payments is required to be reported in such a way that those reading proxy statements can understand them.

According to the WSJ, when Eugene Isenberg, CEO of Nabors Industries Ltd. throws off his mortal coils the company will throw off benefits for him that exceed the most recent first quarter earnings of his company. The amount of his severance package is $263.6 million. The family’s sorrow that will surely accompany the death of Brian Roberts, CEO of Comcast, will be ameliorated by the severance package valued at $298 million his family will receive.

XTO Energy Inc. has provided a $3 million life insurance policy to its CEO, Bob R. Simpson and wanting to further assuage his survivors’ grief has also agreed to provide a $111 million bonus. As generous as the post-mortem payments are, (and they usually consist of providing insurance, vesting stock options, etc.) the most creative way of describing the payments is that used by the Shaw Group of Baton Rouge, La. It has agreed to pay its CEO, James M. Bernhard Jr., $17 million for a covenant not to compete for a period of 2 years following his death. (Not reported is whether at the end of the two-year period the restriction expires as Mr. Bernhard had two years earlier.) When an employee signs a covenant not to compete the employee is agreeing not to enter into a line of work that is in competition with the former employer. It is typically between a company and a live employee. In Mr. Bernhard’s case, however, when he moves into celestial heights (not the name of a subdivision in Louisianna) the company will pay him not to compete with it. Although the foregoing suggests that executives are getting what they deserve, labor doesn’t get it.

Richard Ferlauto, director of corporate governance and pension investment for the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, observed that Mr. Isenberg’s death benefit “is a great present to his estate” but would have a significant effect on the company’s balance sheet. Mr. Ferlauto doesn’t understand that those kinds of payments are what make America the kind of economic place of which George Bush is so proud.

Rewards for the Bush Faithful [2]

I am against government by crony.
—Harold Ickes, resigning as Secretary of the Interior, February 1946

It was a longer hill to climb than the one climbed by John Ashcroft, but Tommy Thompson has reason to be happy with the rewards he received upon arriving at the summit. So do the 9/11 responders who were feeling forgotten.

John Ashcroft’s entrée into the world of private enterprise was announced in January 2008. It was then we learned of the procedure that the Justice Department adopted when dealing with corporations that in a perfect world might be charged with criminal conduct but in a Bush world are permitted to avoid prosecution. Culpable corporations enter into deferred prosecution agreements pursuant to which they are not criminally indicted but instead agree to have their conduct monitored for a set period by the Justice Department or someone hired by the Justice Department. Corporations like this arrangement since they avoid trial on criminal charges and the Justice Department likes it because it is full of Bush appointees who like corporations and know that they are run by good people, many of whom paid good money to help Mr. Bush get elected and don’t deserve to have their reputations sullied by criminal charges. The price corporations pay for not being prosecuted (which is not the same thing as a bribe) is that the corporation that is not being prosecuted pays a fine and has to also pay the cost of the monitor. Here is one example of how that worked in practice.

In 2005 the Justice Department began investigating five companies that make almost all the replacement hips and knees used in the United States. They were accused of paying kickbacks to surgeons. Criminal complaints were filed charging the companies with conspiracy to violate the anti-kickback laws One of the companies investigated was Zimmer Holdings, a medical supply company in Indiana. After completing its investigation the government agreed to defer prosecution of Zimmer in exchange for its agreeing to pay a fine of $169.5 million and agreeing to pay John Ashcroft for serving as monitor. Mr. Ashcroft was to be paid between $28 and $52 million for the 18 months of monitoring.

The latest crony to benefit from his friendship with George Bush is Tommy Thompson.

Tommy Thompson was the Health and Human Services Secretary from 2001 to 2005. During that time he was criticized for his failure to aggressively track and treat health problems arising out of the events of 9/11. Like Mr. Thompson, George Bush was criticized for refusing to adequately fund 9/11 notwithstanding repeated promises to the public and the victims of 9/11 that that was one of his first priorities. His 9/11-budget request for FY 2009 cut funding for those programs by 77 percent from what was appropriated in the FY 2008 budget. The 2008 budget appropriated $108 million and the 2009 budget $24 million. Commenting on the $24 million a White House spokesman said the reduced amount reflected Mr. Bush’s “continued commitment to World Trade Center Workers.” Hillary Clinton, by contrast, said: “With the announcement of his final budget, the President had one last opportunity to demonstrate that he would not forget the sacrifices made by those who responded to 9/11 and are now sick from the toxins released during those attacks. I am disappointed and saddened to see that the President chose not to acknowledge the clear health care needs of these heroes. ” Estimates of the cost of monitoring and treating Ground Zero workers are about $218 million a year.

The disappointment Senator Clinton expressed has been ameliorated by the great news that notwithstanding the cuts in the budget, the administration has generously handed an $11 million contract to Logistics Health, Inc. of which Mr. Thompson is president. He didn’t have it as easy as Mr. Ashcroft since three other companies were considered and there was always the outside chance cronyism would not prevail. It did.

Under the contract the company will be paid $11 million. It will give annual physicals to World Trade Center responders, diagnose and treat their illnesses and provide a pharmacy benefit to the injured workers. It’s not the many hundreds of millions that a concerned president might have provided. But it’s a little something and, best of all, it helps out yet another one of George Bush’s old friends. As his administration winds down it is safe to say that lots of his friends will find lucrative employment in the private sector. That’s the least he can do for those who have willingly worked for a man described by some as the worst president in history. There have to be rewards other than the guilt by association with which they will be forever tainted.

George Bush-Than Shwe-A Study in Style [2]

Comparisons are odious.
— John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae (1471)

It would be unfair to compare the response of Myanmar Junta leader, Than Shwe, to Cyclone Nargis to George Bush’s response to Hurricane Katrina. For one thing, the two disasters were separated by thousands of miles. Furthermore, Burma initially rejected all foreign aid whereas Mr. Bush only rejected aid from Cuba.

Of course, both Mr. Bush and Mr. Than knew in advance of the approaching disasters. On May 6, 2008, a spokesman for the Indian Meteorological Department said Burmese agencies had been given 48 hours’ notice of the cyclone’s advent, including its point of crossing, its severity and all related issues. There was no acknowledgement of the warning from the Myanmar government.

Mr. Bush was told the Sunday before the Monday Katrina struck that the city’s flood defenses could fail in such a storm. The National Weather Service issued a special hurricane warning saying most of New Orleans would be uninhabitable for weeks and “water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.” Unlike Mr. Than, Mr. Bush acknowledged these warnings. He said the government was fully prepared to help. He was wrong, of course, but not on purpose.

Monday morning Mr. Bush was again warned about the potential devastation of Katrina and was told the government might lack the capacity to deal with it. He did not let that interfere with the day’s planned activities. Mr. Bush talked about immigration issues with the head of the Department of Homeland Security. He then shared a birthday cake photo-op with his old friend, Senator John McCain, and, after learning that the 17th Canal levee in New Orleans had breached, went off to Arizona to promote Medicare Drug benefits. By late afternoon he was at a California senior center where he discussed the Medicare drug benefit. At 8 that night the governor of Louisiana told the president she needed everything Mr. Bush could provide to deal with the emergency. Mr. Bush said nothing. He went to bed.

Tuesday afternoon Mr. Bush joined country singer, Mark Willis, for a photo op, Mr. Bush holding a guitar and the singer smiling at the playful president. Mr. Bush then returned to Texas to finish up his vacation. He let it be known that he would begin work the following day with a task force to coordinate relief efforts.

It took Mr. Than two weeks to meet victims and see the destruction for himself. As soon as Mr. Bush finished his vacation Wednesday, he flew back to Washington, making a detour, however, to “flyhttp://www.commondreams.org/views05/0902-32.htm”: over New Orleans so he could see for himself how bad things were. A picture was taken of him looking out the airplane window at the devastation below, the sort of picture that could not be published of Mr. Than since he never did that.

As different as the responses of the two leaders to their respective disasters were, there is one sad similarity. Many Burmese will die or permanently suffer the effects of the government’s unwillingness to permit foreign aid to enter the country until long after the disaster had struck. By contrast, within days after Katrina struck, FEMA ordered $2.7 billion worth of trailers and mobile homes to house those left homeless using a single page of specifications. Joseph Hagerman, a Federation of American Scientists expert who is helping develop new emergency housing is quoted in the Washington Post as saying: “I can’t believe that we bought a billion dollars’ worth of product with a 25-line spec. There’s not much you can do in 25 lines to protect life safety.” He is right. There is now a health catastrophe among the 300,000 people living in those homes.

The problems first surfaced in 2006. Scott Needle, a pediatrician in Bay St. Louis said children living in the trailers were coming in to see him with respiratory complaints that occurred repeatedly. The Sierra Club tested the air in 44 trailers and in 40 of them the concentration of formaldehyde was more than .1 parts per million. The National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health says workers should not be exposed to that level of concentration for more than 15 minutes at a time. Responding to the initial complaints FEMA spokesman, Aaron Walker, said out of 115,000 trailers being used there had then been only 20 complaints and they could easily be resolved by increasing ventilation in the trailers.

In the two years since Mr. Walker spoke, the number of complainants has increased. According to the Post, 17,000 residents of the trailers have joined in a class action lawsuit against the Federal Government and the trailer manufacturers alleging health consequences from living in the trailers including respiratory illnesses and cancer.

Only time will tell if the illnesses affecting the families and the presence of formaldehyde in the trailers furnished by the government is anything more than coincidental. Here is one thing that is definitely coincidental: any similarity between George Bush’s response to Katrina and Than Shwe’s response to Cyclone Nargis.