As Texas Goes... (12 page)

It was all coming on fast, but in the mid-1990s, the changes hadn’t quite solidified, and there was still a substantial contingent of moderates in the GOP House ranks. Frequently the thing that defined them as moderate was a positive attitude toward environmental legislation. Many of them represented suburban districts, and the whole point of the suburbs, when you got right down to it, was grass and birds and a breathable atmosphere. “I could sometimes count on as many as fifty [Republican] votes to go along with something my staff and I agreed was important to the environmental community,” said Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who mobilized the opposition. DeLay—usually such a canny vote-counter—overestimated the support for the Riders from Hell and watched in shock as his fellow Republicans voted them down.

Boehlert, who was chair of the Science Committee, said he generally got along with DeLay, who tended to respect a worthy opponent and who appreciated the fact that Boehlert, if asked, would give him an accurate count of the votes that were against him. Dick Armey was a different matter. “Armey had these cowboy boots with the member of Congress seal on them,” Boehlert grumbled. “Glad I never took an economics course from him. DeLay was much more engaging.”

Engaging, in an enraging sort of way. “They came up with this cockamamie idea—let’s abolish the EPA,” Boehlert recalled. “I fought them all the way, and they were surprised to get opposition from the business community, but many in the business community felt they’d rather have one national standard to deal with than fifty states.” In the end, the main result of all of the Texans’ efforts was to move the center of debate further and further to the right, while stopping any future environmental legislation in its tracks. Presidents would come and go, but Congress would never pass a law to control the carbon output of American industry. Tom DeLay didn’t get his Riders from Hell, but he helped create a new discourse, in which the political debate about global warming, when it comes up at all, is usually about whether or not it exists.

“Let Texans run Texas”

By 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president, the days when Republicans could burble about protecting the forests and stopping climate change were pretty much over. The environmental discussion shifted to the need for “market-based incentives” and the rights of local communities.
The 2000 Republican platform
promised that the party nominee would approach environmental issues “just as he did it in Texas.” That sounded rather ominous, since at the time
Texas ranked first
in airborne carcinogens, first in ozone components, first in toxic air releases. Houston had the nation’s dirtiest air and Texas was number one when it came to unhealthy ozone levels.

Early in his days as governor, George W. had set the tone with his
appointments
to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the state environmental agency. The TNRCC is run by three commissioners, and Bush chose:

1) A cattleman

2) A former employee of the state agriculture department, who was known for his attempts to loosen the rules governing the use of pesticides

3) A career lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council who had once testified in Congress that ozone was “a relatively benign pollutant”

To be fair, Governor Bush had an environmental plus side—sort of. When the pollution in Dallas became so bad that the federal government threatened to cut off road construction funds, Bush backed efforts by the state legislature to require power plants to cut their emissions dramatically by 2003—a year that he didn’t plan to be around to check on compliance. The state also tried to impose a new motor vehicle inspection program, but it ran into opposition from right-wing talk radio and the governor canceled it.
When the firm that had won
the contract to implement the program sued, the state settled for $130 million, which it paid for with funds from a state environmental protection program.

Bush’s one genuine environmental enthusiasm was alternative energy, or at least one form of alternative energy. “
Pat, we like wind
,” Bush told Pat Wood, the chairman of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, who he urged to “go get smart on wind.” It made total sense—if God had wanted to create a wind-power-generating heaven, it would have looked a lot like Texas. And it was apparently Bush’s enthusiasm for wind that caused him to order the creation of the Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard, which has one of those names that make you understand why some people hate government bureaucrats. It was basically a set of goals for production of renewable energy, which Texas more than met.

“That led to a great investment in wind power,” said Daniel Weiss, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress. “But at the same time, when it came to a conflict between oil company profits and Texans’ health, the government has always chosen oil company profits.”

In general, the Bush refrain when it came to the environment was “Let Texans run Texas.” There it was again, that self-conscious appeal to the state’s identity, which happened to work in concert with industry’s desire to be let alone. The state’s air pollution problems were made considerably worse by the more than 800 plants that had been built before Texas passed its Clean Air Act of 1971, which only applied to businesses to be constructed in the future. When Bush was governor most of the older plants were still in service, happily polluting away.
Bush decided to resolve
the problem with what his campaign would come to describe as “a healthy mix of voluntary and compulsory regulations.”
Under a law
that was written with the help of executives from oil and chemical businesses, he exempted the plants from state regulation in return for their promise to clean up voluntarily. The problem with voluntary was that you didn’t have to do it, and very few plants did.

“Basically, what you had is a guy from Marathon and a guy from Exxon sending out a proposal to this secret group of companies affected saying, here’s the way we should approach this,” said Smith.

Under Bush, the state stopped making surprise inspections of the plants it
did
regulate. And there weren’t enough state employees to oversee the program anyway. “
We have our limits
,” then Texas Natural Resource Conservation commissioner Ralph Marquez told the
Washington Post
in 2000.
Marquez was a former lobbyist
for the Texas Chemical Council, a trade organization whose members were, at the time, responsible for 74 percent of all EPA-tracked toxic chemical emissions in the state, 98 percent of the toxic water pollution, and 67 percent of the toxic air pollution.

“It is a darn good bill”

When Bush was elected president, for once a plank in a political platform got carried out. He did indeed continue the Texas strategy.
He championed a Clear Skies
initiative which, Al Gore grumbled, “actually allows more toxic mercury, nitrogen oxide and sulfur pollution than if we enforced the laws on the books today.” There was a Healthy Forests initiative to allow more logging.
The environment in general
accounted for only 5 percent of Bush’s presidential radio addresses. Given the fact that he gave one a week for eight years, it was a wonder his speechwriters didn’t just turn to it more in desperation.

Meanwhile, the energy industry lobbyists were being assured that they would have the president’s ear. During the transition, Bush’s primary policy advisor on energy issues was Hunter Hunt, son of oil baron Ray Hunt. At the Department of the Interior, environmentalists learned to their horror that the number two man was going to be J. Steven Griles, an energy industry lobbyist.

“
Not since the rise
of the railroads more than a century ago has a single industry placed so many foot soldiers at the top of a new administration,” said
Newsweek.

And then—oh joy and bliss beyond compare for Texas—Bush made Vice President Dick Cheney his energy czar. “
Conservation may be
a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy,” the vice president said, in a hint that what was coming would not involve turning down the thermostat or turning in the Hummer.

Cheney is from Wyoming, one of the emptiest places in the country, a state with a population of 544,000 that sends as many senators to Washington as California, with a population of roughly 37 million. And unlike Texas, Wyoming is not showing any signs of ever getting crowded. Cheney represented Wyoming in Congress, was secretary of defense under George H. W. Bush, and then left politics to become CEO of the Houston-based energy giant Halliburton. So let’s consider him an honorary Texan.

The vice president’s task force, the National Energy Policy Development Group, ran for about three months. Enron officials met with the task force at least six times in person as well as a number of times on the phone.
Ken Lay, who
Bush called “Kenny-boy,” got a meeting to discuss energy policy in California, where Enron would eventually use the magic of the marketplace to create a catastrophic spike in electricity prices.
In 2003, the General Accounting Office
looked back on how the energy group had operated, and reported that one of Cheney’s advisors “solicited detailed energy policy recommendations from a variety of nonfederal energy stakeholders, including the American Petroleum Institute [and] the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association.” It hardly seems necessary to point out that while Bush was pushing out his energy policy, the oil industry was
spending seven times as much
as environmental groups on lobbying.

“
We’ll have a strong
conservation statement,” the president promised as the world awaited the Cheney energy policy’s arrival. Later that day, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer was also asked whether Bush would be calling on Americans to use less energy, and took the opportunity to clarify his boss’s statement a tad. “
That’s a big no
,” Fleischer said. “The president believes that it’s an American way of life, that it should be the goal of policy-makers to protect the American way of life. The American way of life is a blessed one.” God, it seemed, smiled upon the Hummers in his flock. He looked upon the empty room with a burning lightbulb and found it good.

The plan that arrived from the Cheney task force, to the surprise of no one, was all about more drilling and pipelines and power plants. Also, about the importance of removing burdensome clean air regulations. In 2005, Congress followed up by passing an energy plan that was basically a Texas model with a nod to the plains states’ desire to have something that involved using a whole lot of corn. There were huge breaks for energy producers, plus provisions to help create markets for ethanol and wind power. “
It is a darn
good bill,” said Smokey Joe Barton, the lead sponsor. Texas was getting what it came for.
A report by the Congressional
Budget Office found that while American business in general is taxed at an overall 25 percent rate, oil field leases and drilling equipment were taxed at an effective rate of 9 percent. For small and midsize companies, whatever taxes existed were eliminated by various credits, giving them a return on investment that can actually be greater after taxes than it would have been before.

“Only nature can change the climate—
a volcano for instance”

If the Texas Republicans hated all things EPA, there was no subject on which they were more rabid than global warming. “
It’s the arrogance
of man to think that man can change the climate of the world. Only nature can change the climate—a volcano for instance,” said DeLay. Armey, who disagreed with his fellow Texan on quite a lot, was in exactly the same camp. At a hearing on climate change legislation in 2009, Armey equated a belief in man-made global warming with a lack of faith in God. “
It is quite pretentious
of we little weaklings here on earth to think that, that we are going to destroy God’s creation,” he testified.

Christie Todd Whitman, the former governor of New Jersey, was Bush’s original head of the Environmental Protection Agency. She was a moderate East Coast Republican, and it didn’t require a crystal ball to figure out she was not going to fit in. Not long after the inauguration, Whitman made a trip to Italy, where she emphasized to Europeans that the administration was committed to controlling greenhouse gases—something the president had said himself before the election. Environmentalists had hung on desperately to that campaign comment, but the W. portfolio of compassionate-conservative commitments was a mixture of things the new president seemed to really believe in, like education reform, and the stuff that was just thrown out there for the moment. Everything relating to global warming, it turned out, was in Category Two.

The White House announced that a cabinet-level review of its energy policy had convinced the president that there should be no federal attempt to cut carbon dioxide emissions. It could not have been more
humiliating for Whitman
, particularly given the fact that this particular cabinet-level review had not included the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. “
When I made
the statement in Italy that something might happen on CO
2
, the utility industry got really engaged, and all of that caused a rethink,” Whitman told
Rolling Stone
much later. The magazine acquired a memo from a team of Cheney loyalists in the White House, which posited that whatever Bush had said about greenhouse gasses during the campaign “did not fully reflect the president’s position” and that “it would be premature at this time to propose any specific policy or approach aimed at addressing global warming.”

Many people, from Whitman to the administration’s first secretary of the treasury, Paul O’Neill, have argued that George W. went into the presidency planning to do something about climate change, but that Cheney stole the issue away from him. Doesn’t matter. In policy, good intentions—especially good intentions that aren’t followed up by any attempt at action whatsoever—don’t count. The bottom line was that the idea of doing anything serious about global warming got trashed, pounded into the ground, pulverized, vaporized, and expelled into the already rather heavily polluted Washington air. And in 2002,
when the EPA iss
ued a report that said climate change was probably due to human activity, Bush said dismissively, “I read the report put out by the bureaucracy.”