Partly sunny: why enviros can't admit that Bush's Clear Skies initiative isn't half bad.
Washington Monthly › Vol. 36 Nbr. 12, December 2004
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Environmental activists
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Partly sunny: why enviros can't admit that Bush's Clear Skies initiative isn't half bad.
It is hard to find a leading environmental advocate who has not denounced Clear Skies, the Bush administration's bill to reduce power-plant pollution. Clear Skies headed the Kerry campaign's list of "The Bush/Cheney Top 10 Environmental Insults," and has been repeatedly assailed by green activists for gutting the historic Clean Air Act. Al Gore has said that Clear Skies should be renamed "Dirty Skies." The proposal has become a prime exhibit for those who delight in examples of Bush doublespeak.
Yet this vitriol seems strangely at odds with the express goals of the legislation. Clear Skies requires utilities to reduce emissions of sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and mercury by about 70 percent by 2018. The Environmental Protection Agency projects Clear Skies will prevent the deaths of 14,100 Americans a year--akin, in a sheer body count, to saving the life of every person who died from HIV in the United States in 2003. By most accounts, Clear Skies would prevent more deaths than any environmental regulation since 1997 at a cost of about $6 billion a year to the utility industry. But instead of garnering broad support and sailing through Congress, this important public health measure has languished on Capitol Hill. It is now little more than a symbol of the Bush administration's craven coziness with the energy industry. As might be expected, green advocates criticized the Bush bill and its regulatory heir, the Clean Air Interstate Rule, for failing to go far enough or fast enough in reducing pollution. But in a novel twist, environmentalists have also asserted that Clear Skies is actually weaker than the existing Clean Air Act--and would thus allow millions of tons of added pollution and inflict tens of thousands of needless deaths during the next decade. John Kerry summed up the conventional wisdom on the ...See the full content of this document
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