Will Bush Turn Green?

By Dick Thompson/Washington

What are we to make of the Bush Administration's early promises about protecting the environment? The President's pledges to Congress that he would clean up toxic industrial sites and provide more money to the national parks were cautious, inoffensive stuff. But his new administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Christine Todd Whitman, is talking a much bolder game. Day after day last week, she spoke of getting the sulfur out of diesel fuel, tightening pollution controls on power plants and even curbing emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming, which is the biggest environmental problem of them all. Is this really the agenda of an Administration headed by two former oilmen?

It's too soon to conclude that George Bush will defy expectations and become a green President, but he's definitely getting an environmental earful from some of the players on his team. Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill puts global warming on the same level as nuclear war and spoke out about the danger in a Cabinet meeting. Whitman has gone public with her concerns. "The climate is changing more rapidly than we've seen in the past," she told TIME, "and there are human actions that are contributing to what we're seeing."

But the battle for Bush's mind on this issue has barely begun, and the President's old friends in the oil and coal industries--the sources of the fossil fuels that produce greenhouse gases--will wield plenty of clout. While Bush told Congress last week that he would support efforts to conserve energy and develop alternatives to fossil fuels, he also declared that "we can produce more energy at home while protecting our environment." Translation: I still want to drill for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

And why wasn't more of Whitman's agenda in the speech? The day before Bush's address, word leaked from the White House that the speech had a line on an initiative to force power plants to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Opponents protested, and the reference was apparently dropped. Bush also neglected to mention that his budget calls for a 6.4% decrease in the EPA's projected spending for 2002.

For now, Whitman seems to have persuaded Bush to build on some of the unfinished efforts of the previous Administration. The rule to get more than 90% of the sulfur out of diesel fuel, which could prevent tens of thousands of cases of bronchitis each year and about 8,300 premature deaths, was proposed by Bill Clinton. Another set of Clinton's air-pollution regulations, stalled for years by lawsuits, finally won unanimous support last week from the U.S. Supreme Court. In a strong opinion from a surprising source, conservative Antonin Scalia, the court backed the EPA's authority to set tough new limits on the amount of ozone and fine particles (better known as soot) spewed out by trucks and power plants. These pollutants ravage the lungs and are implicated in asthma and cardiovascular disease. The high court rejected arguments by the trucking industry and its allies that Congress had delegated too much power to the EPA and that the agency must take the cost of compliance into account when setting air-quality standards. The EPA hopes to have the ozone rules finalized soon.

The real test for Bush will be what he does about global warming. Scientists now warn that unless we cut output of CO2 and other greenhouse gases, the earth could heat up by more than 10[degrees]F this century. Clinton made speeches about the threat and sent Al Gore to Japan to help negotiate the Kyoto protocol to curb carbon emissions. But then they made no real effort to build support for the preliminary agreement, which has yet to be turned into a detailed treaty that nations can ratify. Bush has opposed the Kyoto pact because it exempts China and other developing nations, and he isn't likely to reverse himself unless the treaty is altered in negotiations this summer. In the meantime, he may be persuaded to take smaller steps. Even though he deleted the greenhouse allusion from his speech, language in his budget suggests, and Whitman confirms, that he is still thinking of supporting legislation being drafted in Congress that would force power plants to reduce their production of four pollutants: mercury, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide and, yes, carbon dioxide.

Bush's program may never be an enviro's dream, but whatever he decides to do to clean the air and fight climate change has a better chance of getting through a Republican Congress than anything Clinton and Gore proposed. Conservationists can find hope in this bit of history: the Clean Air Act was passed and the EPA was created during the Republican reign of Richard Nixon.