Crimes Against Nature

by Kennedy, Jr. Robert F.

  58 The findings, of course, contradict everything known about wetlands, including a comprehensive study by the Tampa Bay National Estuary Program, in which more than 25 scientists determined that south Florida wetlands remove far more nitrogen pollutants than they generate.

  59 Bruce Boler, a biologist and water quality specialist working for the office, resigned in protest. “It was like the politics trumped the science,” he says. “I felt like I was bushwhacked.”

  60

  During the first few years of Bush’s presidency, the assault on science was still somewhat ad hoc. But by midterm, his advisers were moving to institutionalize the corruption. And no one was more zealous in this regard than John Graham.

  In September 2003, Graham attempted a massive structural change in how science is generated and how the public gets to hear about it. In what amounted to a brazen coup d’état, Graham has proposed that the Office of Management and Budget take over the peer-review process for all major government rules, plans, proposed regulations, and pronouncements. Under the current system, individual federal agencies typically invite outside experts to review the accuracy of their science, whether it is about the health effects of diesel exhaust, industry injury rates, or the dangers of eating beef that has been mechanically scraped from the spinal cords of mad cows. Graham’s proposal would block all new federal regulations until the underlying science passes muster in a peer-review process centralized in his office.

  61

  In other words, all government research would be under the control of the guru of junk science. Karl Kelsey of the Harvard School of Public Health recalls reviewing Graham’s résumé during his tenure process: “He had this separate tiny paragraph or two about peer-reviewed reports. He’s a man who doesn’t know what peer review is. It’s a horrible thing.”

  62

  Certainly, placing peer review under OIRA is the ultimate delay tactic. No scientific study is airtight. Science is all about divining conclusions from the data. No matter what the study, no matter who’s designed it, Graham’s peer-review panels could always find a hole in the data. Remember how the tobacco industry hid behind “scientific uncertainty” to shield cigarettes from regulation for 60 years? Using the same methods, the coal industry, with even greater profits at stake, could shield itself from regulations for acid rain, mercury contamination, and global warming — maybe forever.

  Lined up in support of Graham’s proposal are all his old friends from the Harvard center, the same industrial polluters who funded the Bush campaign. Opposing Graham are some of the nation’s most respected scientific bodies: the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Federation of American Scientists, and the Association of American Medical Colleges, along with environmental and consumer-interest groups. Additional criticism has come from a group of 20 former federal officials, including prominent regulators from the administrations of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.

  Graham’s proposal is now working its way through the regulatory process, and a version of it will almost certainly become law of the land if Bush is reelected in November.

  Science, like theology, reveals transcendent truths about a changing world. The best scientists are moral individuals whose business is to seek the truth. Corruption of this process undermines not just democracy but civilization itself. The Union of Concerned Scientists, a nonprofit group devoted to the use of sound science in environmental policy, issued a report in February 2004 entitled “Scientific Integrity in Policymaking: An Investigation of the Bush Administration’s Misuse of Science.”

  63 The report, signed by some 60 renowned scientists, including 20 Nobel laureates, made news for about 20 minutes in the mainstream media. But its charges were scalding and astonishingly direct. “There is strong documentation of a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government’s scientific advisory system to prevent the appearance of advice that might run counter to the administration’s political agenda,” the authors wrote. “There is significant evidence that the scope and scale of the manipulation, suppression, and misrepresentation of science by the Bush administration is unprecedented.” That’s not just some protester talking. Those are the conclusions of our country’s top researchers — America’s brain trust.

  In February 2004, Michael Oppenheimer stated the situation plainly. “If you believe in a rational universe, in enlightenment, in knowledge, and in a search for the truth,” he said, “this White House is an absolute disaster.”

  64

  Blueprint for Plunder

  There is no better example of the corporate cronyism now hijacking American democracy than the White House’s cozy relationship with the energy industry. In the 2000 election, it contributed more than $48.3 million to George W. Bush and the Republican Party, and it has donated another $58 million since the president’s inauguration.

  1 The investment matured almost immediately: It may be hard to find anyone on Bush’s staff who doesn’t have extensive corporate connections, but fossil fuel executives rule the roost. Both Bush and Cheney came out of the oil patch. Thirty-one of the Bush transition team’s 48 members had energy-industry ties. Bush’s cabinet and White House staff is an energy-industry dream team — 4 cabinet secretaries, the 6 most powerful White House officials, and more than 20 high-level appointees are alumni of the industry and its allies. It’s a tight-knit group: Chevron named an oil tanker after National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who served for a decade on the company’s board.

  2

  Few of these appointees seem to be troubled about conflicts of interest. In early 2001, while the administration was formulating its national energy policy, Karl Rove still owned $250,000 in Enron stock and tens of thousands more in BP Amoco and Royal Dutch Shell. When asked if Rove ever recused himself from policy discussions involving these companies, the White House stated, “He’s involved in virtually every decision that is made here.” Clay Johnson, as director of presidential personnel, held $100,000 to $250,000 in stock in El Paso Energy Partners, a Houston oil and gas company. As part of his White House duties, he was involved in selecting people to fill vacancies at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which oversees the natural-gas market. Lewis Libby, Cheney’s chief of staff, is a lawyer who in early 2001 sold tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of stocks in Enron, ExxonMobil, Texaco, and Chesapeake Energy. Deputy Commerce Secretary Samuel Bodman was the CEO of Cabot, a Texas chemical company cited as the fourth-largest source of toxic emissions in the state. Kathleen Cooper, undersecretary of commerce for economic affairs, was chief economist at ExxonMobil.

  3

  The fossil fuel crew was among the first to benefit from the Inauguration Day freeze on environmental regulations. Many of Graham’s early moves to emasculate the country’s environmental laws seem motivated by his desire to fill up the coffers of the oil, gas, mining, and other utility companies. No industry gained more from the administration’s massaged data. But the first wave of looting was nothing compared to the spoils to come from rewriting the nation’s energy policy.

  Days after his inauguration, President Bush launched the National Energy Policy Development Group, chaired by Dick Cheney.

  4 Commonly known as the energy task force, the group was convened ostensibly to analyze America’s energy needs and to develop recommendations for meeting those needs. But it behaved more like a band of pirates divvying up the booty.

  Cheney was determined to operate his task force in total secrecy. His problem was the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), which requires that the activities of groups that combine governmental and nongovernmental officials be fully disclosed to the public. Cheney decided to make an end run around FACA by limiting it to government officials.

  5

  Other than being on Bush’s staff, the only qualification for membership on the task force seemed to be an energy-industry pedigree. Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, a former one-term
senator from Michigan who received $700,000 from the auto industry in his losing 2000 campaign, was Cheney’s number two.

  6 He would lead the fight to kill auto fuel efficiency. Joe Allbaugh, director of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, was a member of Bush’s “iron triangle” of trusted Texas cohorts.

  7 Allbaugh’s wife, Diane, was an energy-industry lobbyist for three firms — Reliant Energy, Entergy, and TXU — each of which paid her $20,000 during the last three months of 2000, just prior to the start of the task force’s deliberation.

  8 Joe Allbaugh participated in task force meetings on issues directly affecting those companies, including debates over environmental rules for power plants and — his wife’s specialty — electricity deregulation.

  Other task force members included Commerce Secretary Don Evans, an old friend of the president’s from their early days in the oil business and former CEO of Tom Brown Inc., a Denver oil and gas company; Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who received more than a third of the $800,000 raised for her Senate campaign from the energy industry;

  9 and Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, former CEO of Alcoa.

  10 Recognizing that aluminum-industry profits are directly tied to energy prices, O’Neill promised to immediately sell his extensive stock holdings in his former company (worth more than $100 million) to avoid conflicts of interest, but despite his reputation for integrity, he delayed the sale until after the energy plan was released. By then, thanks partly to the administration’s energy policies, Alcoa’s stock had risen 30 percent.

  11

  For three months, despite insistent protests from the press and environmental groups, the task force held closed-door meetings. Practically the only outsiders invited to share their views on energy policy were energy-industry representatives. Exactly who, of course, was a mystery to everyone outside the proceedings, as the task force refused to disclose names.

  Finally, on May 17, 2001, the task force released the fruits of its labor, the Report of the National Energy Policy Development Group, which became the basis for the Republican-sponsored energy bill. The report was an orgy of industry plunder, transferring billions of dollars of public wealth to the oil, coal, and nuclear industries, which were already swimming in record revenues. (A few weeks earlier ExxonMobil had announced record profits, with earnings up 50 percent from a year earlier.

  12 ) Paying lip service to conservation and environmental concerns, the report focused almost exclusively on deregulation, giant subsidies, and tax breaks that would benefit virtually every major polluter in the energy industry.

  13

  For the first time in history, the nonpartisan General Accounting Office sued the executive branch, demanding access to the records of the task force.

  14 (A recent Bush appointee, federal judge John Bates, dismissed the case,

  15 and the GAO elected not to challenge the ruling.

  16 ) Judicial Watch and the Sierra Club prevailed in another suit against Cheney under FACA.

  17 The U.S. Supreme Court accepted the case for review in December 2003.

  18 Three weeks later, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia accepted a ride from Cheney on Air Force Two to a duck-hunting outing in Louisiana hosted by Diamond Services Corporation, an oil services company and major Republican Party donor.

  19 Scalia then famously refused to recuse himself from the case when the Supreme Court heard arguments in April, despite the clamor to do so by the plaintiffs, the Senate’s Democratic leadership, and editorial boards across the country, including those of the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even the conservative Salt Lake Tribune, which wrote, “Scalia’s prickly insistence that no reasonable person could question his impartiality in the matter suggests that the rarified air of the Supreme Court has addled the justice’s faculties somewhat.”

  20 In June 2004 the Supreme Court issued its decision, effectively foreclosing the release of the pages prior to the November election. Scalia’s concurring opinion urged dismissal of the case based upon executive privilege.

  At the same time that the Sierra Club and Judicial Watch had filed their FACA case, the NRDC had also filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Department of Energy, and when the department did not respond, we sued the DOE. On February 21, 2002, U.S. District Judge Gladys Kessler ordered Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and other agency officials to turn over records relating to their participation in the work of the energy task force.

  21 Under this court order, the NRDC has obtained some 20,000 documents. Although the pages are heavily censored and none of the logs from Vice President Cheney’s meetings are included, the documents still allow glimpses into the sausage making.

  Cheney, who had run Halliburton for five years in the 1990s, regarded himself an energy expert and considered public hearings or input from opposing factions mere interference.

  22 Paul O’Neill, who discussed his dissatisfaction with the energy task force in Ron Suskind’s The Price of Loyalty, told me he was initially optimistic that he could have a positive influence on the energy debate. But he quickly realized that sensible energy policy was not the committee’s agenda.

  At its first official meeting, according to Suskind, the task force briefly discussed the California energy crisis and then Cheney took the helm, making clear that his first priorities were tax breaks and deregulation — both things that would enrich the energy industry at public expense without necessarily creating more energy. Cheney’s persistent theme was that the nation was facing catastrophic energy shortages, and that these so-called shortages could be used to justify billions in corporate subsidies to his energy cronies and the scuttling of health and environmental safeguards. Experts at the time were scoffing at the notion of an alleged energy crisis, but as Californians had learned, the perception of shortages, even when false, creates a huge bonanza for industry.

  “I was against tax incentives that eventually were steam-rolled into the task force recommendation,” O’Neill told me. “Good business people don’t do things based upon tax code inducements. Tax cuts don’t increase industry’s appetite for more research or development, but they transfer the costs of what they are already doing to the public.”

  23

  Cheney wasn’t terribly interested in what O’Neill had to say. Instead, he opened his door to industry titans, soliciting a wish list of recommendations from lobbying associations such as the American Petroleum Institute, the American Gas Association, the National Mining Association, and the Edison Electric Institute.

  24

  To lobby for congressional passage of the Cheney energy plan, more than 400 industry groups enlisted in the Alliance for Energy and Economic Growth, a coalition created by oil, mining, and nuclear interests and guided by the White House.

  25 It cost $5,000 to join, “a very low price,” Wayne Valis, a lobbyist for the Nuclear Energy Institute, wrote in a fundraising letter.

  26 The prerequisite for joining, he noted, was that members “must agree to support the Bush energy proposal in its entirety and not lobby for changes.” Within two months, members had contributed more than $1 million. The price for disloyalty was expulsion from the coalition and possible reprisals by the administration, according to Valis. “I have been advised,” he wrote, “that this White House will have a long memory.”

  27

  Task force members began each meeting with industry lobbyists by announcing that the session was off the record and that participants were to share no documents. A National Mining Association official told reporters that the industry managed to control the energy plan by keeping the process secret. “We’ve probably had as much input as anybody else in town,” he said. “I have to take my hat off to them — they’ve been able to keep a lid on it.”

  28

  Through the winter and spring of 2001, executives and lobbyists from the oil, coal, electric-utility, and nuclear power industries tramped in and out of the cabinet room and Cheney’s office. Many of the lob
byists had just left posts inside Bush’s presidential campaign to work for companies that had donated lavishly to that effort. The National Mining Association, which contributed $575,496 to Republicans, had at least nine contacts with the task force, as did Westinghouse, which contributed $65,060. The American Gas Association, which contributed $480,478 to Republicans from 1999 to 2002, had at least eight contacts, as did CMS Energy, which contributed $357,715. The American Petroleum Institute, which contributed $44,301 to Republicans from 1999 to 2002, had contact with the task force at least six times, as did Exelon Corporation, which contributed $910,886.

  29

  Executives from Enron, which contributed $2.5 million to the GOP from 1999 to 2002, had contact with the task force at least 10 times, including six face-to-face meetings between top officials and Cheney.