Crimes Against Nature

by Kennedy, Jr. Robert F.

  All eight members of the team were pressured to sign off on the whitewashed investigation report. Ronald Brock, one of the team’s engineers, refused until Laurisky directly ordered him to sign, according to Spadaro. “Ron Brock’s wife was suffering from cancer and he felt he could not afford to lose his job,” said Spadaro. “They forced it down his throat.”

  Spadaro flat-out refused to sign the report and has been harassed ever since. At one point, he says, department officials lured him to Washington for a meeting, and while he was there three men raided his office, changed his locks, searched his papers, and disassembled frames holding pictures of his wife and daughter. “They Gestapoed me,” said Spadaro. “I guess they thought I had secret codes written on the back of those photos.”

  In February 2004 the federal government’s independent Office of Special Counsel began an investigation into whether Spadaro was being disciplined because he is a whistle-blower.

  19 Less than a week later the MSHA demoted him and reassigned him to a job in Pittsburgh.

  20

  “I’ve been regulating mining since 1966,” Spadaro told me, “and this is the most lawless administration I’ve encountered. They have no regard for protecting miners or the people in mining communities. They are without scruples. I know that Massey Energy influenced Bush appointees to alter the outcome of our report! The corruption and lawlessness goes right to the top.”

  In addition to Chao, McConnell, and Laurisky, big coal has placed a legion of guardian angels in the Bush government, including Jeffrey Holmstead, the EPA’s assistant administrator for the Office of Air and Radiation. Like many people in the current administration, including George Bush himself, Holmstead can be personable and charming, and like the others, he has elected to spend his talents shilling for industry.

  Holmstead has been a lobbyist and attorney for several big polluters and their trade associations,

  21 including the American Farm Bureau Federation and the Alliance for Constructive Air Policy, a front group for big air polluters, four of which were defendants in major Clean Air Act enforcement actions for their violations of the New Source Review standards. He has also served as an adjunct scholar with the Wise Use group Citizens For the Environment. CFE pitches clear-cut logging as good timber management and deregulation as the solution to most environmental problems. CFE took $700,000 from the Florida sugar industry to help derail Everglades restoration and received $1 million from Philip Morris to fight cigarette taxes.

  22

  Holmstead maintained close personal and professional ties with his former clients that blurred the line between government service and venal self-interest. Within days of his appointment, his buddy David Rivkin landed a job at the law firm of Baker & Hostetler as a lobbyist for Atlanta-based Southern Company,

  23 the nation’s number two coal plant polluter

  24 and the utility that led the charge to kill the New Source Review rules, which require grandfathered coal plants to install modern pollution-control equipment. One day after Holmstead accomplished that mission, his associate administrator for congressional affairs, Ed Krenik, took a lucrative job at Bracewell & Patterson, the Houston-based lobbying firm that led Southern Company’s efforts against the NSR. Holmstead’s chief of staff, John Pemberton, left that week to become Southern’s top Washington lobbyist.

  25

  Holmstead has been dogged by accusations of ethics violations throughout his EPA career. On July 14, 2003, Senator John Edwards of North Carolina called for Holmstead to resign for suppressing scientific research that conflicted with President Bush’s pollution agenda and for routinely lying to hype Bush’s efforts to roll back environmental regulations. “Jeff Holmstead is an extreme example of this administration’s problem with telling the truth when it conflicts with its political agenda,” Senator Edwards said. “Instead of protecting the air, Mr. Holmstead is protecting the energy industry by hiding the truth. He needs to go.”

  26

  An October 2003 report by the GAO indicated that Holmstead had intentionally deceived two Senate committees in an appearance 15 months earlier. At issue was his claim that the administration’s proposed scrapping of the NSR rules would not affect 75 ongoing prosecutions and investigations against corporations that had violated those standards.

  27 Among the targets of the prosecutions were eight power plants owned by Southern Company’s subsidiaries.

  28 As it turns out, Holmstead had discussed the impacts on numerous occasions with senior EPA officers. They included Sylvia Lowrance, acting chief of the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance; Eric Schaeffer, head of the Office of Regulatory Enforcement; and Bruce Buckheit, director of the Air Enforcement Division, all of whom have left the EPA because they say they were disgusted by the administration’s pandering to polluters.

  29 They and many others had warned Holmstead that their cases would be compromised. “It was clearly not true what Holmstead said,” I was told by Buckheit.

  The GAO’s report prompted Senators Jim Jeffords, Patrick Leahy, and Joseph Lieberman to call for further investigation by the EPA’s inspector general.

  30 Leahy, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said that the report indicated that Holmstead “intentionally misled Senate committees last year and has continued to work to get industry polluters off the hook and out of court.” Leahy accused Holmstead of committing fraud and “endangering the health of the American people.”

  31

  Endanger our health he has. The EPA’s own consultants estimated that air emissions from just 51 of the coal plants that were targets of NSR enforcement actions shorten the lives of at least 5,500 people per year. In addition, polluted air from these plants triggers between 107,000 and 170,000 asthma attacks per year, many of them in children.

  32 In 2002, Edwards asked Holmstead for a quantitative study of the NSR proposal’s effect on human health. He and 43 Senate colleagues followed up the request in writing. Holmstead has never provided the analysis.

  33

  The NSR rollback was only one handout to King Coal that came courtesy of Holmstead. In November 2003, former Utah governor Mike Leavitt replaced Christie Whitman as EPA administrator. Leavitt made his bones with his new bosses in one of his first official acts: proposing weaker regulations for the mercury spewing out of power plant smokestacks. He gave a billion-dollar favor to King Coal and the utilities, while America’s children got the back of his hand. Jeff Holmstead was the deal’s architect.

  Mercury is a potent brain poison. Even minuscule amounts can cause permanent IQ loss, along with blindness and possible autism in children who are exposed while in the womb.

  34 As noted earlier, the EPA now estimates that 1 of every 6 American women carries unsafe levels of mercury in her blood, putting 630,000 American newborns a year at risk.

  35 High exposure in adults can lead to kidney failure, tremors, heart disease, severe liver damage, and even death.

  I recently had my own blood tested for mercury. The sample came back with contamination of 11 micrograms per liter. Levels above 10 micrograms are cause for concern, according to Dr. David Carpenter of the Institute for Health and the Environment at the State University of New York at Albany. As a healthy adult male, I’m not too worried. But Dr. Carpenter told me that a pregnant woman with those levels would have a child who was cognitively impaired. This made me pause. “You mean ‘might’?” I asked him. He replied, “No, the science is pretty certain that those levels would impact a baby’s IQ.”

  36

  Humans get contaminated mainly by eating fish. Ocean-going fish — including favorites like swordfish and tuna — along most of America’s coastlines are so contaminated with mercury that they are unsafe to eat regularly. Even more alarming, 17 states have issued warnings about eating fish from all of their streams and lakes, including the five Great Lakes and their tributaries. Forty-five states have issued advisories on mercury in fish for some water bodies.

  37 />
  Most mercury in fish comes from contaminated rain and snow that falls into rivers and lakes. According to the EPA, coal-burning power plants account for 40 percent of the airborne mercury in the United States.

  38

  Because of the catastrophic health impacts, the Clinton administration decided to regulate mercury emissions from power plants as a hazardous pollutant under the Clean Air Act. That move would have required power plants to reduce their mercury emissions by roughly 90 percent within three years. Technologies now available or expected to be available soon can eliminate most of the mercury from utilities at a cost of less than 1 percent of plant revenues, according to the EPA. This seems like a good deal for the American people.

  39

  But the power industry lobbied aggressively against the Clinton-era reforms. The campaign included several Texas companies, whose power plants spew more mercury than those of any other state. Southern Company also lobbied hard. In his briefing to coal moguls in 2001, the EEI’s Quin Shea reassured his audience that the coal industry and the Bush administration had a plan that would ensure that no power plant would be required to achieve anything close to a 90 percent reduction in mercury pollution, regardless of what the Clean Air Act said.

  40 Their plan was Jeffrey Holmstead.

  In December 2003, Leavitt and Holmstead scrapped the Clinton reforms and proposed new ones. These would leave mercury pollution nearly seven times as high as the Clean Air Act would require for at least the next 14 years. But that’s only the beginning. Lawyers for these polluters would be able to delay implementation of even those feeble standards using huge loopholes that they themselves buried like land mines in the provision’s language. Portions of Holmstead’s proposal came verbatim from a memo prepared by Holmstead’s old law firm, Latham & Watkins, which represents some of the affected utilities.

  After giving his industry cronies rollbacks beyond their wildest dreams, Holmstead continues to troll for new ideas for federal giveaways. In January 2004, he attended a conference for lobbyists at the Arizona Biltmore. The event followed a $3,000-per-person golf-and-dinner Republican fundraiser, dubbed “Mulligans and Margaritas.” The conference was touted as an opportunity to draft a to-do list of industry-friendly legislation.

  41 Among the top 10 priorities targeted by the conferees were: reforming the Endangered Species Act, the National Environmental Policy Act, and the Clean Air Act; expanding access to public lands; enacting the federal energy bill; and reforming the legal tort system.

  42 The gathering was organized by Jim Sims, a Denver-based coal and utility lobbyist and former spokesman for Cheney’s energy task force.

  43 Also on hand at the boondoggle-fest were James Connaughton, Bush’s Council on Environmental Quality director and former asbestos attorney, and deputy secretary of the Interior J. Steven Griles. While Holmstead is an extremely useful ally of energy, the appointment of Steve Griles was arguably the biggest payback to the coal industry.

  There was nobody in the United States better positioned than Steve Griles — with his 35 years of working for the energy industry, both in and out of government — to do King Coal’s bidding.

  Ironically, it was the very statute Griles spent his career trying to destroy that catapulted him to fortune and power. From 1970 to 1981, Griles worked at Virginia’s Department of Conservation and Economic Development, which operates a sleepy permit office charged with issuing mining permits to coal companies in Virginia’s Appalachian country. During the early 1970s, Griles made a name for himself by running interference on behalf of the coal business. “I found Steve to be extremely pro-industry,” recalls Frank Kilgore, a Virginia lawyer who worked on mining reforms during that period. “No matter what evidence you showed him about people having their houses blown apart, or rocks coming through the roof, or private cemeteries or water supplies being destroyed by stripping, it didn’t seem to make any impression on him. He was always pretty up-front that he was an industry man — and get out of the way.”

  44

  Then, in 1977, in the wake of the Buffalo Creek massacre, Congress passed the federal Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act (SMCRA). Suddenly Griles’ agency was required to regulate an industry with which it had always been chummy. He took the new law as a personal affront. He led Virginia in challenging the SMCRA as an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights.

  45 Although his suit suffered a rare 9–0 loss in the Supreme Court, it did earn Griles plenty of industry gratitude, the only credential he needed to land a job in Jim Watt’s Department of Interior in 1981.

  Watt appointed Griles to run the very agency he had vowed to destroy — the Office of Surface Mining (OSM), an agency in the Department of Interior that was created to administer the SMCRA. As deputy director from 1981 to 1983, Griles is said to have promised to “turn the lights out at the OSM.”

  46 While he neither confirms nor denies the statement, everyone agrees that Griles gutted the agency. He cut staffing by a third, dramatically reduced the number of federal inspectors at mine sites, and sharply curbed enforcement actions.

  47 Griles recruited industry-friendly personnel, fired or transferred environmentally friendly regulators, and fought to shift regulatory authority to the states. Staff morale plummeted. Griles himself told the Washington Post, “We tore this agency to hell.”

  48

  Griles continued his campaign as he moved up the food chain in Reagan’s Interior Department. When he landed the job of assistant secretary for lands and mineral management at the Department of the Interior in 1985, the Oil Daily endorsed the appointment as the “ideal choice.” During his tenure, Griles leased more federal offshore oil and gas acreage than anyone in the history of the Interior Department.

  49 He was accused of orchestrating what amounts to a criminally negligent giveaway of 82,000 acres of federal oil and shale lands for a ruinously cheap $2.50 per acre.

  50 The government received $200,000. One claimholder got title to 17,000 acres for $42,500 — and then immediately sold the same land for $37 million.

  51

  Griles tried to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling and vigorously promoted offshore oil leasing in California and Florida. The House Government Operations Committee said Griles’ program was so badly administered that Congress should consider transferring it to another agency.

  52 In 1989, investigators for the California legislature uncovered internal Interior Department records revealing that Griles deliberately concealed from the public and state regulators the true risks of oil spills from drilling off the California coast.

  53

  At the end of the Reagan administration Griles formally went to work for the coal industry. From 1989 to 1995 he was a senior vice president for the Virginia-based United Coal Company, where he oversaw operation of one of the nation’s largest mountaintop-removal operations. In 1995 he founded J. Steven Griles and Associates, a lobbying firm that represented over 40 coal, oil, gas, and electric companies and trade associations. Subsequently, he merged his firm with National Environmental Strategies (NES), a lobbying outfit founded by former Republican National Committee chairman Haley Barbour. NES represented the National Mining Association and Dominion Resources, one of the nation’s largest power producers, as well as the Edison Electric Institute, Shell, Texaco, Chevron, Arch Coal, and Pittston Coal, to name just a few.

  These clients poured millions of dollars into George W. Bush’s presidential campaign, and Bush’s appointment of Griles as second in command at Interior was exactly what they were paying for. Griles served on President Bush’s transition team, helping to fill key administrative posts with reliable lobbyists from regulated industries. Following the announcement of his appointment, the National Mining Association hailed Griles as “an ally of the industry.” The Denver Post lamented that the “champions of industry will be running the department that oversees most of the nation’s public lands.”

  54

  Like Holm
stead, Griles has a tortured relationship with the truth. It’s bad enough that a former mining lobbyist was put in charge of overseeing mining on public land. But it turns out that Griles is still on the industry’s payroll. In 2001, he sold his client base to his NES partner Marc Himmelstein for $1.1 million, payable in four annual installments of $284,000, making Griles, in effect, a continuing partner with a direct financial stake in the firm’s profitability.

  55 The Senate made Griles agree in writing that he would avoid contact with his former clients as a condition of his confirmation.