New plans could open swaths of public land in Utah, like this tract near Canyonlands National Park, that has a potash mining operation, to more drilling and mining. (Robert Harbison / The Christian Science Monitor / FILE)
Bush’s parting moves on the environment
Last-minute rule changes would weaken environmental protections, critics say.
By Amanda Paulson | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor/ November 5, 2008 edition
Reporter Amanda Paulson discusses some of the environmental rule changes proposed by the Bush administration in its last months.
Reporter Amanda Paulson
Chicago
The changes seem minor: clarifications of regulations, revisions to rules, updated land-management proposals.
But some recent proposals from the Interior Department – many likely to be finalized in the waning months of the Bush administration and pushed through with a shortened comment period – are seen by critics as an assault on America’s environmental resources and an attempt to solidify industry-friendly policy.
The proposals include changes to the Endangered Species Act, new management plans for 11 million acres in Utah, an effort to revoke congressional committees’ emergency powers to protect public lands, and a rule change for mountaintop mining regulations.
The Interior Department says the changes are common-sense ones that balance the needs of conservation with those of national energy policy. Environmentalists counter that the actions represent the final efforts of an administration that has been hostile to the environment since Day 1.
“Overall, it certainly is consistent with the approach this administration has taken for the past eight years,” says Sharon Buccino, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s land program. “It’s one final push before they go out the door to really open up public resources for private and industry gain.”
Mr. Bush is not the first lame-duck president to change environmental rules. Bill Clinton, in the last few days of his presidency, pushed through regulations to protect vast areas of the West.
The proposals include the following:
• A change to the Endangered Species Act to disallow the ESA from being used to regulate global climate change even if a species, like the polar bear, is suffering as a result of it. The change also reduces the number of scientific reviews of projects performed by the US Fish & Wildlife Service.
• Six new resource management plans for 11 million acres of federal land in Utah that critics say would open more roads and trails, make nearly 9 million acres available for oil and gas development, and reduce the areas managed primarily for environmental value. Five of the plans were finished on Friday.
• A rule change eliminating one of the few regulations governing mountaintop mining, a common practice in Appalachia in which a mountain’s top is blown off to get access to the rich coal beds beneath. Currently, a largely ignored “buffer zone” rule bars mining companies from dumping debris within 100 feet of any stream. The new rule would require them to either avoid the buffer zone or show why that is not possible, and to minimize harming the streams “to the extent possible” if they must dump there.
• A proposal to remove an “emergency powers” provision that allows the Interior Department or two congressional committees to protect public lands. The rule gained prominence this summer when the House Natural Resources Committee declared 1 million acres next to the Grand Canyon off limits to uranium mining.
These proposals have been portrayed incorrectly, says Chris Paolino, a spokesman for the Interior Department.
The proposed changes to the ESA, Mr. Paolino says, would clarify the Interior secretary’s belief that the ESA is not the right mechanism for regulating climate change. “Science at this point cannot make the link between the specific greenhouse-gas emissions from, say, Kansas, and link it to the effect on a subset of polar bears or an individual polar bear in the Arctic region,” he says. As for the reduced number of federal scientific reviews of projects, he believes it will allow the Fish & Wildlife scientists to give more time to projects that are more likely to affect listed species.
Environmental groups counter that allowing different agencies to determine whether a project needs independent scientific review hasn’t worked in the past and could lead to a scattershot approach in which potential hazards to species are overlooked. “They won’t have good sense of the cumulative impacts if they’re not tracking projects across species and agencies,” says Noah Greenwald, science director for the Center for Biodiversity in Tucson, Ariz.
As for the ESA’s role in climate change, Mr. Greenwald argues that it provides a focus for assessing the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions. He notes that even in the past, when the ESA was used to regulate DDT because of its impact on the bald eagle, officials did not tie one use of DDT to the death of one particular eagle.
Some of the harshest criticism is reserved for the land-management proposals in Utah and the easing of restrictions on drilling and oil-shale exploration, in part because they would be difficult for a future administration to overturn.
“Defaulting to providing more and more routes for oil and gas and more land for oil and gas development effectively prohibits other uses of these lands,” says Nada Culver, senior counsel for The Wilderness Society. Encouraging oil-shale development and geothermal leasing, and creating new “energy corridors” in the West, could lead to an “industrialization of the landscape,” she adds.
The Bureau of Land Management, for its part, says most of the lands were already open to potential drilling and off-road vehicles. The new plans would get rid of some of the unrestricted vehicle use, they say, and put designated routes in play. “There seems to be a perception … that these plans would throw open vast new acreage to development and use,” says Don Ogaard, planning lead for Utah’s BLM. “The land is open to that use now.”
( More stories )
Comments
2. Mark Stickle | 11.05.08
This is absurd and should be fought immediately through the judicial system. This administration has done more harm than good in our time. I feel like I’ve lost nearly a decade of my life to “those” people.
3. arbutus1440 | 11.06.08
This is outrageous. Nothing short of evil. Those coal and oil companies are still trying to get every last penny out of their investment: The Bush Presidency. They are counting on the country being distracted by the election. They cannot be allowed to get away with this.
4. Tim | 11.06.08
For those of you who are against any kind of mining to support our energy needs quit using the equivalent amount of energy and the mining will be unnecessary. Live your values instead of forcing it on the rest of the country.
5. Courtney | 11.06.08
Read what is being said, “The land is open to that use now”. They can already drill. These plans limit where off road vehicles can go, protecting the area. They place tighter restrictions on oil and gas companies. Not to mention that just because the land is available to lease that it will be leased, there is a long period of time and work to be done before a lease can even be signed. Finally, the best that we can hope for is other countries to drill on our land (by they way, it’s not under your house, there are no houses out there). The vast majority of countries from around the world that would be interested have much higher environmental restrictions and policies and when you drill in another country you still have to follow your countries policies.
6. Dejay | 11.06.08
We need to use our own energy resources like coal and we need to be very careful about it but Bush has proved he is not CARE FULL about anything,,, just send him packing already, this country has had enough of his reckless leadership!!!
7. Adam | 11.06.08
I agree with Tim. We stupidly rely on these resources that we know are harmful out of sheer laziness. We need to stop driving and sprawling our shopping utopias into the middle of nowhere while the cores of them all deteriorate. We need to stop driving away from our problems and fix them. We need to fix or replace the boarded-up buildings within the cities and find less harmful ways to commute. Those endless rows of houses with two-car garages were a bad idea. We need to innovate and stop waiting for other people to solve our problems.
8. Aimee S | 11.06.08
We the people should file suite against the Bush Administration for knowingly withholding & altering information about our environment the same way the victims of the Tabacco Industries filed suite on those big corporate fat cats for deliberately that could have saved the lives of so many!
GO SOLAR & WIND!!! IT”S CLEAN & FREE!!!
9. RL | 11.06.08
Sadly, now that gas prices have dropped a bit, people seem to be right back to previous consumption patterns.
During the 90’s a survey of people driving gas thirsty vehicles noted people claiming safety for doing so. As gas prices soared, safety didn’t seem so important.
Fact is, people do what they will while finding ways to justify their behaviors. The future seems to be some kind of abstract concept until it gets here.
Perhaps this new administration will rely on science, but, to paraphrase Farley Mowat: whenever human economic interests conflict with the natural world, the natural world loses.
10. Erik | 11.06.08
Dear Tim,
I consume very little energy. I don’t own a car, a tv, a radio or any other random electronic devices. I take public transport anywhere I don’t bike or walk, and I live in LA. I pretty much only use a single (fluorescent) light at night to read by. And, of course, I use my computer from time to time. But I won’t pretend I do this because of my environmental preferences, it is just the life I want to lead.
The problem, Tim, is that I, along with you and a lot of other people I have never met own a huge chunk of land in Utah. I, unlike many of my co-owners head out to these dessert paradises to go camping from time to time. My father and I have been doing this from time to time since I was 4. As a frequent user of these places, I prefer if there are no gapping holes in the ground or people racing around on dirt bikes. However, there are other owners of these lands that have different preferences.
How are we to resolve this? Well, we could do the same thing as my condo association does, and have an election. In fact, this is a very popular solution, and further we just had an election. Moreover, the candidate of guys like me won. So it seems like the candidate of guys who want to dig holes and ride dirt bikes all over Utah in the last election should probably not try to finagle his way around the election results.
I could stop there, but that seems to me to be too much of a tyranny of the majority type answer. I’d bristle if someone told me they were digging a hole because their candidate had won. So I’d like to give you another justification for imposing my values on you.
I, like most other Americans, am happy to pay a few cents extra for my energy so that these lands may remain pristine. Unfortunately, even if all of us who were willing to do this did so, there would still be people who would go and dig holes and pocket our extra money. This doesn’t work unless we all refrain from digging holes. To put it another way, one person could mess this up for everyone. So even though I would prefer to let you do what you want, I’m going to have to make a regulation and stop you from digging a hole.
Moreover, this move also makes economic sense. As economists such as MIT’s Robert Pindyck have shown, when you are unsure of the long term costs of doing something irreversible (like environmental damage) you are better off doing nothing because if it turns out that as more information arrives you’d like to do it, well it is very easy to do. However, the opposite is not true. If later, you figure out you would prefer if you hadn’t done it, well, then you’re screwed.
Anyhow, Tim, I hope this clears up why I won’t *just* be conserving energy.
Best,
erik
11. jd | 11.06.08
Any organized effort to fight these moves? Criminal to stand by and let them wreak havoc through our own apathy.
12. Janet | 11.06.08
For more offences of the Bush administration see Cognressman Raul M. Grijalva’s website (http://grijalva.house.gov/) and his article titled “A Report on The Bush Administration Assults on Our National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands”.
13. rpm | 11.07.08
the DOI, which regulates MTR is filled with former coal company executive. I have heard coal execs. explicitly telling activist that they will do whatever they need to get the coal from those mountains. To them is about the money as much as it is about the coal. They are doing GODs’s work in brinnging the appocholypse. MTR makes the a fitting analogy for is also uses fire and brimstone and propelled simply by greed and lust. It is such a complex problem that we are only beginning to learn the effects from, let alone cumulative effects. This is no supprise.
14. michael bowen | 11.11.08
Alas, we see the pendulum begin its return swing that will keep law-makers busy for years. Progression is always glacial it seems. We,in spite of our efforts are not excluded from the cycles of the universe. We are foolish to think otherwise. You could minimise your electrical footprint by turning your power totally off at the breaker when you are not needing electricity. Many small nations do this. They shut down their generation plants at night and live in the dark as we do at home. People off the grid are accoustomed to this.We at home here feel no need to pay for the total impedance of the wire and idle appliances when we are sleeping and thus consume 30% or more less power as meter measured. Many small things can be done to conserve which will in turn add up to a large effect. All the legislation in the worl will have little effect in a market driven economy if consumers do not apply the pressure to the market by consuming more or less. We can start by NOT using non-durable goods…most notably plastics. Simply refuse to buy them and they will go form being bulk goods to being specialty. Prime example…organic foods now being found on the shelf in most supermarkete..took about ten years. I would guess we could mostly get rid of plastics in the same amount of time. mike
15. KJL | 11.11.08
In my best red state blue state come together and all sing coumbaya.
I truly believe we MUST get past this partisan bickering like school kids and really look at all the pros’s and con’s of these enoromusly important issues now facing our Country and the world.Our very survival as one nation is at stake.
In this effort an old reliable source has stepped forward and laid out the many options to our future in terms of energy PBS FRONTLINE recently did a program called “HEAT” and it is truly telling. Watch it and notice how the coal, oil and auto industries react to questions in light of their past and present policies. It gives the viewer all the facts and allows them to decide where we should go as a nation in our energy policies.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/view/
16. chiarch1 | 11.11.08
Anyone wishing to support efforts against Bush’s assault on the environment may do so by contributing/volunteering to the Natural Resources Defense Council, or NRDC. Their website may be easily found using an internet search. They are fighting these actions as I write this, so dollars contributed now will go directly towards fighting these 11th-hour tactics by the current administration.
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
2. Celebrity Paycut - Encouraging celebrities all over the world to save us from global warming by taking a paycut. | 11.06.08
Leave a Comment
We do not publish all comments, and we do not publish comments immediately. The comments feature is a forum to discuss the ideas in our stories. Constructive debate - even pointed disagreement - is welcome, but personal attacks on other commenters are not, and will not be published.
Tip: Do not write a novel. Keep it short. We will not publish lengthy comments. Come up with your own statements. This is not a place to cut and paste an email you received. If we recognize it as such, we won't post it.
Please do not post any comments that are commercial in nature or that violate copyrights.
Finally, we will not publish any comments that we regard as obscene, defamatory, or intended to incite violence.
1. jim | 11.05.08
where are these mining companies from? most are foriegn. canada, holland, germany. etc. they lease these public lands under the mining act which means they pay next to nothing. they can drill a hole under your house and you can do nothing but watch. hey, they are raping our country! i say it’s time to change some laws.