The Liquidation of the Commons

Liquidation of the Commons
There has not been such a wholesale giveaway of
America’s public assets since McKinley was president in
the late 1800s

By Adam Werbach

In These Times

http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=459_0_1_0_C

When the Bush administration’s nominee to
head the Environmental Protection Agency was asked to
describe his goals, Gov. Mike Leavitt of Utah summed up
his general approach by invoking the Latin term enlibra,
which roughly means "in balance." In typical fashion for
the Bush administration, the choice of language is both
elegant and misleading. Environmentalists understand
balance, but Leavitt’s balance is not the tending of the
delicate interaction between nature and humanity in
order to ensure that the ecological systems on which we
rely are protected. An examination of the Bush
administration’s record during its first three years in
office demonstrates that it views its role as
reestablishing the preeminent right of corporations to
take from nature what they need with little regard for
the long-term health of nature or for the communities
that live downwind or can’t afford bottled water. The
"balance" the administration wishes to strike is akin to
an affirmative action program for corporate polluters.

There has not been such a wholesale giveaway of our
common assets to corporate interests since the
presidency of William McKinley. In the 1896 presidential
election, McKinley was aided in his battle against the
great American populist, William Jennings Bryan, by coal
and oil magnate Mark Hanna. Hanna has been cited by Karl
Rove, President Bush’s key political adviser, as a major
influence and inspiration. Hanna raised more than $4
million in campaign contributions from corporations like
Standard Oil and unapologetically blanketed the country
with pamphlets suggesting that only a government that
catered first to the needs of corporate interests could
serve the needs of the people. Upon election, McKinley
proceeded to give away large sections of America’s
common assets under the direction of Hanna.

The Bush administration, elected with the contributions
of America’s largest polluting companies, is on a
similar path. Executing the plan are the same people who
were lobbying for exemptions and tax breaks before Bush
took office, only now they’re being paid by the federal
government. For example, the Undersecretary of the
Interior, J. Steven Griles, is an industry lobbyist
still being paid by his former firm to work on behalf of
that firm’s interests rather than on behalf of the
interests of the American people.

The destructive effects of the administration’s policies
are felt on the ground in places like Gillette, Wyoming.

Gillette, Wyoming

Gillette bustles with the energy of a town on the verge
of a gold rush. The hard-scrabble landscape surrounding
Gillette is pocked with drill pads and roads left by
dried-up oil wells from previous plunders. The town lies
in the middle of the Powder River Basin, which lies at
the heart of the administration’s plans for natural gas
development in the United States. What’s happening there
illustrates the negative consequences of corporate-
interested common-asset giveaways.

Soon after Bush took office, Vice President Dick Cheney
convened a secretive energy task force to craft the
administration’s agenda. They recommended two major
efforts: lower the environmental bar and pay
corporations to jump over it. With the help of Enron’s
Ken Lay and other gas and oil industry leaders, they
laid out a set of plans to weaken existing environmental
regulations and provide a multibillion-dollar package of
tax incentives to increase oil and gas production.

If natural gas development made economic and
environmental sense in the Powder River Basin, capital
from private investors would take the place of
government subsidies. This is a gold rush where the gold
is provided by Congress. There is a significant amount
of natural gas in the area, but it’s embedded within
coal deposits deep underground. The only way to get at
this natural gas-coalbed methane-is by draining the
groundwater to the level of the coal in order to release
the gas. To do so requires an astonishing amount of
water. The Bureau of Land Management estimates that if
all goes ahead as planned, the miners will discard more
than 700 million gallons of publicly owned water a year,
water that will be pumped out of rapidly dwindling
aquifers, nature’s water storage devices. Local ranchers
already are complaining that their water wells are
running dry and that their land is being invaded by
mining companies given title to the minerals beneath the
ranchers’ land. The mining of coalbed methane is as
expensive as it is wasteful, and the industry has
received promises from Congress of a $3 billion tax
credit to help them on their way, despite the fact that
it makes little economic sense to drill for marginal
coalbed methane when larger deposits are elsewhere. In
the Powder River Basin alone, the industry is proposing
the development of 50,000 new wells. This number clearly
highlights the harmful inefficiency of coalbed methane
drilling. Each well requires miles of roads and power
lines that despoil the landscape and threaten local
wildlife. In contrast, Saudi Arabia, which has more than
10 times the natural gas, as well as billions more
gallons of oil, has only about 1,000 oil and gas wells
in the entire country. Meanwhile the U.S. government
agencies normally responsible for protecting the land
now serve as customer service organizations for the
mining companies.

The Language Conundrum

Across the United States, cities like Gillette face
similar threats from Bush policies. But to listen to the
rhetoric of the administration you’d never know it. When
wildfires ripped across California in November, it was
quick to call upon Congress to pass the Healthy Forests
Initiative, claiming it would speed up the clearing of
brush-clogged forests near homes. In the words of the
administration, "The President’s Healthy Forests
Initiative is returning the nation’s forests to their
natural condition by reducing unnecessary regulatory
obstacles that hinder active forest management." The
administration poses the problem as one of regulatory
burden and obstructionism by environmentalists, yet
according to research conducted by Paul Rogers of the
San Jose Mercury News, U.S. Forest Service records show
that in the four national forests in Southern California
that burned in early November, environmentalists had not
filed a single appeal to stop Forest Service tree-
thinning projects to reduce fire risk since at least
1997. In April of 2003, California Gov. Gray Davis
requested $430 million to remove unhealthy trees on
415,000 acres of California forest, but the request for
emergency funds went unanswered by the Bush
administration until the end of October - and then was
denied. If the administration were serious about making
communities near forests safer, it would have put
forward to fund to clear brush and overgrowth on the
urban-forest boundary. Instead it has proposed to fund
such projects by giving logging companies access to old-
growth trees and paying them for brush clearing. To the
administration, a healthy forest is a forest robbed of
its old-growth trees, one that bears more resemblance to
a Christmas tree farm than to a wild forest.

If the intention behind the Healthy Forests Initiative
is to allow logging companies an excuse to cut America’s
last old-growth forests, then it’s not surprising that
the administration’s Clear Skies Initiative will do as
much for clean air as George Bush has done for
international diplomacy. The Clear Skies Initiative is
the most extensive revision of the Clean Air Act in 13
years. The plan would allow power plants to emit more
than five times as much mercury, twice as much sulfer
dioxide, and more than one and a half times as much
nitrogen oxides as the current Clean Air Act allows.

The Clean Air Act of 1970 is responsible for many of the
improvements in air quality that America has seen over
the past three decades. The skies over most cities are
cleaner, and after the work of the Clinton
administration, there remained only a few remaining
hurdles to overcome before the main goals of the act
would have been achieved.

One of the compromises made when the Clean Air Act was
passed allowed a few existing power plants the right to
continue to operate without new pollution controls. The
act’s authors knew that without major repairs the plants
eventually would be decommissioned. The law stated that
if major repairs were undertaken, the old polluting
power plants would need to employ state-of-the-art
pollution-control technology. More than three decades
later, these plants are still polluting, largely because
they’ve been illegally repaired and upgraded without
enhancing their pollution-control devices. The federal
government filed suit against these power companies
during the Clinton administration. Once Bush was
elected, power companies began working to roll back the
Clean Air Act regulations and to halt the settlement
negotiations that were already under way.

With this in mind, it’s not surprising to learn that the
power companies are major contributors to the Republican
Party and had access to Cheney’s energy task force. The
Edison Electric Institute, an industry trade group with
members who are Clean Air Act violators, had more than
10 contacts with the Cheney task force and contributed
nearly $600,000 to the Republican Party from 1999 to
2002.

Coalbed methane development, the Healthy Forests
Initiative, and the Clear Skies proposal are three
examples of the Bush administration’s efforts to undo 30
years of environmental progress. Unlike previous attacks
on the nation’s environmental laws - by Ronald Reagan’s
Secretary of the Interior James Watt and by Newt
Gingrich - these attacks are made in front of scenic
backdrops and with flowery language while the real
agendas are hammered out behind closed doors. It takes
an expert in decoding the Bush administration’s double-
speak to differentiate the Bush-Cheney 2004 Web site
from the Sierra Club’s. But the Bush policies are like
week-old sushi advertised as fresh fish. The media has
faithfully reported the names of the Bush
administration’s bills - Healthy Forests, Clear
Skies - without exposing the irony to the public.

In the end, Leavitt was overwhelmingly approved by the
Senate for the post of EPA administrator, despite the
fact that he did not reject any of the Bush
administration’s environmental policies. Democrats on
Capitol Hill pounded their chests for a while, and then
quietly approved him. Leavitt now intends to bring more
"balance" to a relationship that is already skewed
toward corporate interests. No one at the hearings
bothered to ask why the administrator of the
Environmental Protection Agency would set his goal as
balance rather than protection.

[Adam Werbach is the executive director of the Common
Assets Defense Fund and a member of the San Francisco
Public Utilities Commission. He is a former president of
the Sierra Club, a position to which he was elected at
the age of 23.]