http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/06/tech/main582309.shtml
CBS/AP) White House staff made subtle changes to the language of
proposed rules on mercury pollution that largely downplayed the
chemical's health risks, a newspaper reports.
The New York Times, quoting e-mail messages and other documents, says
White House staff deviated from descriptions of mercury found in a
National Academy of Sciences report.
Scientists from the academy told the newspaper that none of the
language was false � some of it made the wording clearer, and the rest
pertained to scientific points that are debatable.
But the White House usually came down on the side of wording that
downplayed the risks of mercury, which the academy concluded can
affect children's and festuses' brains, the newspaper said.
According to The Times, one section first read: "Recent published
studies have shown an association between methylmercury exposure and
an increased risk of heart attacks and coronary disease in adult men."
It ended up reading: "it has been hypothesized that there is an
association between methylmercury exposure and an increased risk of
coronary disease; however this warrants further study as the new
studies currently available present conflicting results."
A White House spokeswoman tells the paper the changes were part of the
normal process of drafting rules. One scientist said the original
National Academy report overstated some of the evidence against
mercury.
The proposed rules on mercury mirror the wishes of the energy
industry, and according to The Times, some sections of the rules are
nearly identical to what was proposed by lobbying firms with ties to
current EPA officials.
Attorneys general from 10 states and 45 senators want the rules thrown
out, and the EPA administrator, Michael Leavitt, is reviewing them.
Under the proposed rules, the Bush administration is proposing to give
power plants up to 15 years to install technology to reduce mercury
pollution.
The EPA proposal would ease limits envisioned by the Clinton
administration, while requiring immediate action in some cases.
In 2001, EPA estimated that mercury could be cut by as much as 90
percent, to 5.5 tons, by 2008 if the best available technology were
used as the Clinton EPA had hoped, according to EPA documents obtained
by advocacy group National Environmental Trust.
But the White House and EPA want to let utilities meet mercury
pollution limits the first six years using the benefits of controls
installed for other pollutants that cause smog and acid rain.
The Clinton administration listed mercury as a "hazardous air
pollutant." The Bush administration would undo that by placing mercury
into a less strict category of the Clean Air Act, which will allow
companies to buy and sell pollution rights with other plants under a
"cap-and-trade" system.
This approach, EPA says, would eliminate about 14 tons a year of
mercury emissions from the currently unregulated 48 tons a year
generated by coal-fired power plants. Such plants account for about 40
percent of the nation's mercury pollution.
After that, the pollution-trading proposal would cut an additional 19
tons a year of mercury emissions, EPA says. The result would be a 70
percent reduction � from 48 tons to 15 tons � by 2018, the agency
says.
Cap-and-trade programs set a national limit on emissions and then
allow companies to choose whether to reduce emissions or buy credits
from plants that do. This rewards firms that innovate first and
imposes costs on those that do not.
Supporters say the system allows the market to pick the most
cost-effective way to reduce pollution.
Proponents frequently point to the acid rain trading program begun in
1990 as the model for using market forces to reward companies that
surpass their pollution reduction targets. But it would mean the
toughest mercury requirements would not take force until 2018.
Last fall, scientists told the Food and Drug Administration that it
should issue stronger warnings to pregnant women and young children
about mercury levels in fish, particularly tuna. White, or albacore,
tuna has nearly three times as much mercury as cheaper "light" tuna.
Mercury pollution can taint fish once it enters water and turns into a
more dangerous form, methyl mercury.
Also last year, the Bush administration revised the Clean Air rules to
allow power plants to avoid mandatory pollution controls when they
make limited capital improvements to their facilities.
The White House said the move would encourage power plants to install
newer, cleaner technology.
Twelve states and several Northeast cities sued the EPA this fall to
block the new Clean Air rules, which they argue will weaken
protections for the environment and public health.
�MMIV, CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may
not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The
Associated Press contributed to this report.
----- Original Message -----
From: Larry C. Lyons <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Wed, 7 Jul 2004 08:22:26 -0400
Subject: Endangered Species Act's Protections Are Trimmed
To: CF-Community <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Don't know whether anyone caught this but the Shrub Administration is
still trying to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A26242-2004Jul3.html
Endangered Species Act's Protections Are Trimmed
By Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, July 4, 2004; Page A01
The Bush administration has succeeded in reshaping the Endangered
Species Act in ways that have sharply limited the impact of the
30-year-old law aimed at protecting the nation's most vulnerable
plants and animals, according to environmentalists and some
independent analysts.
The Bush initiatives, which have ranged from recalculating the
economic costs of protecting critical habitats to limiting the number
of species added to the protected list, reflect a policy shift that
Interior Secretary Gale A. Norton calls the "New Environmentalism."
Under this approach, federal officials have focused more on providing
incentives to private landowners to protect the habitats of endangered
species than on prohibiting human activity on those lands. While some
environmentalists praise the incentive programs, they say these
projects are not enough to protect animals and plants on the brink of
extinction.
Federal officials have added an average of 9.5 species a year to the
endangered list under President Bush, compared with 65 a year under
President Bill Clinton and 59 a year under President George H.W. Bush.
They have designated as "critical habitat" only half the acreage
recommended by federal biologists. And they are transferring key
decision-making powers from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to
other agencies with different priorities.
"Instead of taking the Endangered Species Act head on, the
administration is working to destroy the effectiveness of it through
executive rule changes," said Brian Nowicki, a conservation biologist
at the Tucson-based Center for Biological Diversity, which promotes
species conservation. "They can't just attack it outright, so they try
to stop it out of the spotlight."
The law, long a lightning rod for political and legal challenges, has
come under intense attack from landowners who say it deprives them of
full use of their property, and the administration has strived to
alter features that top officials describe as broken.
"It's a different way of looking how to administer the act," said
Craig Manson, assistant secretary of the interior for fish and
wildlife and parks. "We are putting our efforts on the up-front end of
conservation, as opposed to the emergency listing end."
This shift comes at a time when congressional critics are reviving
plans to seek changes in the act to make it harder to list endangered
species and declare habitat off-limits. House Resources Committee
Chairman Richard W. Pombo (R-Calif.) plans to bring two Endangered
Species Act revision bills up for a vote by the month's end.
The act "has been a failure in terms of what its initial goals were,
in terms of identifying and recovering species," Pombo said in an
interview, adding the administration has applied some "common-sense"
principles in recent years, but "they can only go so far and stay
within the boundaries of the law."
Enacted under President Richard M. Nixon in 1973 with overwhelming
support in Congress, the Endangered Species Act seeks to protect
ecological diversity by preventing animals and plants from being
driven to extinction by development pressures, hunting or trafficking,
and it authorizes the government to set up conservation programs to
restore species whose numbers have dwindled dangerously. The Fish and
Wildlife Service Web site currently counts 1,074 animals and insects
and 749 plants as endangered or threatened in either the United States
or foreign countries.
Environmentalists have sued administrations -- including Clinton's --
for failing to move quickly enough to list imperiled plants and
animals. Private property owners, by contrast, have complained that
once a species or its habitat is listed, they lose the economic value
of their land. While experts estimate the law has saved hundreds of
species from going extinct, only 15 species have recovered to full
health since its passage, according to the Fish and Wildlife Service.
The Interior Department's Manson, who has questioned in the past to
what lengths the government should go in staving off the extinction of
certain species, said the administration has committed $1.3 billion
toward conservation. Last year, for example, the department awarded
$82,500 to help five Long Island towns protect the threatened piping
plover, a beach bird, through programs that will monitor nesting and
protect the bird's eggs from predators.
"We view it as a major accomplishment and contribution to plover
protection on Long Island," said Joseph Jannsen, coastal resources
manager for the Nature Conservancy.
Although the conservation grants are popular across the political
spectrum, other initiatives are more controversial. Academics and
wildlife advocates, as well as some career federal officials, question
recent proposals that would let the U.S. Forest Service decide whether
fire prevention projects pose a threat to key species and allow the
Environmental Protection Agency to make that call on pesticides. Such
judgments have been the province of the Fish and Wildlife Service.
Jamie Rappaport Clark, who headed the Service between 1997 and 2001
and is now executive vice president of the environmental group
Defenders of Wildlife, said having those agencies make such
determinations was "like the fox watching the chicken house." Fish and
Wildlife officials, she said, "have the continuity and knowledge about
the species to make the decisions that are relevant to the Endangered
Species Act."
John J. Fay, a biologist at the Fish and Wildlife Service's endangered
species program, said the shift is "a little troublesome" given the
two agencies' track records on endangered species, but added that it
could work. "Will someone have to keep a close eye on it? Absolutely,"
Fay said.
Oliver Houck, who heads Tulane University's environmental law program,
said Bush's appointees are "hostile to the Endangered Species Act" and
prefer to rely on "PR and carrots" rather than enforce the law.
Interior officials have been aggressive in using economic analyses to
question whether to designate critical habitat, saying the
designations often do little to help species recovery. Under the law,
the government is supposed to determine whether a particular habitat
is essential to the survival of the species when it makes a listing
decision. If officials see a need, they must designate the habitat as
critical so future federal activities do not damage it.
Between 2001 and 2003 the government approved 41 million of the 83
million acres of critical habitat initially proposed by federal
biologists, a recent National Wildlife Federation survey found. In
habitat cases involving the Topeka shiner, an endangered minnow, and
the threatened bull trout, the administration decided not to consider
economic analyses that showed potential benefits to such designations.
In at least one of those cases, Manson said, the analyses did not
comply with federal guidelines.
In a case involving 15 vernal pool species in California last year,
Manson and his deputy Julie MacDonald decided not to designate nearly
1 million acres that biologists had deemed to be critical habitat.
The National Wildlife Federation charged that the decision was based
on an analysis that inflated the expense of the move by counting
previously estimated costs stemming from the listing.
"This administration has set new records in terms of the perversion
and distortion of science," said John Kostyack, the federation's
senior counsel.
Manson responded that calculating economic costs was subjective, "a
matter of policy judgment and how one sees it. . . . You get any two
folks together and they will disagree on the values of benefits and
costs."
Endangered species advocates have gone to court to press for more
listings and critical habitat designations. Center for Biological
Diversity conservation biologist Noah Greenwald has been seeking a
listing for the Montana fluvial Arctic grayling, a member of the
salmon family described in Lewis and Clark's journals in 1805 as
"equally well flavored" as speckled trout.
In 1994, Fish and Wildlife Service officials determined that listing
was warranted because the fish are a distinct population, but the
agency lacked the money to proceed. The fish is now restricted to just
60 miles of river in Montana, where drought coupled with farming
activity have drained the waterway to a trickle during summer
months:Now there are barely enough fish to count, Greenwald said:
"It's a grim situation."
But administration officials say they are also attuned to the pleas of
farmers such as Joe Hopkins, a Georgia forester who could not legally
harvest valuable heart pine timber on his land after a 2000 fire
because it was home to the endangered red-cockaded woodpecker.
"I just had to watch it rot on the stump," Hopkins said. "I don't want
to watch any species go extinct, but it's not fair to put it on a few
private landowners to finance the Endangered Species Act."
Researcher Madonna Leibling contributed to this report.
� 2004 The Washington Post Company________________________________
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