back the clock 50 years in terms of environmental legislation?
larry
On Wed, 7 Jul 2004 10:11:46 -0600, dana tierney <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> ::nod:: more worried about the relaxation of mercury pollution standards though.
>
> 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 â�" 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 â�" from 48 tons to 15 tons â�" 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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