[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 144 (Thursday, October 23, 1997)]
[Senate]
[Pages S11004-S11007]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
GLOBAL WARMING
Mr. INHOFE. Mr. President, today we will be having some conversation
on the floor concerning the global warming treaty. I will make a few
comments concerning that in that I am the chairman of the Clean Air
Committee of the Environment and Public Works Committee. We have had
extensive hearings on this. I will review just very briefly what we
have learned from the hearing that we held in our subcommittee in the
Environment and Public Works Committee insofar as global warming is
concerned.
In July, the Environmental Committee had a hearing on the global
climate change treaty and we heard from five top scientists.
The conclusions I found were very interesting, particularly since
last night when I watched Administrator Carol Browner talk about the
scientific evidence that is conclusive concerning global climate
change. That is not at all what we found in our hearing. We had five of
the top scientists around. While there is a large body of scientific
research, there is much controversy and disagreement in scientific
facts being misrepresented by the administration and the press.
Four things that we came to a conclusion on were, No. 1, we don't
know how much human activity has influenced the climate. One scientist
before our committee said it could be as much as 6 percent.
Second, if you look at satellite data, we are not sure if there has
been any global warming. We had a very interesting session that lasted
more than an hour with viewing the satellites and what conclusions
could come, and there was no conclusive evidence that there has
actually been any global warming.
Three, even if we eliminate all manmade emissions, it may not have a
noticeable impact on the environment, and the treaty may only eliminate
emissions here in the United States and not in the entire world.
Four, when asked, all five scientists stated that we would not have
the uncertainties understood by this December, when the administration
plans on making a decision regarding the treaty.
Now, we found out yesterday that the President came and made his
announcement. It is kind of interesting, Mr. President, because we
passed a resolution on the floor of the Senate, by 95 to 0, that said
we would reject any type of a treaty that came from Kyoto that didn't
treat the developing nations the same as the developed nations. So the
President came out with something where he is calling for a binding 30
percent reduction in emission levels by the year 2012. He calls this an
important first step, with more reductions to follow.
As chairman of the Armed Services Readiness Subcommittee, I can tell
you that this is going to have a profound negative affect on our
ability to defend America, as the President stated yesterday that the
military accounts for 43 percent of the Federal energy use. The Federal
Government cannot reduce by 30 percent or more without significant cuts
in the military. I think this equates to something like a 3 to 7 times
greater cut than the Btu tax of 1993.
One of the things that bothered me more than anything else is the
moving target that we are dealing with. In March of 1995 in a House
Commerce Committee hearing, Congressmen Dingell and Schaefer raised
concerns that the new targets may not apply to all countries equally,
and on behalf of
[[Page S11005]]
the administration, Mr. Rafe Pomerance, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of
the State Department said, ``Our goal, Mr. Chairman, is that all
parties participate in this next round of negotiations. We want to see
that all governments participate and help define the post-2000
regime.''
One month later, the administration signed on to the Berlin Mandate
to review the commitments made to reduce the greenhouse gases and adopt
targets for further reductions. The conference differentiated between
developed and developing nations. They signed on to this, totally at
odds and contradicting the commitment made to the Congressmen.
In June 1996, Mr. Pomerance stated, ``Are we going to agree to
legally binding instrument in Geneva? No way.'' One month later, Under
Secretary Wirth announced that the United States supported a legally
binding emissions target.
I want to also say that this has not changed since September 1996. It
is before the same Commerce Committee. Assistant Secretary of State
Eileen Claussen told Congressman Dingell and the committee that the
United States would not be bound before we have completed the economic
analysis and assessments. We have just learned that the
administration's efforts to analyze the economic effects has failed.
The models they used did not work, and we will not understand the
effect on our nations's economy certainly before December.
The reason I am concerned about this is, there is a very interesting
parallel between what they are trying to do in the absence of any
scientific evidence in global climate change, which has a dramatic
deteriorating effect on our ability to be competitive on a global basis
and on the ambient air changes promulgated by this administration. We
all know that, just about a year ago, Carol Browner came out and
unilaterally suggested--and now has promulgated--the rule change to
lower the ambient air standards in both particulate matter and in
ozone. We find that during the various hearings that we have had that
Mary Nichols, who is immediately under Carol Browner, said that the
cost would be $9 billion to put these standards in--the cost to the
American people. At the same time, the President's Economic Advisory
Committee said it was $60 billion a year. The Reason Foundation
estimated the costs between $90 billion and $150 billion. This would
cost the average family of four some $1,700 a year.
They talk about the deaths, and Carol Browner reused this yesterday.
There would be 60,000 premature deaths. Those deaths were lowered by
the EPA last November to 40,000; then in December to 20,000, and in
April to 15,000. Then the scientist who discovered the mathematic
mistake now says it's less than 1,000. In our committee, Mary Nichols
admitted these regulations would not save any lives over the next 5
years.
I have watched how Carol Browner goes around and makes promises. She
says to the mayors of America, ``This isn't going to affect you.'' She
says to the farmers, ``This isn't going to affect you.'' She says to
small businesses, ``This won't affect you.'' To some of the parishes in
Louisiana that were found to be out of attainment, she said, ``This
isn't going to make you do anything because the problem is for the
neighboring State of Texas to the west; they are going to have to do
this.''
So, Mr. President, I only ask the question, why is this obsession
taking place in the administration if there is no scientific
justification on either global warming or ambient air standards? Why
are they trying to do this in eroding our personal freedoms? I think
probably the best way to answer that is to read an article in Forbes
magazine, called ``Watch Out For This Woman; The EPA's Carol Browner is
exploiting health and the environment to build a power base.''
If you read this article, Mr. President, it says:
If science isn't Browner's strong point, political tactics
are. Her enemies can only envy the way the EPA uses the
courts.
. . . For her part, Browner often dismisses as simple male
chauvinism any criticism of her hardball tactics.
. . . She learned politics working on Gore's Senate staff,
where she rose to be his legislative director before heading
back to Florida to head the State environmental commission.
. . . She is an environmentalist zealot.
Mr. President, I know my time has expired. I ask unanimous consent
that this article be printed in the Record.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From Forbes magazine, Oct. 20, 1997]
Carol Browner, Master of Mission Creep
(By Pranay Gupte and Bonner R. Cohen)
As the center of that enormous rent-seeking organization
known as the federal government, Washington, D.C. has evolved
its own vocabulary. There is, in bureaucratese, an innocent-
sounding but insidious phrase: mission creep. Mark it well:
Mission creep explains a lot about how big government grows
and grows and grows.
Mission creep is to a taxpayer-supported organization what
new markets are to a business organization. It involves a
gradual, sometimes authorized, sometimes not, broadening of a
bureaucracy's original mission. It is a way to accrete money
and power beyond what Congress originally approved when it
funded an agency.
Playing mission creep is an old game in Washington. But no
one has ever played the game with more skill than Carol M.
Browner, Bill Clinton's choice to head the Environmental
Protection Agency.
From a modest beginning a quarter-century ago, the agency
has grown to employ nearly 20,000 people and control an
annual budget of $7 billion. But these numbers are a poor
measure of the agency's power: Because its regulations have
the force of law, the agency can jail people, close factories
and override the judgments of local authorities.
In its quest for power and money, the agency has imposed
many unnecessary costs on American industry, and ultimately
on the American people--costs that do more to satisfy
bureaucratic zeal than to clean the air or the water.
The EPA was established in 1970 by an executive order
issued by President Richard M. Nixon. Rachel Carson, a patron
saint of the environmental movement, had made a huge impact
with her emotional tract, Silent Spring, a few years earlier.
The public was right to be alarmed. Industrialization has
imposed hidden costs in the form of polluted air, despoiled
streams, unsightly dumps and a general degradation of the
landscape. Concerns about pollution could, of course, have
been dealt with by existing agencies, but that is not the
nature of American politics. Politicians must be seen to be
doing something dramatic. Creating new agencies makes
favorable waves in the media.
Nixon created a new agency. Pulled together from a
hodgepodge of existing federal programs, the EPA never had a
congressional charter that would have defined its regulatory
activities. It was simply given the task of carrying out the
provisions of what, over time, became 13 environmental
statutes, each with its own peculiarities and
constituencies.
Without perhaps fully comprehending the issues, Nixon made
the new EPA the instrument for a tremendous power grab by the
federal government. Most environmental problems--chemical
spills, groundwater contamination, abandoned dump sites--are
purely local in nature. But suddenly they were federal
matters. In the name of a greener, cleaner Earth, Washington
mightily increased its power to intervene in the daily lives
of its citizens. It was a goal so worthy that few people saw
the dangers inherent in to. Mission creep had begun.
In 1978 then-EPA administrator Douglas Costle cleverly
shifted the focus of the agency. Henceforth the EPA would
protect not just the environment but your health. ``Costle
became determined to convince the public that [the] EPA was
first and foremost a public health agency, not a guardian of
bugs and bunnies,'' wrote Mark K. Landry, Marc J. Roberts and
Stephen R. Thomas in their book, The Environmental Protection
Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions from Nixon to Clinton.
People do care about forests and wildlife, but they care
much more about themselves and their families. There is a
strong strain of hypochondria in the American people, and
nothing grabs our attention faster than an alleged threat to
our health. If the alleged threat involves cancer, it is
almost guaranteed to make the six o'clock news. Costle
shrewdly exploited cancerphobia to expand his agency's reach
and to wring money from Congress. He launched the EPA on a
cancer hunt, looking for carcinogens in foods and air and
water, even in the showers we take.
Carcinogens, of course, abound in nature, ordinary sunlight
being one of the most prevalent. So it is with many man-made
substances. The exposure to background levels of these
carcinogens is so minimal in most cases as to pose no serious
threat in the over whelming majority of cases. Never mind:
EPA scientists, following the agency's cancer-risk
guidelines, were soon ignoring the age-old admonition that
the ``dose makes the poison.'' If it was man-made and carried
carcinogens, the EPA would root it out. As one EPA scientist
explained it to Forbes: ``At EPA, we're not paid not to find
risks.''
Under the mantra of ``one fiber can kill,'' the EPA in the
1980s mounted a costly and probably self-defeating nationwide
effort to rip asbestos out of schools. Simply sealing the
substance would have kept the fibers away from kids at a
fraction of the cost. But it would not have yielded the same
harvest in headlines.
[[Page S11006]]
Even more than her predecessors--and possessing much
greater resources--Carol Browner presents herself as the
great family physician. ``There isn't a decision I make on
any given day that's not related to the health of the
American people.'' she tells Forbes. Browner, it's worth
noting, is a lawyer with no medical training.
After all, she reminds us, she's the mom of a young boy.
Attendees of Capitol Hill hearings snicker at her constant
references to her son, Zachary, when she testifies on
environmental issues. But she never misses a chance to repeat
the message. ``If we can focus on protecting the children . .
. we will be protecting the population at large, which is
obviously our job,'' she tells Forbes.
Who said that was her job? Nobody, but that's what mission
creep is all about.
Last September Browner announced the release of a new EPA
report setting forth a broad national agenda to protect
children from environmental risks. She followed up the report
with the creation earlier this year of the Office of
Children's Health Protection at EPA.
There was no congressional mandate, but Congress meekly
went along by failing to challenge the agency's justification
of the program. Who would want to face reelection accused of
being callous toward children? Especially when the EPA's kept
researchers stand by ready to produce scare studies on EPA
money (see box, p. 172).
Where most agency chiefs tremble at criticism from
Congress, Browner has a platform from which she can
counterattack. An EPA-funded newsletter was recently
distributed by the National Parents Teachers Association. At
the time an internal EPA memo noted: ``The PTA could become a
major ally for the Agency in preventing Congress from
slashing our budget.'' Thus does Browner's EPA use taxpayer
money to fight efforts to trim the federal budget.
On Mar. 15, 1995 David Lewis, an EPA scientist attached to
the agency's laboratory in Athens, Ga., was told by his
supervisor that EPA employees with connections to members of
Congress should use their influence to sway lawmakers against
a bill proposed by Representative Clifford Stearns (R-Fla.)--
if it could be done ``without getting into trouble.''
Stearns' bill would have reduced funding for EPA. The
scientist later said in a deposition: ``We were being asked
to do this during government business hours, and the purpose
was to protect EPA funding levels.'' This request on the part
of high-level EPA officials to lobby Congress on government
time is under investigation by the House Government Reform
and Oversight Committee.
Had this been a Republican administration and had the
department involved been other than the EPA, one can imagine
the outcry in the media.
Asked about the growing criticism of her tactics, Browner
blatantly ducks the question with: ``This isn't about me. It
never has been about me. It's about the air being cleaner. Is
the water going to be safer? It's about business going to be
able to find a better solution to our environmental
problems.''
It's really about politics. When supportive lawmakers ask
to borrow EPA experts for their staffs, the EPA hastens to
comply. Requests from liberal Democrats almost always are
filled, those from Republicans rarely. A request by
Representative Richard Pombo (R-Calif.) for an EPA detailee
was rejected on Jan. 2, 1997 on the grounds that ``new
procedures'' were being written. Less than four weeks later
(Jan. 28), a similar request from liberal Democrat
Representative Charles Rangel of New York was approved,
without reference to any ``new procedures.''
Since 1995 her office has approved all requests for
employee details to four Democratic lawmakers--Senator Frank
Lautenberg (D-N.J.), Senator John Kerry (D-Mass.), Senator
Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and Rangel. Of the four GOP
requests, three were rejected.
Browner was at her politically impressive best in this
summer's debate over the EPA's tougher clean air standards.
Because air quality levels have improved markedly since
passage of the Clean Air Act amendments of 1990, it was
widely hoped--especially in areas that badly need new jobs--
that the standards would not be further tightened. The EPA's
own data showed that levels of the particulates have dropped
dramatically over the past decade. Many local governments,
anxious for jobs and economic development, were looking
forward to being removed from the list of so-called
nonattainment areas for ozone and particulate matter, or PM.
In July the EPA finalized new tighter standards for ozone
and PM. For communities that had made expensive efforts to
comply with the current law, the higher standards were like a
baseball player, having rounded third base and heading toward
home, being told he had to circle the bases again to score.
A good many congresspeople were outraged. Browner's
insistence on imposing the new standards in the face of
nothing more than scanty scientific evidence unleashed howls
of protest from elected officials in the affected
communities.
Legally, Browner was probably in the right. In its haste to
seem to be attending to the environment, Congress failed to
exert control over EPA standards and regulations.
There was nonetheless quite a donnybrook, with veteran
Democrat John Dingell of Michigan leading the charge against
Browner. A lot of jobs were at stake in Michigan, still
headquarters of the U.S. auto industry. Congress, he
insisted, should be consulted. Dingell was not alone.
With lots of support from Vice President Al Gore's office,
Browner went to work putting down the congressional revolt.
Her testimony before Congress was, by general agreement,
brilliant, though her facts were often shaky.
Until then, Bill Clinton had remained on the sidelines. But
Browner maneuvered the President into a corner, where he
faced the politically embarrassing choice of supporting her
controversial initiatives or disavowing his outspoken EPA
administrator. Clinton then got to the head of the parade by
declaring his support for Browner. The game was over. Browner
1, Congress 0.
If EPA's new standards survive congressional and legal
challenges, state and local governments will have to devise
elaborate State Implementation Plans, or SIPs, detailing
their strategies for complying with the agency's latest
regulatory diktat. And in accordance with the Clean Air Act,
it will be up to the EPA to approve or disapprove the SIPs.
The estimated cost of compliance with the new standards for
the Chicago area alone is projected to be between $3 billion
and $7 billion.
``I wish we never had that fight with Congress,'' she tells
Forbes. ``I wish it could have been avoided. I think it came
at great expense to the country. I think it was very
unfortunate.'' Note the implication: The way it could have
been avoided was for Congress to avoid challenging her.
You can admire Browner's skill and still be appalled by
what she is doing. ``This is by far the most politicized EPA
I've seen in my three decades of working in state
governments,'' says Russell J. Harding, director of
Michigan's Depatment of Environmental Quality. ``It is an
agency driven more by sound bites than by sound science.''
Says Barry McBee, chairman of the Texas Natural Resource
Conservation Commission: ``EPA continues to embody an
outdated attitude that Washington knows best, that only
Washington has the capability to protect our environment.
States are closer to the people they protect and closer to
the resources and can do a better job today.''
As a weapon to humble the state regulatory bodies, Carol
Browner's EPA has embraced the politically correct concept of
``environmental justice.'' This broadens EPA's mandates even
beyond protection of everyone's health.
In early 1993 Browner set up the Office of Environmental
Justice within EPA which, among other things, passes out
taxpayer-funded grants for studying the effects of industrial
pollutants on poorer, mostly black, communities. In 1994 the
White House supported this initiative by ordering federal
agencies to consider the health and environmental effects of
their decisions on minority and low-income communities.
That's the rhetoric. The reality is that the federal
agencies have a new weapon for overruling state agencies.
Browner's EPA recently delayed the approval of a $700 million
polyvinyl chloride plant to be built by Japanese-owned
Shintech in the predominantly black southern Louisiana town
of Convent. Louisiana's Department of Environmental Quality
had already given the go-ahead; the plant would have created
good-paying jobs and opportunities in an area suffering from
60% unemployment and low incomes. But the EPA argued that
blacks would suffer disproportionately from potentially
cancer-causing emissions of the plant in an area already
lined with chemical factories of all descriptions.
Louisiana Economic Development Director Kevin Reilly was
enraged. ``It is demeaning and despicable for these people to
play the race card,'' he says, pointing out that poor people
and blacks would have gained economically and were at little
health risk. The scientific evidence bears Reilly out: A
recent article in the Journal of the Louisiana Medical
Society found that cancer incidence in the area is in most
cases no higher than nationally.
But never mind the facts: This kind of decision has less to
do with science than with power politics. It delivers the
message: Don't mess with the EPA. ``Carol Browner is the best
hardball player in the Clinton Administration,'' says Steven
J. Milloy, executive director of The Advancement of Sound
Science Coalition in Washington, a longtime critic of EPA who
acknowledges receiving funding from industry. ``She has the
105th Congress completely intimated by her debating skills
and her sheer grasp of facts, however questionable. She eats
their lunch.''
Like many Clintonites, Browner takes her own good time
about responding to congressional requests for EPA documents.
When word got out that EPA was developing a series of
proposals for reducing U.S. emissions of man-made greenhouse
gases, the House Commerce Committee asked for a copy. The EPA
ignored the request for two years.
When the proposals were leaked to the committee late last
week, it was immediately clear why EPA had stiffed Congress.
The document was loaded with proposals for raising taxes to
pay for new EPA initiatives. Produced in the agency's Office
of Policy, Planning & Evaluation and dated May 31, 1994,
EPA's ``Climate Change Action'' recommends a new 50-cent-per-
gallon gasoline tax, with an estimated cost to motorists of
$47 billion in the year 2000 alone. Seven other tax increases
were recommended: a ``greenhouse gas tax,'' a ``carbon
tax,'' a ``btu tax,'' an ``at-the-source ad-volorem tax''
on the value of the fuel at the source of extraction,
[[Page S11007]]
an ``end-use ad valorem tax'' on the value of the fuel at
the point of sale, a ``motor fuels tax'' on the retail
price of gasoline and diesel, an ``oil import fee.'' Also
recommended: A new federal fee on vehicle emissions tests
of $40 per person to ``shift the cost of vehicle
inspection from the state to the vehicle owner.''
How could they hope to get so many new taxes through a tax-
shy Congress? The ``Climate Change Action Plan'' contains
repeated references to how each of the above taxes and fees
can be imposed under existing laws. Talk about taxation
without representation.
It's not entirely surprising that Browner and her crew
think in terms of government-by-edict. Browner's
extraordinary power is in many ways a consequences of
Congress' delegation of its lawmaking power to the EPA. It
has let the agency micromanage environmental activities
throughout the nation with little regard for either local
wishes or the cost. This negligence has permitted the agency
to ignore scientific data that conflict with agency
orthodoxy. The EPA is in many ways becoming a state within
the state.
``This is Washington at its worst--out-of-touch bureaucrats
churning out red tape with reckless abandon. The EPA hasn't
taken into account an ounce of reality,'' says Representative
Fred Upton (R-Mich.), a frequent critic, referring to the new
clean air rules.
If science isn't Browner's strong point, political tactics
are. Her enemies can only envy the way the EPA uses the
courts. An organization such as the Natural Resources Defense
Council will go into federal court and sue to force the EPA
to do something. The EPA will wink and, after the courts
expand its mandate, see to it that big legal fees go to the
NRDC.
Mission creep, in short, takes many forms and its
practitioners have many ways to plunder the public purse.
For her part, Browner often dismisses as simple male
chauvinism any criticism of her hardball tactics. ``I think
sometimes that it's an issue of men and women,'' she says,
coyly.
Such cute demagoguery aside, there is no doubting Browner's
sincerity. She is an environmentalist zealot. She was clearly
behind the decision to tighten the clean air standards to
what many people regard as unreasonable levels. If not a
tree-hugger she is philosophically close to Al Gore and his
quasi-religious environmentalism.
After graduating from University of Florida law school,
Browner (both of whose parents were college teachers) went to
work for a Ralph Nader-affiliated consumer advocate group.
There she met her husband, Michael Podhorzer, who still works
there.
She learned politics working on Gore's Senate staff, where
she rose to be his legislative director before heading back
to Florida to head the state environmental commission.
After the EPA, what's next for this tough and aggressive
politician? If Al Gore's presidential hopes aren't dashed by
the fund-raising scandals, there's vice presidential slot on
the Democratic ticket up for grabs in 2000. A female
environmentalist and mother of a young boy would do a lot to
bolster Gore's otherwise soggy appeal.
In a statement to Forbes, Gore went so far as to try to
claim for Browner some of the credit for the current economic
prosperity. ``She has helped prove,'' he declares, ``that a
healthy environmental and a strong economy are inextricably
linked.''
If not a vice presidential run, what? Could Browner be
nominated by the Clinton Administration to be the next head
of the United Nations' environment program? Or would the
Administration nominate her as the new U.N. Deputy Secretary
General? Either position would give Browner instant
international visibility, which couldn't hurt her political
prospects in Washington.
One way or another, you are going to be hearing a lot more
about Carol M. Browner; whenever you do, it's unlikely to be
good news for business--and it may not even be good news for
the environmental.
Mr. FORD addressed the Chair.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky.
Mr. FORD. Mr. President, I believe that we have 30 minutes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. There are 30 minutes under the control of the
Senator from North Carolina [Mr. Faircloth] and the Senator from
Kentucky [Mr. Ford].
Mr. FORD. Mr. President, the Senator from North Carolina is here. So
with your permission, we will proceed.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Kentucky is recognized.
Mr. FORD. I thank the Chair.
(The remarks of Mr. Ford and Mr. Faircloth pertaining to the
introduction of S. 1310 are located in today's Record under
``Statements on Introduced Bills and Joint Resolutions.'')
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Brownback). The Senator from Nebraska is
recognized. There will now be 35 minutes under control of the Senator
from Idaho [Mr. Craig] and the Senator from Nebraska [Mr. Hagel].
____________________