[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 149 (2003), Part 16]
[House]
[Pages 22731-22734]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. McCotter). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of January 7, 2003, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. Blumenauer) 
is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. BLUMENAUER. Mr. Speaker, this evening I wanted to take the 
opportunity to deal with the critical issue of our Environmental 
Protection Agency, the key Federal agency dealing with the environment 
and of great import to citizens all across this country.
  Recently, we have seen the resignation of Christine Todd Whitman as 
the administrator. Ms. Whitman was a former moderate Governor of New 
Jersey and was hailed by some as an important signal, when she was 
appointed by the Bush administration, of perhaps some environmental 
moderation and balance, that there would be an opportunity for the 
administration to use the appointment of someone like Ms. Whitman to 
send a signal that it was going to try and operationalize some of the 
rhetoric that was used by then-Governor Bush in his Presidential 
campaign where at times, in some of the debates with Vice President 
Gore, he was actually making even stronger statements in support of the 
environment. My colleagues will remember he was going to deal with all 
four of the air pollutants dealing with, in the debate, in terms of the 
regulation.
  What we have seen in the course of the past 32\1/2\ months, sadly, 
has been a rather extreme disappointment on the part of those who 
follow the environmental developments and, in fact, has been rather 
unnerving for many Americans.
  Administrator Whitman has left, some would say, under a cloud, 
literally and figuratively, being repeatedly undercut or backtracking 
in terms of her environmental pronouncements, most notably 
internationally dealing with global climate change, staking out a 
position of reasonableness and international cooperation, only to be 
pulled back by the administration and to repudiate that position by the 
President himself.
  New attention is being directed to the EPA and its administrator, as 
we have a nomination by the President of Utah Governor Mike Leavitt to 
replace Ms. Whitman; and indeed, today our colleagues in the other body 
began hearings on the confirmation. In his opening statement, Governor 
Leavitt talked about balance, ``Balance between this generation and 
next, balance between sustainable environments and sustainable 
economies and balance among regions.''
  I was struck by how, in this language, he was closely following the 
advice of the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz who sent a 
memo to the Republicans in Congress earlier this year entitled Straight 
Talk, which has become rather notorious here on Capitol Hill, because 
its advice to the Republican Party in Congress is not to deal with 
strengthening its record, not to deal with new initiatives to protect 
the environment, not pushing back on the President's efforts to erode 
environmental protection; but instead, it is a blueprint of how to talk 
about the environment.
  The memo starts with: ``Tell them a personal story from your life,'' 
and it is interesting that Governor Leavitt started out his testimony 
with a story about being 8 and going to the Grand Canyon.
  Luntz urged Republicans to talk about a ``fair balance between the 
environment and the economy,'' and indeed, Leavitt has even made up a 
word called ``enlibra,'' which he wants to mean this environmental 
balance.
  The Luntz memo tells Republicans that they need to be even more 
active in recruiting experts who are sympathetic to your view and more 
active in

[[Page 22732]]

making them part of your message. Governor Leavitt has been accused by 
those working on the environment in Utah of reassigning or demoting 
dozens of wildlife scientists after they recommended needed protections 
for endangered species in Utah.
  The issue is not making up words. It is about telling the truth about 
the environment and the public health consequences.
  I would like to make clear from the outset that there are some 
aspects of Governor Leavitt's record that I personally find very 
interesting. I have done a lot of work over the years in the State of 
Utah, and I have worked with the people who are involved with a program 
called Envision Utah, which is planning for the future that people in 
Utah want to promote livability, to promote sound land use and 
integrating the built environment with the natural environment; and I 
will say that Governor Leavitt by all accounts has been involved with 
smart growth issues.
  He was the honorary co-chair of Envision Utah, a public-private 
partnership to implement this quality-growth strategy, to help protect 
Utah's environment, economic strength and quality of life from urban 
sprawl; and I personally think that this is a positive development. 
There are 130 key stakeholders in Utah, State and local government 
officials, business leaders, developers, conservationists, landowners, 
members of the LDS Church and others in the religious community and 
citizen groups.
  They had 150 public workshops where citizens discussed how they 
wanted to shape future land use, transportation and open space 
preservation; and in these public workshops, when citizens were given 
the chance to, they demonstrated that they wanted more investment in 
public transit, more initiatives with affordable housing, more reliance 
on alternative transportation like cycling and walking. They were 
concerned about the preservation of open space and more town-like 
development along the transit lines.
  I have been pleased to note that Governor Leavitt has been part of an 
implementation of this vision for the future. He supported the creation 
of a special fund for open space protection, secured funding for 175 
miles of railway right-of-way for commuter rail and has been involved 
with leadership in the National Governors Association as chair, raising 
the profile of growth issues and promoted tools that States can use to 
contain sprawl and build healthy cities and towns. He even lobbied the 
National Governors Association to produce its first-ever land use 
principle.
  This is an encouraging development because this is truly an area of 
environmental protection that cries out for bipartisan support, for 
leadership from the administration and Congress, for doing things where 
Congress leads by example, with the administration, to model the sort 
of behavior we want from the rest of America, to lead by example.
  Another area that I thought was intriguing in the Governor's record, 
as I have examined it, deals with the accomplishments attendant to the 
Olympic games. He was Governor during this period. There was a net zero 
air emissions. There was a voluntary effort where local companies 
donated emissions reduction to offset pollution from the games, an 
interesting and innovative approach. There was zero waste from 
recycling and composting, and there was complete compliance with all 
environmental standards, unlike what some in Congress would do, 
exempting parts of the Federal Government.
  Most recently, we had an effort here in Congress to eliminate 
environmental requirements of the Department of Defense to play by the 
same environmental rules as the rest of America, except of course when 
there was a need for an exemption for national security; but there are 
some here who were saying that is too hard for the Department of 
Defense, we want to exempt them across the board. Governor Leavitt did 
not use the Olympics and the significant task that that faced for his 
community and for our country to shortcut environmental standards. 
Instead, as near as I can tell, his administration was in complete 
compliance, an interesting and important precedent that I would like to 
see modeled here in the Federal Government. They were involved with 
things like planting over 100,000 trees.
  So I want to be clear that I am not reflexively opposed to the 
Governor; and I do think there are elements of his record that are 
worthy of praise, and I hope that we would find willing people here in 
the Federal Government to implement some of them; but there must be a 
full look at the Governor's record, and as a long-tenured Governor, he 
has achieved a number of other areas.
  I have already referenced deep concerns from some of the people who 
have been following environmental developments in the State of Utah, 
the notion of not having hands off when it came to allowing the 
scientific experts to state their opinion. He fired a division of 
wildlife resource enforcement official who had fined the Leavitt family 
fish farm for violations that had brought devastating whirling disease 
to Utah's wild fish stocks. He downplayed toxic releases reported by 
the mining industry, including releases of neurotoxin mercury by 
saying, ``In reality, it is not pollution.''
  He supported the infamous Legacy Highway, an extremely controversial 
project that threatens wetlands along the Great Salt Lake. This was a 
project that was challenged by community activists and local government 
officials; and taken to court, the Legacy Highway project was rejected 
by the 10th Court of Appeals for the failure of the people planning 
this project to consider less environmentally harmful alternatives and 
for ignoring the impacts on Utah's wildlife and environment, a sad note 
on his watch.
  It is no secret that there was a series of closed-door negotiations 
with Secretary Norton, after which Governor Leavitt signed a memorandum 
of understanding that opened up 10 million acres of Federal lands in 
Utah for possible development under the arcane RS 2477 road provision. 
He also brokered a back-room agreement with the Interior Department to 
prevent a new wilderness study area designation. This agreement opens 
2.6 million acres of former wilderness study areas to oil and gas 
drilling, off-road vehicle use, and other development.
  It is no accident, I suppose, that Utah has the least amount of 
designated wilderness out of 11 Western States, in part because of this 
Governor's dedication to preventing new wildlife proposals from being 
passed by Congress during his tenure. Utah is one of only a handful of 
States without any, without any wildlife and scenic river designations, 
again because the Leavitt administration worked to oppose Federal wild 
and scenic river reviews in southern Utah.
  In objective, objective appraisal of Utah's environmental performance 
under the Governor's administration, looking at the EPA itself, this 
administration's recent EPA report on Clean Water Act enforcement from 
major sources, Utah tied for last place with two other States for 
performance in six key environmental indicators.

                              {time}  2230

  This from the EPA that he seeks to lead, published in February of 
2003.
  According to the 2001 EPA toxic release inventory, Utah has the 
second highest volume of toxic chemical releases in the Nation. And 
between 1995 and 2002, during the Leavitt administration, Utah power 
plants actually increased their emissions of nitrogen oxide, a 
pollutant linked to respiratory disease, while the rest of the country 
decreased such emissions substantially, on average over 21 percent 
during the same period.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, in addition to defending and explaining his 
environmental record, positive and negative, there are other issues 
that the nominee should address as he appears before Congress and the 
American public. These are some of the issues that have caused Senators 
to place a hold on his nomination, people who are concerned about EPA 
statements about the pollution in New York City after 9/11; the New 
Source rules; the Clean Skies administration strategy. Indeed, what

[[Page 22733]]

may be the major issue in these discussions will not be Governor 
Levitt's record at all but that of this administration, its 
environmental record and the fundamental question about the 
independence of the EPA.
  It is interesting to note that Russell Train, who was the EPA 
Administrator under Presidents Nixon and Ford, and I would state 
parenthetically that the EPA has a long and proud bipartisan history, 
being created under the administration of President Nixon, Russell 
Train, a Republican appointee, has said recently that the White House 
has constantly injected itself into the way the EPA approaches and 
decides the critical issues before it. The agency today has little or 
no independence. I think it is a very great mistake and one for which 
the American people could pay over the long run in compromised health 
and reduced quality of life.
  The administrator designate, Governor Leavitt, and this 
administration need to be held accountable in terms of the initiatives 
on Superfund. Will the administrator and the administration push to 
reinstate the Superfund tax and help clean up sites? The GAO reported 
that the Superfund would run out of money next month. There are 
currently 1,200 sites in the annual $3 billion Superfund program. It 
has cleaned up only 42 toxic waste sites last year, down more than 50 
percent from the late 1990s.
  The EPA announced this summer they would have to cut funding for 10 
Superfund sites, including one close to home for me, but I have heard 
from Republican colleagues who have been concerned about loss of 
projects in their districts, citing lack of funding as a reason. Yet 
the administration refuses to come to Congress to have the Superfund 
tax, which is the very principle of ``polluter pays'' that was 
supported by Presidents Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and Clinton. Silence 
from the administration.
  Mr. Speaker, where will the new EPA Administrator be when it comes to 
deal with the Clean Air Act? One of the holds that has been placed on 
the Leavitt nomination deals with the relaxation of the New Source 
Review rules, which inhibit the intent of the Clean Air Act. As you 
know, 30 years ago, when the Clean Air Act was enacted, there was a 
reprieve given to the dirtiest coal-fired plants, giving them a 
reasonable time to come into compliance. They did not all have to do it 
immediately, that would have been disruptive and expensive. The notion 
was that the new technology, under the New Source rule, was designed so 
that plants would modernize and then the new technology would be put 
into place when it was the most economical. Instead, what we have seen 
is an industry that has kept these aging powered dinosaurs in place 
because they make a lot of money. They are cash cows.
  But rather than enforcing the Clean Air Act, as previous 
administrations have done to put pressure on the industry to deal with 
the modernization and upgrade of these plants, President Bush has now 
proposed that the old plants, in effect, be grandfathered permanently, 
being able to spew forth pollution indefinitely. The changes that he 
announced to the New Source Review rules would allow plants to make a 
20 percent investment without triggering the rule. There is no reason 
for the vast majority of them to ever come into full compliance.
  Now, there are approximately 17,000 of these plants, and the 
estimates from the scientific experts that we are supposed to listen to 
are that they caused conservatively 20,000 premature deaths each year. 
Because of the patterns of prevailing winds that blow the smoke from 
these plants, the pollution is not just in the vicinity of the plant. 
If they were just polluting their neighborhood, maybe it would be a 
sort of rough justice for the cities and States that permitted them. 
But the effects move away often because of the pattern of prevailing 
winds.
  They are concentrated particularly in the New England States. It is 
interesting that Attorney Generals in New York, New Jersey, 
Pennsylvania, Wisconsin are lining up to challenge these rules in 
court. The changes were also opposed by the States of Massachusetts, 
Illinois, and California.
  Earlier this month, the President was in Michigan for a photo-op for 
the power plant in Monroe to promote the Clear Skies Initiative, which 
it is estimated may be responsible for up to 300 premature deaths 
itself. Now, the President attempted to paint this as a job creation 
issue, but local labor leaders were quick to point out that when the 
owner of the Monroe plant, Detroit Edison, found out that the New 
Source rules were going to be relaxed, they stopped their efforts to 
install pollution controls required by law. And I understand there are 
some 800 union workers who are out of work.
  The administration and the new administrator should be straight with 
the American public about the economic, environmental, and national 
security consequences of continuing to rely on these aging, polluting 
plants. When we deal with issues like the Clean Skies Initiative, it is 
an important question for the administrator designate and for the 
administration: Who are they going to be taking advice from? For 
instance, there have been calls for the resignation of the Assistant 
EPA Administrator of Air and Radiation, Holmstead, the leader behind 
the Clean Air Act overhaul. The Clear Skies Initiative, which actually 
is going to move us back beyond what would happen if we just enforced 
the Clean Air Act now, and leave any progress well, well into the 
future.
  The EPA has withheld scientific data from two different EPA studies 
that undercut the administration's claims about the benefit of the 
proposed legislation. It has drug its feet in completing the analysis 
of competing Clean Air Acts before Congress so that we do not have the 
information before us as a legislative body, and the American public 
does not have the benefit of this analysis. It took months of delay 
before the EPA finally agreed to study Senator Carper's Clean Air bill, 
but will not include carbon dioxide reductions in the analysis. Carbon 
dioxide, a critical element in the Senator's bill, one of the key 
elements of global warming, is not going to be included.
  The EPA overstated State and local support for the Clear Skies 
Initiative. In fact, many of the Governors and mayors cited as allies 
in an August press release have decided not to support it at all. The 
Southern Governors Association did not have a policy for or against the 
plan if they are included. The National Association of Counties has 
adopted a position that generally supported the reduction of emissions. 
No reference to this specific bill.
  Assistant Secretary Holmstead, is an attorney for the former industry 
that he is now seeking to--supposed to--regulate. He represented 
several clients in fighting title I, III, and V of the Clean Air Act. 
Those clients include the Ad Hoc Industry Group on Regulatory 
Reinvention, Alliance for Constructive Air Policy, Hughes 
Communication, Montrose Chemical, and he is an adjunct scholar at a 
think tank, the Citizens for the Environment, that actually believes 
that many of these environmental problems are myths and lobbies for 
deregulation of corporations as a solution to the environmental 
problems, something that has not had great effect as we have looked at 
the securities industry, at the deregulation of energy, and has in the 
State of Texas, the voluntary program of then Governor Bush, has 
yielded really pitiful results in terms of cleaning up the air.
  There is a deep and troubling question that is circulating now about 
the representations of the EPA about the World Trade Center pollution. 
Will the EPA, under the new administrator, be an independent agency 
that can give the American public the truth? One week after September 
11, Christie Whitman assured the citizens of New York that the air was 
safe to breathe, the waters safe to drink. Her statements focused on 
asbestos levels and did not mention any other pollutants. Well, an 
investigation by the EPA Office of Inspector General has revealed that 
the White House, through its Council on Environmental Quality, told the 
EPA to downplay these concerns. The facts are that the EPA did not have 
sufficient data to evaluate short-term or long-term health impacts, and 
they had only data on four

[[Page 22734]]

of 14 pollutants. It will be one of, I think, the black marks of former 
Governor Whitman's administration to make statements like this to the 
citizens of New York.
  A team of independent scientists, led by the University of 
California, Davis, found that in fact the air was the most polluted the 
world has experienced. The area had high levels of sulfur, sulfuric 
acid, titanium, nickel and silicon. The EPA had not tested for these 
small particles, even though EPA scientists acknowledge that they are 
the most hazardous. Tragically, tragically, the rescue workers, the 
people who on this floor were commemorated and celebrated, with whom 
this administration has been involved with photo-ops and issued flowery 
words, these rescue workers were the most likely to suffer from this 
pollution. Yet the EPA was involved in, to be charitable, shading the 
truth. And we do not know what the long-term consequences will be with 
a failure to level with the American public.
  There is a question about whether the EPA in the remaining term of 
President Bush, under a new administrator, will be able to change the 
pattern of manipulating and ignoring science to serve political and 
their own policy ends. For instance, in June of this year, the EPA 
released a report that was commissioned by former EPA Administrator 
Whitman to examine the state of the environment.

                              {time}  2245

  It noted improvements which were actually due to landmark legislation 
passed decades ago. If the EPA does a follow-up report in a decade, 
what will be the likely increases in air and water pollution, global 
warming and ozone depletion as a result of this administration's 
policies because it is claiming credit for what happened 10, 20, and 30 
years ago and under its watch is undermining and delaying?
  The report ignored global warming, the single most important long-
term threat to our environment. The White House forced the EPA to 
eliminate references to many studies concluding that warming is at 
least partially caused by human activity. There is a denial despite the 
2001 National Academy of Science report that was requested by President 
Bush that confirmed that greenhouse gases are accumulating in our 
atmosphere as a result of human activities, and this is causing air and 
ocean temperatures to rise.
  The edits made by the White House and acquiesced to by the former EPA 
Administrator were so severe that an internal EPA memo stated that the 
section on climate ``no longer accurately represents scientific 
consensus on climate change, global warming.''
  Another example, last September the annual EPA report on air 
pollution that for 6 years had contained a section on climate change, 
this time when the scientific community has reached an even stronger 
consensus that global warming is a reality, when we have permafrost 
thawing in Alaska, roads buckling, villages washing away, parts of the 
Alaskan pipeline sagging and temperatures increasing 4, 6 and 8 degrees 
Fahrenheit, this report for the first time in 6 years had no section on 
global warming, climate change.
  Mr. Speaker, Russell Trane, the Nixon-Ford EPA Administrator that I 
quoted earlier, stated that we have moved radically ``away from 
regulation based on independent findings and professional analysis of 
scientific health and economic data by the responsible agency to 
regulation controlled by the White House and driven primarily by 
political considerations.''
  It has been one of the great frustrations and concerns during my 
tenure in Congress to watch the Environmental Protection Agency, an 
agency that I have worked with throughout my public service career, 
where I have worked with many fine, dedicated public servants, 
professionals, who are in that so-called faceless bureaucracy, but are 
really doing their best to deal with their mission of protecting the 
environment, and when I have worked with Republican and Democratic 
administrations going back over 20 years, it saddens me to see the 
politicalization of the EPA, the reversal, the abrogation of 
responsibility to give the American public the truth about the 
environment, to say nothing of hard work to move forward with policies 
and programs to give our communities the type of environment that our 
families deserve.
  I can only hope that the Senate in the course of its deliberations 
will be able to focus on this and that the new Administrator, should 
Governor Leavitt be confirmed, will be the Governor Leavitt that was so 
creative in dealing with livable communities, sprawl, planned growth, 
transportation, and allowing the community to work to gain control over 
its destiny, and not be the Governor Leavitt of questionable 
environmental achievements dealing with air and water, open space, and 
certainly not an EPA that has been characterized by the reversals and 
the politicization of these last 2\1/2\ years.
  Mr. Speaker, time will tell, but the American public deserves an 
answer sooner rather than later, and I will continue to do all I can to 
put appropriate focus on these critical issues.

                          ____________________