ENVIRONMENT-U.S.: U.S. green laws face extinction, say analysts

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

WASHINGTON, Mar 10 1995 (IPS) - The most threatened species in the United States today are its environmental laws, say activists who are scrambling to keep up with a slew of proposals from the Republican-controlled Congress.

Three of the proposed laws — popularly known as “risk assessment”, “regulatory moratarium” and “takings” — strike special fear in the hearts of environmentalists who say 30 years of legislation may be at stake.

The bills will substantially change almost every U.S. environmental law in existence, from the Clean Air Act to the Safe Drinking Water Act, and could gut legislation like the Endangered Species Act, according to the interest groups.

Almost all the major environmental groups and newspapers, as well as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), have come out against the reforms, but the speed with which they are moving through Congress has taken defenders completely off-guard.

“This is a polluters’ bill of rights that would cripple virtually all of this country’s health, safety and environmental protections,” says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, one of the country’s largest environmental groups.

Pope describes the succession of votes on the reforms as “a week-long romp of destruction.” His group has sent out alerts to its members describing the events on the Hill as the “war on the environment” and begging them to voice their anger.

Protests so far have been few and far-between. On Thursday, a dozen Greenpeace activists wearing gas masks and orange body-suits normally worn by workers fighting chemical fires or spills, unfurled a 30-foot-long banner on the steps of the Capitol building. It read: “Warning: The Contract With America is Hazardous to our Health”.

All the changes that have been proposed are part of a platform called the “Contract with America” to roll back “the regulatory monster”. It was launched with much fanfare by rightwing Republican Newt Gingrich to take advantage of rising populist anger during last year’s legislative elections

Those elections brought Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time in 40 years — long before Congress first approved environmental legislation in the 1960s. They also made Gingrich into the powerful Speaker of the House of Representatives.

“These bills are really just a way to legalise corruption, pollution and disenfranchisement in the name of reform,” Rick Hind, a Greenpeace toxic trade campaigner, told IPS.

“The Republicans are slipping them past the people because they are Greek to the average person. That is the only way you can rape the environment — through the back door,” he added.

Under the “Risk Assessment and Cost Benefit Act of 1995,” no new regulation could be issued without the regulating agency showing that its expected costs would be justified by its proposed benefits.

The same law would also require health, safety, and environment regulators to lengthy scientific testing to precisely determine the risk posed by the regulated product or activity before issuing any new rule.

Such a process could by itself slow the rule-making and enforcement process by two years, according to government officials. For example, new rules for meat inspection designed to respond to public concern about the estimated five million illnesses and 4,000 deaths in this country caused by contaminated hamburgers and chicken will be delayed under the legislation.

Republicans and industries on whose behalf they appear to be acting argue that federal regulators have been too strict and too cautious.

But others disagree. Ellen Silbergeld, a toxicologist affiliated with the Environmental Defense Fund, told a Congressional hearing that the risk assessment guidelines would “encourage the use of junk science” by attempting to put a price on the value of health and safety.

The “regulatory moratarium” bill, also known as “unfunded mandates”, suspends any new regulations that have been approved but not yet funded by Congress. It also suspends all rules that have been issued since November 1994.

The “takings” bill forces the government to pay private landowners for any action, such as protecting the land against farming or mining, which reduces the property’s estimated value by more than ten percent.

“The cost would be enormous: the government would in many cases be paying people and companies to stop doing things — polluting the air, destroying streams,” wrote the Washington Post in a lead editorial this week.

“The risk bill allows poison in your drinking water. The takings bill makes you pay the polluters not to poison public water,” wrote Bruce Hamilton, conservation director of the Sierra Club, in an action alert to its members.

Last week, the House of Representatives voted 276-141 to pass the the Job Creation and Wage Enhancement Act, which combines the all three bills, as well as other regulatory reform measures.

They are now being debated by the Senate which has already approved its own version of “regulatory moratoriums”. After a reconciliation in a House-Senate conference committee, the bill will go to President Bill Clinton who, it is said, does not now have enough votes to sustain a veto.

“What this does is undermine every single environmental and public health standard in the country,” said Carol Browner, the head of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

Sources within the EPA told IPS that the government may already be giving up. Staff has received memos instructing them to prepare to rollback regulation and relax ethics rules governing ties to industry.

More is still to come. The Republicans begin a series of field hearings in Louisiana next week to bar the government from adding new animals and plants to the Endangered Species Act.

“The Republican bills constitute a contract on America not a contract with America,” said one activist grimly, summarising the way that many groups feel. “There appears to be only one law which the new House leadership is willing to uphold, the law of the jungle,” adds Pope.

On Wednesday a Los Angeles Times editorial called the new bills “Environmental Reform Via Sledgehammer”. It accused Republicans of “planting environmental time bombs that will later explode in their faces.”