Maybe there’s a good spin for this, but I can’t think of one.
While working with Environmental Protection Agency officials to write regulations for coal-fired power plants over several recent months, White House staff members played down the toxic effects of mercury, hundreds of pages of documents and e-mail messages show.
The staff members deleted or modified information on mercury that employees of the environmental agency say was drawn largely from a 2000 report by the National Academy of Sciences that Congress had commissioned to settle the scientific debate about the risks of mercury.
The White House said its changes merely “sharpened the scientific points being made.” NAS members aren’t buying it.
[S]cientists on the academy panel and others outside it as well as environmentalists and politicians expressed concern in recent interviews that a host of subtle changes by White House staff members resulted in proposed rules that played down the health risks associated with mercury from coal-fired power plants. The proposal largely tracks suggestions from the energy industry.
While the panel members said the changes did not introduce outright errors, they said they were concerned because the White House almost uniformly minimized the health risks in instances where there could be disagreement.
And in case there was any doubt as to the extent to which the Bush administration would go to help the industry with lax mercury standards, let’s not forget this report from the Washington Post three months ago, which explains that the administration used text from industry lobbyists — word for word — to write EPA standards.
The Bush administration proposed new rules yesterday regulating power plants’ mercury pollution, and some of the language is similar to recommendations from two memos sent to federal officials by a law firm representing the utility industry.
The three approaches that the administration published for public comment would for the first time regulate airborne emissions of toxic mercury, which can enter the food chain and cause developmental damage to infants whose mothers eat mercury-tainted fish.
A side-by-side comparison of one of the three proposed rules and the memorandums prepared by Latham & Watkins — one of Washington’s premier corporate environmental law firms — shows that at least a dozen paragraphs were lifted, sometimes verbatim, from the industry suggestions.
And, as always, Paul Krugman helps put it all in context.
The answer is that the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. The head of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven’t guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn’t just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration’s proposal came directly from lobbyists’ memos.
E.P.A. experts normally study regulations before they are issued, but they were bypassed. According to The Los Angeles Times: “E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order. . . . E.P.A. veterans say they cannot recall another instance where the agency’s technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal.”