Robert F. Kennedy, JR. & Christine Todd Whitman Debate the Environment

Outside Magazine November 2004

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Robert F. Kennedy, JR. & Christine Todd Whitman
The Environment: A Debate (cont.)
Tangled Up In Green


	Outdoor Leadership School: Whitman and Kennedy square off at Shepp Ranch, on the Salmon River, July 19, 2004. (Andy Anderson)

OUTSIDE: On Election Day, how important will the environment be to voters?
WHITMAN: If you ask voters to name their top issues and don't specifically mention the environment, it may not even make the list. It might be 20th. If you give them a specific list, the environment still barely makes the top ten. The war, the economy, and people's jobs are going to be at the top.

OUTSIDE: Why?
WHITMAN: A lot of reasons. Everyone assumes they're going to have clean air, clean water, and better protection. Other things become more important: making your payments, giving your kids the things you'd like to give them. There's both a feeling of helplessness about the environment and a feeling that it isn't all that bad—that there aren't that many ozone-alert days anymore. People care about it, but they're getting on with their daily lives. Also, it's not the kind of thing newspapers want to write about, because there's a feeling that this stuff is too complicated. And it is complicated.

In my office at the EPA, I kept two books on global warming side by side. One was Bjørn Lomborg's The Skeptical Environmentalist, and the other was Laboratory Earth, by Stephen Schneider. Both were written by Ph.D.'s with good credentials. Both of them worked with the same amount of data. Yet they came to opposite conclusions. No wonder people are confused!

KENNEDY: I have a different view of it. The polling data shows consistently that the American public—more than 75 percent of both Republicans and Democrats—cares deeply about the environment. They want stricter environmental laws, and they want them enforced. An overwhelming majority of people in this country want air, water, and wildlife protected. Only 7 percent think those laws ought to be weaker. If you get beyond the newspapers and the partisan politics, Americans share the same values.

People tend to have faith that government is generally taking care of the environment and that the disputes are over incremental fine-tuning at the margins. Very few people understand that fundamental rights and values are in jeopardy.

Republicans and Democrats alike are furious when they understand the magnitude of the Bush administration's anti-environmental rollbacks. The problem is that the White House has masked its radical agenda with Orwellian rhetoric and stealth tactics that have left the public in the dark.

OUTSIDE: Christie, what's the environmental argument for reelecting President Bush?
WHITMAN: Neither Bush nor Kerry is going to run on the environment. Bush will run on the economy, on education, on delivering on his promise to make drug benefits part of Medicare. On the environment, Bush will have his people out talking about the good things that this administration has done. The new diesel rule we put out last year will drastically reduce the air pollution from construction and farm equipment. The president is spending up to $250 million a year to clean up brownfields, those abandoned industrial sites blighting our cities. He's kept his pledge of "no net loss" of wetlands and wants to move it to a net increase.

I'll be one of those people out there talking about those gains. I'll admit that there are some things that have happened that I'm not happy with; for example, I thought the administration could have gone further in regulating mountaintop mining. But I really object to the false perception, the distortion put out by environmental groups, that there hasn't been anything good done in the past three years.

OUTSIDE: Bobby, what's the case for John Kerry?
KENNEDY: John Kerry's got a 96 percent approval rating by the League of Conservation Voters, which tracks the environmental voting record of members of Congress. By comparison, Al Gore's lifetime rating was 73 percent. Kerry's great on these issues. We'd be drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge [ANWR] if it weren't for John Kerry. He's the one who promised to filibuster against opening up the refuge; he's the one who lined up the Senate votes against it. But this isn't about Republican versus Democrat. This is about this president. There have been a lot of Republicans out there who are great environmentalists. But everywhere you look, the traditional values of the Republican Party—the ones that Christie's father, former New Jersey Republican party chairman Webster Todd, stood for, and that she came into power standing for—have been eroded and attacked by this administration.

The Bush White House has the worst environmental record of any administration in our history. Anybody who doubts that should go to the Web site of the group I work for, the Natural Resources Defense Council, where we've tracked more than 430 major environmental rollbacks by the EPA and other agencies that oversee our environmental assets.

Five years ago, if you had asked the top 20 environmental leaders in the country, "What's the gravest threat to the global environment?" they would have given you a range of answers: global warming, overpopulation, habitat destruction. Today, they'll all give you one answer: George W. Bush.

This administration has simply stopped enforcing the law—or rewritten the laws to accommodate polluters. They're letting corporate criminals steal our public lands, the air from our children's lungs, the health of our infants by putting mercury in the water and particulates and ozone in the air. To me, that's criminal—that those things could be stolen so that somebody can make a buck.

People need to understand that environmental crime is real crime with real victims. I have three children with asthma, including my son who's with me on this trip. I watch him gasp for breath on bad-air days. One in four children in Harlem now has asthma. We know that asthma attacks are triggered primarily by ozone and particulates, substances coming largely from coal-burning power plants that have been discharging illegal pollutants for more than 15 years. Seventy-five of those offenders were being prosecuted by the EPA when the Bush administration came into office. But this is an industry—energy and utilities—that gave $48 million to the 2000 Republican election campaign. And one of the first things this administration did was drop those lawsuits.

WHITMAN: Oh, please. We did not stop enforcing the law. When I left last year, we had just recorded the largest single settlement in EPA history. Dominion Resources agreed to spend $1.2 billion to reduce air pollution at its power plants in Virginia and West Virginia. The problem was, it took 15 years to reach that settlement. And that's the difficulty I have with relying purely on enforcement as a strategy to clean up the environment. Enforcement is important, but we shouldn't judge the effectiveness of our policies by the number of fines and penalties we're handing out. Is the air cleaner? Is the water purer? Is the land better protected? Are people living healthy lives? Those are the things that'll tell you. And under this administration, you saw the environment get a lot cleaner—

KENNEDY: No. No. No. You didn't see the environment get a lot cleaner. The Dominion case was filed by the Clinton administration. And what has happened here is unprecedented in our history—for a corporate criminal to contribute to a presidential campaign and then have cases dropped. Roughly 5,500 people die every year because of the substances coming from those plants.

WHITMAN: We did not stop enforcing the law.

KENNEDY: All you have to do is look at the people who work for the EPA. The three major heads for enforcement—Eric Schaeffer, Sylvia Lowrance, and Bruce Buckheit—resigned their posts, saying this administration was not serious about enforcing environmental law. For anyone to argue that this administration is seriously enforcing law is just a joke.

WHITMAN: The idea that we stopped enforcement is ridiculous. Enforcement has to be a part of it. We brought cases. Sylvia Lowrance retired. Eric Schaeffer had his job lined up way before he left. Bruce Buckheit was frustrated, no question about it. But at times we were all frustrated—these things don't happen overnight. Many cases are years in the works.

We need to recognize that, while enforcement is important, we're beginning to get an environmental ethic in this country now. People are expecting good environmental behavior from the major companies. Voluntary programs aren't going to solve the problem by themselves. But we shouldn't ignore what they're doing.

KENNEDY: That's like saying we can get bank robbers to stop robbing banks by figuring out why they rob the banks and then somehow persuading them not to do it. You can make a lot of money by polluting. And as long as it's more profitable to pollute than to comply with the law, then you are going to have pollution. Besides, the idea that enforcement cases take too long is nonsense. I do enforcement all the time. Most cases settle overnight. I can take you, Governor Whitman, out any day of the week—and I offer to do this—and show you hundreds of polluters in the coalfields of West Virginia. Mountaintop mining is illegal out there, but the Bush administration has never prosecuted any of the companies doing it. The hog industry is destroying rivers and polluting air all across North America, but you dropped the cases against the hog—

WHITMAN: I have to respectfully disagree on a couple of things. Certainly, the hog industry is going to be subject to regulation, which we extended, and we actually included, for the first time, a lot of the chicken industry—

KENNEDY: Oh, Christie.

WHITMAN: —which is a huge industry. It's true.

KENNEDY: You're killing me with this. We had strong regulations for the hog industry before you weakened them to nothing. I read the regulations, which were written by industry lawyers to eviscerate the existing regulations. I'm suing you on your regulations.

WHITMAN: I'm sure you are. You sue us on everything. Everybody sues us. But suing is not always the answer.

KENNEDY: It's true that litigation ought to be the tool of last resort, but it's critical nonetheless.

WHITMAN: Look, it seems clear that you're going to say the only way forward is to throw out Bush. Fine. I'm going to say there's a lot more to it than that.

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