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

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Outside Magazine November 2004

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Robert F. Kennedy, JR. & Christine Todd Whitman
The Environment: A Debate (cont.)
Sharp Dialogue


	RFK Jr. cooling off in the Salmon near camp on Lower Rhett Creek (Andy Anderson)

OUTSIDE: Christie, one of the strategies that has seemed to unfold in this administration is that, rather than changing environmental laws through Congress, they make changes quietly, through administrative rules.
WHITMAN: That's been an accusation and a feeling for some time now. But keep in mind that getting a law through Congress now takes a monumental effort. Bobby will tell you everything we did was just godawful, with a secret agenda to undo everything. There are those on my side of the aisle who think that everything that happened in the Clinton administration involved a secret agenda by the environmentalists. I was told by a lot of Republicans that I was going to walk into the EPA and find a bunch of tree huggers who think the sky is falling. What I found was a bunch of very professional people who really knew what they were doing.

OUTSIDE: And for the purpose of argument, let's also mention that the Clinton-Gore administration did not enact the environmental Marshall Plan that Al Gore wrote about in his 1992 book, Earth in the Balance.
KENNEDY: Well, for six of their eight years, Clinton and Gore were distracted fighting a rear-guard action against Newt Gingrich's anti-environmental rollbacks. But you're not going to get me defending the Clinton administration or Democrats on Capitol Hill. A lot of Democrats on the Hill are as crooked as the Republicans. They're taking industry money, and they're doing industry bidding.

This is why campaign-finance reform is the most critical piece of environmental legislation that can be passed. If you want to run for Senate in a state like New York, you have to raise $25 million. That means you're raising $10,000 contributions from people. Do you know anybody who can accept $10,000 from somebody and not feel indebted? That's legalized bribery.

If you look at all the major environmental issues here in the West—water, mining, grazing, lumber—it's all about subsidies. We're giving huge subsidies to the richest people in our country, and these welfare cowboys have got their indentured servants on Capitol Hill demanding capitalism for the poor while they're protecting this system of socialism for the rich.

WHITMAN: You're right. When you have to raise a lot of money from a group, you certainly take their phone calls. I don't believe that everybody gets bought and paid for. But it's a problem. The framers of the Constitution never imagined that serving in Congress would become a way of life. If it is your way of life, you get to a point where all you care about is keeping that job. So you aren't that aggressive and you don't act as freely.

KENNEDY: I'll say this: I believe there's no difference between rank-and-file Republicans and Democrats regarding their concern for the environment. Democratic leaders are not paragons. But this administration is as bad as it gets.

Today you have a situation where virtually all the principal environmental agencies are being operated by lobbyists from the very businesses they're supposed to regulate. The head of public lands, Deputy Interior Secretary Steve Griles, is a mining-industry lobbyist who believes public lands are unconstitutional. You have Mark Rey as the head of the Forest Service—a timber-industry lobbyist who's spent his career trying to destroy environmental rules. In Christie's agency, the EPA's second in command, Linda Fisher, is a former lobbyist for Monsanto, the world's largest developer of genetically modified crops. The head of Superfund, Marianne Horinko, was a consultant for petrochemical conglomerate Koch Industries, one of the worst offenders in the country. The head of the air division, Jeffrey Holmstead, was a lobbyist for the filthiest polluters in the electric industry.

I have nothing against businesspeople entering government, but across this administration, individuals have entered government service not to promote the public interest but to subvert the very laws they are charged with enforcing.

WHITMAN: Can I just say something? Linda Fisher, who was my assistant administrator, and Marianne Horinko, the head of solid waste and emergency response, were absolutely dead-on working as hard as they could on Superfund. Not all the budgetary decisions were in our hands.

KENNEDY: Do you defend Holmstead?

WHITMAN: We're talking about Linda Fisher.

KENNEDY: And Jeffrey Holmstead, who also worked for you.

WHITMAN: Yes, he did.

KENNEDY: Try to make a case that Jeffrey Holmstead is working in the public interest.

WHITMAN: Jeffrey Holmstead has done a lot of hard work in air quality.

KENNEDY: I know you can't feel that way. Why didn't you fire Holmstead?

WHITMAN: Over what?

KENNEDY: Clearly, his agenda was to serve his former bosses.

WHITMAN: That's your opinion. It's such a broad brush to say that anybody who has ever worked with industry is therefore bad and has an agenda. That's too simplistic.

OUTSIDE: The Bush administration does seem reluctant to engage in a dialogue on environmental issues.
WHITMAN: They are reluctant. But they're not reluctant to address the issues; they're reluctant to engage in the dialogue.

One of the best things the Bush administration has done, and we did it while I was at EPA, was institute a new rule to clean up nonroad diesel emissions. The average backhoe produces 800 pounds of pollutants a year. So we came up with a rule that brought that down to 80 pounds per year—that's a 90 percent reduction. After the rule came out, the NRDC wrote me a letter saying this was the best thing for human health since we took lead out of gasoline. Within three days there were stories in the papers about how NRDC was getting jumped on by other environmental groups. Within a week I got another letter from the NRDC saying, "Well, we've looked at some other things in the Clean Air Act and we're not entirely happy with the new rule, so could you please not use our letter..."

It gets very discouraging when things like that happen. There's a feeling of "What's the point? Why bother?"

OUTSIDE: Those phrases are interesting. Before the 1972 election, President Nixon pushed through landmark environmental legislation—from creating the EPA to the Clean Air Act—with an eye toward shoring up support among centrist voters. But he got nothing but grief from the environmental community, and finally he said, "Screw it," and nothing more was passed.
WHITMAN: Let me make a distinction. This administration's attitude regarding environmental issues isn't "Why bother?" That work continues to go on. It's more an attitude about promoting it, wondering how much to talk about what you're doing. It's also true that, for some in the administration, part of it is a feeling that we're not going to get any credit from the environmental groups anyway, so maybe we can do some of these things quietly and not enrage the conservative political base.

But I have to tell you, I met with the environmental groups every quarter, and those were never pleasant meetings. Never. And you get to the point where you think, Why am I going through this?

OUTSIDE: Bobby, has the environmental movement gotten caught up in a hectoring mode?
KENNEDY: Any hectoring is unique to this administration. You'll always have groups on the fringe asking for more. You've got Greenpeace, whose view is extremely weighted toward sustainability. Then there are groups solidly in the mainstream, like Environmental Defense, NRDC, the Sierra Club, the Nature Conservancy, and the Audubon Society.

The problem is that, right now, there's nobody—fringe or mainstream—who can deal with this administration. Because nobody believes them. They've used well-intentioned moderates like Christie and Colin Powell to put a face of reasonableness on an agenda that is all about plunder.

It's frustrating dealing with someone who is so attractive and charming and articulate as Christie, to see her represent this administration, because I know that in her heart she does not believe in the things they're up to. Their agenda is about rapacious self-interest, and there's no talking to them. If they throw us a crumb, it's like pirates who have sunk your ship, murdered your family, and burned your village giving you a lifeboat to sail away on. And they wonder why we don't thank them.

WHITMAN: This was the attitude we got from the environmental community from the very get-go. I went to the Environmental Ball at the presidential inauguration in January 2001, and the comments I got from environmental leaders told me loud and clear that it was going to take a Herculean effort to gain their trust.

KENNEDY: Well, that's because we knew what Bush did in Texas. And look what they did to you, Christie. Right at the outset, they totally double-crossed you on carbon dioxide. President Bush made a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide, you publicly assured the world that his word was good, and then after two months in office Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney pulled an about-face and left you hanging. They destroyed your prestige, and in doing that they told us what they thought about the whole issue—that they're willing to take the cabinet official who represents the human face of the environmental movement and publicly double-cross and humiliate that person. They were expressing their level of contempt for our entire movement.

WHITMAN: I get very damn tired when you come out and say I've been used. As if I'm some kind of idiot. I was governor of a very big state with a lot of complex stuff for seven years. I know what deceit is. I know what's right and I know what's wrong. And I know there are two sides to that issue.

You've been talking about how I was used and humiliated on the carbon issue. You know what? I have to agree that the president did a very bad job communicating why he went back on the Kyoto Protocol, but I also happen to know what was behind that decision. It wasn't a deal that was cut ahead of time. I honestly don't believe that.

You know, New Jersey is not really the nicest state for politics, so I do know when I'm being had from time to time. And I don't believe that the president's Kyoto reversal was a concerted, premeditated position. Whether you agree or not, it's just unfair to leap over context all the time.

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