Deep-Fried Baloney, Greg Easterbrook Style

On Tuesday, Oct. 14, the Los Angeles Times published an editorial by the widely known environmental gadfly Gregg Easterbrook -- a senior editor at the New Republic and a fellow at the Brookings Institution -- who set out to roast (or rather deep-fry) critics of the Bush administration's environmental record. He dismissed charges made by everyone from the Natural Resources Defense Council to Sen. James Jeffords (I-Vt.) as "baloney -- baloney being rolled and deep-fried with cheese for purposes of partisan political bashing and fund-raising."

While Easterbrook scores a few points for entertaining analogies, he loses many more for a polemic "so preposterously distorted, so replete with factual errors, that it's appalling to me that it was published anywhere, much less someplace like the L.A. Times, which tends to be strong on these issues," said Frank O'Donnell, executive director of the Clean Air Trust. Easterbrook's argument comes from "Everything You Know About the Bush Environmental Record Is Wrong," a report he wrote for the Brookings Institution and the right-wing American Enterprise Institute's Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. The crux of both the op-ed and the report is that the environment, and in particular air quality, has been getting dramatically better over the years -- so what's the harm in weakening a few regulations?

The numbers Easterbrook cites about air-quality improvement are exaggerated, according to O'Donnell; Easterbrook notes, for instance, a 33 percent reduction overall in nitrogen oxide emissions since 1990 when the number more widely accepted by experts is 12 percent. More intolerable, however, is the way he ignores the primary reason these improvements came about in the first place: the very "command and control" regulations that President Bush is trying to eliminate, and that Easterbrook claims are unnecessary.

The op-ed has too many transparently preposterous statements to eviscerate them all here (take "logging is one of the few endlessly sustainable industries," for example). But the ones that deserve perhaps the most scrutiny are those that applaud Bush for his supposed environmental accomplishments: "Bush has implemented three major new environmental reforms for which he has received zero credit," writes Easterbrook. "He ordered that diesel fuel be reformulated to reduce its inherent pollution content ... He ordered that new diesel trucks and buses meet significantly stricter emissions standards ... he imposed new emissions standards on a range of previously unregulated [construction and off-road] machines."

Problem is, Bush had nothing to do with the first two of these three "major new" reforms. "I spent five years working on those diesel rules, negotiating with industry and the president [Clinton] to push them through," said Carol Browner, EPA chief under the Clinton administration. "Those were our rules, and [the Bush administration] has repeatedly claimed them as theirs. That's hardly an environmental victory."

When we put in a call to Bob Perciasepe, Browner's lead author on the diesel regulations, he said he was prepared to write a rejoinder to the L.A. Times addressing Easterbrook's misstatements. "I happen to be staring at a plaque on my wall right this moment," he said, "with the front page of the Federal Register on it from Jan. 18, 2001 -- two days before the Bush administration came into office. It contains the title of the diesel rules that we passed. The Bush administration had absolutely nothing to do with it."

What's more, said Chris Miller, a staff member at the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, Bush's Office of Management and Budget actually put Browner's diesel rules on a list to be "reconsidered" as possible candidates for revoking. "Far from 'ordering' these rules, as Mr. Easterbrook claims, they did nothing but let them strand as written by Clinton. They claim that because they didn't revoke it, they did a positive, pro-active thing. Ha!"