Sludge Funds

In mid-May, the propaganda machine at the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency was like a diesel engine in overdrive, breaking with its nonpartisan past to help re-elect the president. After cutting deals with oil and diesel engine companies on new standards for diesel heavy equipment, the EPA was proclaiming, hyperbolically, that President Bush was taking bold steps that would usher in a veritable Age of Aquarius for clean air.

While spin-doctors were plying their craft, White House political surgeons were quietly carving up an EPA plan to clean up lethal emissions of electric power plants. By the time they were through, the plan resembled the hapless Trojans slashed apart by Brad Pitt's Achilles.

Progressive staffers at the EPA had been promoting a plan to create incentives for power companies to use energy more efficiently -- an idea that could reduce not only greenhouse gas emissions, but harmful pollutants as well. Behind closed doors, however, the White House axed the idea. What emerged was a plan that favored the oldest and dirtiest coal-fired electric plants.

Though the matter dealt with a seemingly esoteric and technical issue, the stakes were enormous. The White House gambit not only constituted a huge financial windfall for some of the biggest Bush campaign contributors, it also rewarded companies in a number of battleground states important in the November election, including Ohio, Michigan, West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Iowa.

This sorry episode is just the latest in a series of heavy-handed White House moves to tamper with EPA activities in order to help politically wired supporters from the coal fields.

The President had barely taken his oath of office when the pro-coal promotional effort began. In early 2001, President Bush cut the legs out from under then-EPA Administrator Christine Todd Whitman and disavowed the Kyoto Climate Accord.

Whitman was still reeling from that blow when Vice President Cheney's energy plan -- carved out in secret with the help of coal and power industry lobbyists -- ordered the EPA to rethink its enforcement strategy for dealing with existing coal-burning power plants. Despite Whitman's warning that Bush might pay a "terrible political price" for such a blatant sellout, the result was a slowdown in enforcing the Clean Air Act and new industry-friendly rules that would permit the dirtiest coal plants to continue polluting.

More recently (after Whitman fled the agency, declaring, like departing CIA Director George Tenet, that she needed to "spend more time with my family"), the White House ordered the EPA to pretend that poisonous mercury is not a toxic pollutant -- even while the Food and Drug Administration was warning pregnant women of the risks associated with eating mercury-contaminated fish. A proposed EPA rule was politically doctored by the White House to include language supplied by lawyers from coal-fired power companies.

These ham-fisted White House maneuvers all have one thing in common: they all distort administration policies to favor big coal and coal-burning electric companies -- the source of millions of dollars in campaign contributions to the Republican Party and to the Bush-Cheney re-election effort in particular.

This most recent gambit involves a Bush administration proposal to reduce smog- and soot-forming emissions from power plants during the next two decades. As the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (a quasi-independent watchdog group set up under NAFTA) recently noted, power plants are the biggest source of toxic air contaminants in America. Those emissions -- chiefly from coal-burning plants -- have been linked to tens of thousands of premature deaths every year.

The Bush plan is a dud in many respects. It sets weak targets and would permit the biggest polluters to continue spewing poisons well into the next two decades. It would also illegally attempt to substitute this weaker approach for a tougher Clean Air Act requirement to clean up the haze that ruins the views at national parks.