Enviros Yank Dick's Cheney

Environmentalists are wasting no time in aiming their fire at former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who this morning became George W. Bush's running mate on the GOP presidential ticket. Enviros are criticizing Cheney's voting record in the House -- he got only a 13 percent career approval rating from the League of Conservation Voters -- and knocking his environmental record as current chair and CEO of the Halliburton oil company.

While a representative from Wyoming from 1978 to 1989, Cheney cosponsored a measure to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling and, among other things, voted against reauthorizing the Clean Water Act and requiring industries to release publicly their records on toxic emissions.

In a hint of the Cheney deluge to come, the Sierra Club began blasting him on Monday, contending in a release that many of Halliburton's plants produce great gobs of pollution. The group says that a company facility in Duncan, Okla., was in the top 20 percent of the dirtiest facilities in the United States, according to EPA data from 1997.

Other environmental organizations began circulating material concerning Cheney's involvement with the Committee to Preserve American Security and Sovereignty (COMPASS), which is apparently affiliated with the conservative George C. Marshall Institute. Cheney and 12 other COMPASS members, nearly all of them heavyweights from the Reagan and Bush administrations, wrote a letter to President Clinton in 1998 to protest the Kyoto climate change treaty, concluding with the zinger that Kyoto appeared to be "nothing more than a 'feel good' public relations ploy."