Dirty Jobs
Frank O'Donnell is the executive director of the Clean Air Trust, a national non-profit watchdog group founded by former Senators Edmund Muskie of Maine and Robert Stafford of Vermont.
During a hastily called telephone news conference last week, EPA Administrator Michael Leavitt announced the agency would take more time to analyze the agency’s controversial mercury pollution plan.
The EPA put forth the industry-friendly plan last December. As written, it would permit coal-burning electric plants to delay spending money to clean up toxic mercury, which the Centers for Disease Control has described as a “poison” for infant brains.
Under fire for the plan"drafted by Bush political appointees with the help of industry lawyers"Leavitt harrumphed “I was not party to any of those discussions.” He added he has made a "commitment to making decisions based on all available information."
Is the EPA chief turning over a new green, election-year leaf? Or is this just a fig leaf"another effort at political damage control? (John Kerry is among those who’ve called on the Bush administration to scrap its pro-industry plan and start over.)
One thing is certain: for more than three years the Bush administration has promoted the agenda of big-polluter campaign contributors like ExxonMobil and Southern Company. And those contributors have made it pretty clear what they want: to minimize and delay spending to clean up pollution.
That agenda was evident earlier last week during a “seminar” on clean air hosted by the American Enterprise Institute"a Bush"defending “think tank” underwritten by big corporations (including ExxonMobil) and corporate foundations.
Faithful to the mission of his bankrollers, one of the Institute’s “fellows” assailed what he termed “overinvestment in pollution control.” (Nodding approval in the audience was a key Bush administration sub-cabinet clean-air policy wonk"Indur Goklany of the Interior Department"who once wrote that a state might want to “provide some health insurance for its indigent” rather than clean up pollution.)
It's no shock that companies like ExxonMobil want to avoid spending on pollution controls. But one of the least-reported stories in town is that cleaning up the air and water is good for the economy. It creates jobs. Lots of them. And the Bush dirty-air policies have led to layoffs.
The Commerce Department reported in 1998 that the environmental products industry employed 1.3 million Americans, generated $181 billion in revenues and contributed $16 billion to U.S. exports. The Bush administration has not published an update.
Some jobs are still being created as a result of actions taken by President Clinton. For example, on April 7, Corning Inc. opened a new factory in upstate New York to make pollution control devices for diesel trucks, which Clinton’s EPA required to clean up. And membership in the boilermaker union surged as power companies bought pollution controls required by President Clinton.
But the Bush administration’s decision to weaken enforcement of the Clean Air Act has contributed to the nation’s loss of manufacturing jobs. For example, DTE Energy (the Michigan-based site of a presidential visit last September to tout his environmental policies) stopped a planned cleanup program.
The Institute of Clean Air Companies"a trade group of more than 75 suppliers of air pollution control equipment"recently noted that the pro-polluter Bush approach could lead to additional job losses.
The pollution control industry actually should face a job boom in the coming years thanks to tougher national health standards for smog and soot set by the Clinton EPA. (Power plants and other smokestack industries eventually will have to clean up to meet the standards.) Yet even here the Bush administration has intervened to delay progress.
In surely one of the most bizarre arguments ever made in Washington policy circles, the Bush administration has argued that it must delay most power plant cleanup until 2015 or later because of a labor shortage! The Institute of Clean Air Companies has retorted that there should be an ample supply of labor to meet cleanup needs sooner.
Which brings us back to Leavitt and mercury. Until now, Leavitt has made the bogus argument that it would be impossible for companies to meet mercury-specific controls before 2018.
Ironically, there are companies vying to sell mercury cleanup technologies much sooner. But the power companies won’t have any reason to buy them"and the related jobs they’d create"unless the EPA chief deals with the issue honestly.
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Published: May 05 2004
