Last Shenanigans
Only a New President Can Rescue the EPA—Or Its Global Warming Policy.
SOURCE: AP/Dennis Cook
How many more sordid tales concerning the Environmental Protection Agency can actually come out before November? Above: EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson is sworn in during a January hearing before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.
Okay, so: Raise your hand if you can no longer keep track of all the political, legal, and scientific scandals that are dragging down the Environmental Protection Agency. (I thought so.)
The latest is that a group of Democratic senators are calling for EPA administrator Stephen Johnson’s resignation. The day before that, it was the agency’s clamping down on its enforcement staff’s freedom to talk to the media, Congress, and the agency’s own inspector general. But no single one of these episodes can really be understood except as part of a much broader mosaic. EPA is a scandal-ridden agency that has all but ceased to function, dragged down by rampant politicization and repeated assaults to its integrity—a large volume of which involve the issue of global warming.
In sum, it’s a long, sad story that’s finally coming to a close.
Now, as we wait for the Bush years to end, it’s interesting to contemplate just how many more installments to the saga there can actually be. How long will everyone keep going through the same fruitless motions—a well-practiced dance between administration politicals, EPA staff, occasional whistleblowers, congressional monitors, and journalistic muckrackers—before realizing that we should all just wait for a new president to (hopefully) come in and clean up the mess?
I, for one, am feeling pretty fatigued. At this point, the ongoing saga over EPA’s refusal to regulate greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act has gone on for eight years. It traces all the way back to the campaign trail in 2000, when President Bush initially pledged that on his watch, EPA would do just that. But shortly taking office, the president reversed himself—and hung EPA administrator Christine Todd Whitman, who had taken Bush at his word, out to dry.
The new administration then had to support and defend its new policy of non-action—and so began a consistent pattern of dissembling on the science and (increasingly) the law of global warming. This deliberate course of action has spun off continual and variegated mini-scandals. The most recent have been over EPA’s refusal of a request from California to obtain a waiver, under the Clean Air Act, allowing the state to blaze an ambitious trail on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in the absence of federal action; and over the agency’s continuing failure to act upon the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2007 demand that it determine whether greenhouse gases from vehicles “endanger” public health and welfare—and, if so, regulate them.
These last two scandals have increasingly exposed the current EPA administrator, Stephen Johnson, as little more than a stand in for the White House. EPA’s whistleblower-of-the-moment, former Associate Deputy Administrator Jason Burnett, has testified before Congress that Johnson was for granting California’s waiver request before he was against it. According to Burnett, Johnson had originally made up his mind in California’s favor—at least until hearing from the White House. Indeed, Johnson’s final position on the waiver contradicted the views of his expert staff, including the EPA’s General Counsel, who stated: “After review of the docket and precedent, we don’t believe there are any good arguments against granting the waiver. All of the arguments…are likely to lose in court if we are sued.”
Something eerily similar has occurred with respect to EPA’s long-overdue response to the U.S. Supreme Court. After Bush reversed course on whether his administration would regulate vehicular greenhouse gas emissions under the Clean Air Act, states and environmental groups sued EPA for its inaction. And as we all now know, the case eventually made its way to the Supreme Court—which, in Massachusetts vs. EPA, did not look smilingly upon EPA’s attempt to use scientific uncertainty and other evasions as a rationale for not doing anything.
This set the stage for EPA to, you know, do something—and it nearly did. Johnson and his staff prepared two memos, one for the White House and one for the National Highway and Safety Administration, explaining why greenhouse gas emissions do endanger the public welfare (not a hard stance to defend), and then proposing vehicle standards to deal with that problem. A choice quote from these documents, which have now been partially exposed: “In sum, the Administrator is proposing to find that elevated levels of GHG concentrations may reasonably be anticipated to endanger public welfare.”
But then came (yes) more shenanigans. The White House refused to open the email containing EPA’s communiqué, and then the person who sent the email (Jason Burnett, again), drew back the curtain and exposed the politicos behind it. And now, it appears that oil industry interests had a hand in everything (of course).
Meanwhile, despite having originally supported the document emailed to the White House (but never opened), administrator Johnson shifted stances again. He has now become complicit in a White House attempt to essentially flip off the Supreme Court and run out the clock on global warming policy (by extending the period of public comment on what the agency ought to do).
In sum, it’s a long, sad story that’s finally coming to a close. And surveying it all, I’m struck by two observations.
First: Congressional Democrats—and more specifically, the committees headed by Ed Markey, Henry Waxman, and Barbara Boxer—are going to continue probing this mess as we get deeper and deeper into campaign season. In the process, they may well expose more juicy details. Maybe they’ll even drive out Stephen Johnson.
But we already know enough to know what to think, don’t we? The administration has never wanted to do anything about global warming, and has never been candid in rationalizing its inaction. And this, in turn, has damaged the integrity of many agencies of government, and especially EPA.
That’s the bottom line, and while it’s a bottom line that we can all continue to lament, it’s also one that only a new president and administration can alter.
And then there’s the second observation. It is simply this: I still can’t get over the fact that Stephen Johnson is the first EPA administrator in history who’s actually a scientist.
Chris Mooney is a contributing editor to Science Progress and the author of two books, The Republican War on Science and Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming. He blogs on The Intersection with Sheril Kirshenbaum.
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