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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Environmental controls on 30 million acres managed by the Pentagon would all but vanish under a new military-readiness plan.
Mar 11, 2003 | Citing the imminent war with Iraq and the ongoing war on terrorism, the Bush administration is moving quietly to give the Pentagon broad exemptions to environmental laws that would, in the name of national security, allow the military to more freely pollute the air, contaminate land and water with toxic munitions, and threaten endangered species like whales and birds.
The measure would give the military near-absolute environmental authority on bases, bombing ranges and other military property totaling 30 million acres, a combined area larger than the state of Ohio. Republicans last week slipped the measure into the Defense Department's 2004 budget authorization bill, legislation that needs to be fast-tracked through Congress in order to keep the armed forces fully funded. Opponents say that this linkage, combined with the release of the initiative on the eve of war with Iraq, will make it much more difficult to properly study, debate, amend or reject the proposal.
"I have dealt with the military for years, and they constantly seek to get out from under environmental laws," said Rep. John D. Dingell (D-Mich.), the ranking member of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. "But using the threat of 9/11 and al-Qaida to get unprecedented environmental immunity is despicable." The exemptions are unneeded, since environmental-protection regulations have never interfered with military training and readiness, Dingell told Salon. If there ever is a conflict between the two, he added, environmental laws already provide for case-by-case exemptions.
Even within the Bush administration, the exemptions proposed last Thursday have provoked disagreement and opposition. The exemptions are similar to those proposed by the Bush administration last year, which Congress defeated. That bill, prompted by 9/11, would have given blanket exemptions from eight key environmental laws to all military forces conducting exercises.
The new, rewritten bill claims that the military is unable to prepare for war so long as it is hamstrung by provisions of the Endangered Species Act, Clean Air Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, and Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (better known as the Superfund Law).
The administration claims that these laws hamper soldier training and military readiness. According to the environmental news service Greenwire, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld testified at a Feb. 5 congressional hearing that the new exemptions will "clarify environmental statutes which restrict access to, and sustainment of, training and test ranges essential for the readiness of our troops and the effectiveness of our weapons systems in the global war on terror."
Sen. John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, backed Rumsfeld's claim, noting that environmental issues affecting military training exercises must be resolved quickly, especially since military training facilities are now operating at "absolute peak" in anticipation of war, reported the Environment and Energy Daily. "We're not being fair to the military," Warner said.
Environmentalists vehemently disagree. "This bill is an attempt to roll back the laws that keep our air clean, that protect us from cancer caused by toxic waste, and that conserve our most endangered species," Michael Jasny, a senior policy analyst for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview. "To gut environmental protections on 30 million acres across our country is bad for local communities and for the soldiers who serve on those military bases, all who will have to deal with the health and environmental consequences. To undermine our environmental laws and ram this bill through Congress at this time, and in this way, is cynical even by the standards of this administration."
The U.S. military is already the worst polluter in the nation, with 28,000 current and formerly contaminated sites scattered across every state and extending to some far-flung territories.
The exemption bill would override laws for the disposal of hazardous waste by changing the definition of "solid waste" to exclude explosives, munitions, munitions fragments and other toxic material. It would allow spent, toxic munitions to be left lying exposed on target ranges where they can leach into lakes, rivers, marshes and groundwater. It would also weaken the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency and of state agencies to guard communities from Defense Department toxic waste, and would prevent the states from collecting damages against the Pentagon when its contaminants damaged sensitive natural resources, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
In a recent New York Times report, environmentalists warned that the bill would also allow the Pentagon to pass the buck. Cleaning up the most contaminated hazardous-waste sites would be mostly paid for not by the military polluter but by state governments, which with their severely strained budgets can ill afford the expense.
"There are obvious environmental-justice implications to all of these hazardous-waste exemptions," Jasny said. "People that live near military bases and soldiers who live on those bases -- who are exposed to these environmental hazards -- are in many instances disproportionately of minority backgrounds and among our poorest citizens. Those are the people who will suffer most should this bill pass."
The Pentagon initiative would also lift the mandate for ensuring that military activities do not worsen air quality. Clean Air Act exemptions would broaden the definition of "training" to exclude even the control of emissions caused by nonmilitary activities, such as driving vehicles on military bases or even spraying pesticides on a right of way.
One need look no further than Fort Wainright, Alaska, to see the impact of giving the Pentagon a blanket air-quality exemption. The base's antiquated coal-burning power plant has been ordered to pay $16 million in air-quality fines to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency over a 10-year period. It was cited for 450 state environmental violations in a single month.
Changes in another law, the Marine Mammal Protection Act, seem intended to squelch litigious battles between environmentalists and the Navy over the implementation of a low-frequency active sonar system that may possibly lead to whale beachings and deaths. Last fall, a federal court stopped the Navy from deploying the system, pending a trial.
While the Navy says that the sonar system is vital for detecting enemy "stealth" submarines and that it will harm few whales, Marsh Green, the president of the Ocean Mammal Institute, disagrees. "There is a significant body of research showing that whales avoid underwater sounds starting at 110 to 120 decibels," the animal behavior specialist told the Christian Science Monitor. But "the sonar sound field around the [Navy] transmitting ship will be 180 decibels up to one kilometer (0.6 miles) away and 150 to 160 decibels up to 160 kilometers (100 miles) away This means that many marine animals will be exposed to sonar levels capable of causing stranding and, possibly, lung hemorrhaging over large areas of the ocean." Dr. Kenneth Balcomb, executive director of the Center for Whale Research in Friday Harbor, Wash., has likened the biological harm done by high-powered sonar to that caused by "fishing with dynamite."
