Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The White House has joined with the oil and auto industries to undermine the state's rigorous environmental regulations.
Dec 16, 2002 | In October, the Bush administration took time out from battling al-Qaida and other evildoers to file an amicus brief in federal court in Fresno, siding with automakers and dealers in a suit against a California regulation requiring car manufacturers to sell "zero-emissions vehicles."
The administration has also been fighting for the extension of offshore oil drilling rights in California coastal waters near Santa Barbara. Never mind that such drilling is so unpopular with voters here that even state Republican politicians outdo themselves trying to prove how fervently they oppose it.
And earlier this year, even as California passed the nation's first anti-greenhouse gas law to fight global warming, the feds declared that the government must continue to study the issue before enacting any policies around it. The auto industry plans to mount a legal challenge to that California law, too.
Even California's bounteous forests are at risk, fear environmentalists, who see new federal plans to allow road-building and "thinning" in the state's national forests (which add up to nearly 10 percent of the entire country's national forests) as a handover to logging interests.
In the air, the water, the forests and on the road, the environment is the battleground for a federal war with California. A Republican administration that believes that industry knows best when it comes to pollution controls is taking on a staunchly Democratic state with some of the toughest environmental regulations in the world.
It's a battle that seemingly pits a libertarian, laissez-faire philosophy against the liberal belief in government intervention -- except for the awkward fact that the Bush administration's own intervention against California's environmental regulations is a classic case of the sort of Big Government meddling conservatives usually deplore. Whatever happened to that Republican Party standby, states' rights?
"The Bush administration talks until they're blue in the face about respecting state authority on environmental issues," says Drew Caputo, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. From drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to snowmobiles in Yellowstone, the Bush administration argues that they're only supporting what locals want. But not in California. "Basically their position is, 'we respect state authority, but only when the state agrees with the oil industry,'" says Caputo.
California has long led the nation -- indeed the world -- in environmental regulation, in part because the state has experienced such dramatic problems, visible and tangible to the average voter. Smog and oil spills in California helped galvanize the modern environmental movement and inspire the passage of landmark federal regulations, such as the Clean Air Act, which the Bush administration is now weakening.
California-style government intervention, say environmentalists, has been a success. Although a toxic cocktail of smog-trapping geography, car culture and bulging population means that the Los Angeles area still has some of the worst air in the country, by any measure air in the region has improved dramatically since the state cracked down. In 1977, the region had 121 Stage 1 smog alerts, while since 1999 it has had a total of zero.
Auto industry defenders say that cleaner technologies would have arisen regardless of government mandates, a claim that environmentalists scoff at. But whichever claim is true, one thing is clear: California's role as standard-bearer in the environmental movement is under concerted attack from the U.S. government. On several simultaneous fronts, the Bush administration is asserting federal power on behalf of the automobile and oil industries -- at the expense of the clean air and clean water that Californians have fought for 40 years to improve and protect.
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