A save in the Senate

Christie Whitman tried Friday to keep environmentalists from rising up as one to oppose Bush administration policies of the last three months – Arctic drilling, carbon dioxide, arsenic, climate change – and to keep them from rallying against anything else the administration might think of in the next four years. The EPA administrator was not wholly persuasive at a meeting of the National Wildlife Federation, but on the same day Senate Republicans, led by Susan Collins of Maine and James Jeffords of Vermont, were when they supported a climate-change amendment to the budget resolution.

Ms. Whitman had the tougher sell. She had to defend a policy on carbon dioxide that contrasted with President Bush’s campaign rhetoric and her own beliefs on the issue, according to a leaked memo. And she had to explain why the president decided to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty on climate change, thereby irritating Europe and offending Japan, when he could have just as easily ignored the treaty since it never would have passed the Senate anyway. The administration’s policies seemed not only anti-environment but mischievously anti-environment, and even a group like the National Wildlife Federation, usually willing to apply the benefit of the doubt generously, didn’t seem to accept the explanations.

For the future, Ms. Whitman might try as a defense that environmental policies will be worked out in the Senate. Climate change, at least, got rescued there when Sen. Collins broke a logjam on a budget amendment and joined Sen. Jeffords and Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts on a measure to restore $4.5 billion in funds for climate change programs over the next decade. The amendment restores money the administration cut in the areas of energy efficiency, renewable energy and research programs aimed at reducing greenhouse gases. It also restores funding to the Global Environment Facility, which works on developing clean energy technologies for use around the world, and it crucially provides authority for the State Department to enable the United States to “fully engage with the international community in ongoing and highly complex negotiations” toward a climate change treaty.

Sen. Collins said that she supported the amendment based on the merits of the case for climate change. The case gets stronger by the year, and the United States, as a major contributor of greenhouse gases, needs to become a larger influence in crafting international rules on the issue. Fortunately, the Senate understood that merely backing away from a treaty and cutting research funds, as the administration did, does not constitute a policy.

In the next couple of weeks, the administration is expected to make decisions on policies regarding reporting on lead emissions, on dioxin and mercury from power plants. Senators, unfortunately, are in recess through April 20. Ms Whitman may welcome their return.