ENVIRONMENTAL VOTES

The passage was brief in the State of the Union last week, but it was unmistakably clear: President Bush intends to present himself as a friend of the environment, a president who can reduce regulations on business while protecting the natural wonders of this nation. It is an appealing image, and the president has offered a few solid ideas about what is wrong with some environmental laws. But this attempt at image-building has run into an immediate and particularly difficult encounter with reality: Several members of his own party do not agree with him.

In his speech last week, the president defended two environmental proposals and offered a new one: Clear Skies, which has drawn the most attention for its reworking of regulations for new sources of air pollution; his Healthy Forests Initiative, which allows for significant increases in logging but decreases in judicial oversight; and the new one – $1.2 billion for research on hydrogen-powered cars. He also recently supported a small increase in the corporate average fuel efficiency (CAFE) for SUVs, minivans and trucks.

Environmental groups already are pointing out that new money for hydrogen cars is not needed for improving the technology of the vehicles – private industry already is spending billions on that – but on making hydrogen widely available. Unless the Bush administration handles this plan properly and quickly, it soon will be called nothing more than a subsidy to automakers.

But it is the remaining issues that will soil the image of the president as champion of nature. On Clear Skies, Northeastern Republican senators, including Maine’s Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, do not support a plan that will allow power plants to produce more pollutants than allowed under the current law. Several have recognized the problems with new-source review, which demands too many top-to-bottom inspections of power plants for relatively minor changes, but they do not support the president’s plans.

The same is true of Healthy Forests – members of Congress may agree that the current policies can too often lead to uncontrollable forest fires, but they do not agree that reform should include waivers for judicial review, as the president supported last year but which failed to pass the Senate. Some of the noncontroversial forest policy has since been implemented through rules, but the measures to limit public comment and the bypassing of environmental reviews and appeals are opposed by several Republicans as well as Democrats.

On CAFE standards, Sens. Snowe and Collins last week reintroduced a bill that would not just add a mile or two a gallon to SUV and light truck performance, as the president’s plan does over three years. They would include those large vehicles in the standard for cars by demanding increases in fuel performance beginning when the president’s plan ends, in 2008, and achieving 27.5 mpg by 2011. The estimated savings from the Senate plan, when fully in place, would equal 1 million barrels of oil a day. And that improvement certainly allows Congress to oppose the president’s plan to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as do six Republican senators, again including Sens. Snowe and Collins, making the passage of such legislation unlikely.

President Bush earned himself a reputation as an anti-environmentalist early in his tenure for the mishandling of arsenic levels in drinking water and his dismissal of the Kyoto treaty on climate change. The reputation is not entirely fair, but it is fair enough to scrutinize any new plan he proposes.

If he truly wants to change his record on these important issues, he will substantially strengthen his proposals and put conservation farther ahead of drilling for oil in the wildlife refuge.