Such support is crucial to enforce the hard-won standards contained in our environmental legislation. If there was any doubt, The New York Times ("Clean Water Laws Neglected, at a Cost") has laid bare just want happens when political will fails: polluters with deep pockets and millions-sometimes billions-of dollars at stake run roughshod over our country's cornerstone environmental laws.
Public records, government documents and even reports submitted by polluters themselves analyzed by the Times set out a stunning portrait of non-compliance across the country that includes over half a million violations of the 1972 Clean Water Act since 2004. Well over half of these were described as "significant non-compliance". Still, the Times' research found fewer than 3% of these Clean Water Act violations resulted in fines or other significant punishment.
For anyone in the business of enforcing environmental law, these figures merely provide unsettling detail for a broader picture they already know all too well. The numbers underscore a stark reality: our environmental laws have not failed us; we have failed our environmental laws. To quote the comic strip character Pogo, "We have met the enemy and he is us." Without enforcement, even the finest laws protect little.
Environmental regulation was rarely a Bush administration priority and the New York Times report has given a whiff of what that low priority has produced. Today, there is a new administration in Washington and the appointment of Lisa Jackson as head of the Environmental Protection Agency is encouraging. She told The Times that "strengthening water protections is "among her top priorities."
It will be important that she repeatedly shows her attention to water quality because political direction-and political will-flow from the top. If the EPA shows determination on enforcement, then state regulators will get tough, too. Success in just one high profile case can cause a ripple effect with a far broader impact.
While political will is crucial, it's not enough. Government regulators at both federal and state levels often lack the resources needed to enforce key provisions of the Clean Water Act and other environmental legislation. In New York state, for example, the number of regulated polluters has doubled over the past decade, yet the number of government inspectors has remained roughly the same, according to the Times. When the economic slowdowns force governments at all levels to tighten their belts, enforcement budgets are often among the first cut.
But beyond these staffing numbers there's also a more subtle-equally damaging-barrier to enforcement that has grown steadily over the past two decades: the ability of defendants to drag out enforcement cases to the point that the process itself becomes a deterrent to regulators. If they launch an enforcement case today, they know they are taking on a long and exhausting battle, one that could last years-while still dealing with everything else on their plate.
For example, it took the New York State Attorney General's office, working with EPA, the Department of Justice and other states and environmental organizations (including NRDC) ten years to win cases against major polluters who had violated the Clean Air Act's New Source Review Provisions.
It was an important case because the pollution was costing thousands of lives each year and although we won it, the very length of such a fight raises questions about the balance of public interests versus the interests of private polluters; between public health and private gain. To protect the public, the pace of these cases must go faster at both the administrative and judicial level. There needs to be greater presumptions favoring the public interest.
To achieve that, we have to ask ourselves how we feel as a people about environmental law, the value we place on it and the value we place on those who regulate it. All too often, the regulator's public image is a negative cliché: a bureaucrat interested mainly in disrupting business and endangering jobs. The truth is far different. The New York Times story provides a glimpse of what happens when regulators are unable to enforce environmental laws. Law enforcement is critical to leveling the playing field and ending the competitive advantage given to polluters. Consistent enforcement is also crucial to create the kind of predictability needed to justify for new investment. But the real evidence of under-enforcement is that, years after the deadlines imposed in key environmental legislation, we haven't yet met the goals set out in those laws and people still get sick from drinking water.
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And receiving the lifetime achievement award was none other than NRDC's President, Frances Beinecke. Anyone who works at NRDC understands the drive, passion and perseverance that makes Frances such an effective leader, but it's always nice when others from the larger green community recognize this as well. Frances is an inspirational leader as well as an extraordinary boss who is great to work with.
Here's what Dan Shapley from The Daily Green had to say:
]]>She's a blogger, a government watchdog, a community organizer and a policy wonk - in the best sense of the word. She fights for the preservation of polar bears and our offshore environment, for the protection of children's health, for the restoration of our economy as a sustainable green machine - and for the protection of the earth's ecosystem in the face of rising temperatures.
She's an innovator, a visionary, an inspiration. As president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, one of the nation's most influential environmental groups, Frances Beinecke is all these things and more.
Born in Summit, N.J., Beinecke was inspired during camping trips by the "magical landscapes" of Grand Teton National Park. The majesty of those landscapes left her with a resolve to protect wild places.
She graduated in the first Yale University class to accept women, experienced the first Earth Day in 1970 and graduated with a master's degree from the Yale School of Forestry. It was while in graduate school, during this pivotal time in the nation's history, that Beinecke first joined forces with the Natural Resources Defense Council, as an intern working in the Catskill Mountains, the source of New York City's drinking water.
For three decades counting, it's a relationship that has strengthened not only the woman and the organization but the environment.
She started the group's Water & Coastal Program, designed in part to fight offshore drilling, before taking a hiatus to raise her three children. She returned in 1990 to aid in a strategic reorganization. By 1998 she was named executive director, and in 2006 she became NRDC's second president.
Still staffed with some of the nation's leading legal, scientific and policy experts, NRDC under her leadership now also boasts 1.2 million members --- real people who have been inspired to take action to protect the environment. Beinecke, who serves on the boards of numerous other environmental and academic institutions, promotes the idea that "the environment is everywhere" -- and that activism benefits not just untouched wilderness and endangered species, but our homes and our health.
During her tenure, NRDC has reached out to Spanish-speaking citizens, empowered citizen journalists, and launched both an influential blog and a Web site devoted to "Simple Steps" that help the environment. And under her leadership, NRDC argues hard for laws that fight global warming and revive our economy by investing in green jobs, clean energy and sustainable communities.
"With the right policies in place," she wrote recently, "many American companies are poised to bring clean energy technology into the mainstream -- along with the thousands of jobs, reduced oil dependence, and cleaner air that come with it."
In the face of staggering challenges, she has a vision that is clear, positive and empowering.
"To be in this business," she has said, "you have to be an optimist. You have to believe that change is possible and that you're part of the solution to getting that change in place."
She is The Daily Green's 2009 Heart of Green Lifetime Achievement Award winner.
One possible angle: the rollbacks of our environmental protections went from start to finish. On President Bush's second day in office, he tried to reverse standards to make air conditioners -- which use about 30 percent to 50 percent of our peak electricity -- more efficient. NRDC and others had to sue him to get this move reversed; today better machines save us money and reduce pollution. And now, with only days before he leaves office, eight years later, President Bush tries to strip protections from wolves (for the third time). In between the two, a relentless litany. He was nothing if not persistent.
Another possible angle: He was catholic in his anti-health and environment efforts (small "c" of course). He tried to gut air pollution rules making power plants and factories clean up (NRDC and states sued him to stop him). He reduced water protections from sewage and coal mining waste (we hope the new Administration will reverse those messes). Of course, he ignored his own campaign pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and even refused to do what the Supreme Court ordered his EPA to do -- lower global warming pollution from vehicles. He opened lands all around the country to coal, oil and gas, delayed the Everglades cleanup, and gave away the public's lands for subsidized logging. And he continued to allow high levels of toxics in our air and food. Clearly he did not play favorites.
Maybe instead I should focus on the misrepresentations? He claimed to preserve 5 million acres of wetlands but did not mention the 20 million acres of wetlands from which he stripped protection. He claimed his "Clear Skies" law would reduce air pollution when its purpose was to gut one of the most effective air pollution reduction programs. He claimed there was "uncertainty" about global warming when he was twisting the scientific discussion beyond recognition. (After all, there is uncertainty exactly where the economy is going, but we know it's down and we better act, so "uncertainty" about details of future temperature, even though we know it's going up, should not delay action.) Healthy Forests? That means logging. Even to the end, the Bush team kept this up. On the same Diane Rehm show, Jim Connaughton, head of Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, said the Administration's climate efforts led to a new spirit of international cooperation. I need not comment on that.
But in the end, of course, I just answered the questions Diane asked us. It probably went better that way.
Note: My NRDC colleague Michael Oko also blogged about the Diane Rehm show here. You can listen to the segment here.
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