Business Calls the Tune
President Bush’s actions in recent days, rolling back key environmental and workplace rules, are wrongheaded but hardly surprising. In fact, more policy reversals of this sort seem inevitable in coming months. What’s particularly dismaying, however, is how quickly and completely the special pleaders from business and industry have taken over at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Wednesday’s announcement that the president is likely to suspend a sensible rule holding gold and silver miners responsible for the environmental mess they make on public lands is but the latest Clinton administration action undone by Bush. Tuesday the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency revoked new standards that would have cut by 80% the allowable arsenic in drinking water.
Arsenic occurs naturally in the drinking water of several regions of the country and can also result from mining and lumbering. The highest concentrations are found in Western states, including in 19 California water districts. Unsafe levels of arsenic can cause bladder and other cancers, among other diseases. Americans now are exposed to the highest levels of arsenic in the developed world.
The administration’s rollbacks began earlier this month with repeal by Congress, at Bush’s invitation, of federal ergonomics rules. Last week the new president reversed his campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and he suspended a Clinton ban on road-building and commercial logging in 58 million acres of national forests.
It’s tempting to fault Bush alone, but there’s plenty of blame to go around. President Clinton waited until his last months--or hours, in some cases--to impose by executive order many of the rules now repealed. Had Clinton had the courage to act earlier, allowing for full implementation, Bush would have taken a bigger political hit for killing these rules. But Clinton stalled for years, no doubt because he feared that the Republican-led Congress would retaliate on some other issue.
Bush has insisted that research doesn’t yet prove, for example, that the existing levels of arsenic cause cancer in humans. Perhaps delay would be called for if the EPA had not already drawn on 50 years of studies pointing to arsenic’s long-term dangers. Or, in the case of the ergonomics rules, if workers around the nation didn’t feel in their hands and joints the toll their assembly-line jobs have taken. Or, in regard to control of carbon dioxide, if there weren’t so much data linking those emissions to global warming.
The 100% certainty that Bush seems to be looking for will never exist. In some areas, more study may indeed eventually yield better answers. But when Bush retreats behind the “more study is needed” excuse, he is then logically bound to fund that research. Such budget commitment is not yet forthcoming.
In the meantime, why does the president believe he should give business the benefit of every doubt? Why is he so quick to justify his actions as sparing business “burdensome” regulations and new costs? Protecting the health and safety of individual Americans and of the environment merits at least equal priority. Bush owes the nation much better answers.
