The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE CONTRAST BETWEEN DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ON ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ISSUES” mentioning the U.S. Dept. of Energy was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H1527-H1531 on April 23, 2002.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE CONTRAST BETWEEN DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS ON ENVIRONMENTAL
PROTECTION ISSUES
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Forbes). Under the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2001, the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Pallone) is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
Mr. PALLONE. Mr. Speaker, tonight, although I know it is the day after Earth Day, I want to concentrate my remarks on the environment. The gist of my statements tonight are basically to point out the contrast between the Democrats and the Republicans on environmental protection issues.
Mr. Speaker, I have been very concerned over the last year or the last 18 months that the new administration, President Bush's administration, both in terms of actions in Congress with the Republican leadership or in agency actions as part of his administration, has done a great deal of damage to the environment, and has basically used the presidency and the power of agencies to break down a lot of environmental protection, not provide the type of enforcement action or the budgetary action that is necessary to protect the environment.
Much of this has been linked to special interests, to corporate interests, and to concerns that big business has about environmental protection, environmental regulation. Very little concern has been focused on the impact of these changes in environmental protection on the average American.
Mr. Speaker, the Democrats are committed to preserving America's air, water, and pristine lands for future generations, and are fighting to make sure that environmental protection and public health are not sacrificed to the corporate special interests.
I have been concerned, Mr. Speaker, to see both the President and the Republican leadership in the Congress not handling in a responsible way what needs to be done to protect our air, water, and land from the polluters, and forcing taxpayers to pay for the cleanup of many pollution problems, such as hazardous wastes or Superfund sites, instead of having the brunt of the cost paid for by the polluters themselves, the corporations and other responsible parties.
So in the aftermath of Earth Day, Mr. Speaker, I wanted to basically outline in some detail this evening some of the concerns I have about what has been happening under President Bush, and also with the Republican leadership that has a majority here in the House of Representatives.
I thought that I would start by detailing a few areas where I think the actions of this administration and the Republican leadership in the Congress have been particularly egregious. I wanted to start by talking about wetlands protection, because I represent a district, a large part of which is along the coast of New Jersey, along the Sandy Hook and Raritan Bay.
We have traditionally in New Jersey had a lot of wetlands, a lot of which has been destroyed. But we are trying very hard to make sure that what we have left continues to be protected.
Wetlands provide us, and I think many of us know, crucial habitat for fish and wildlife, and protect our homes from floods by soaking up water from storms and releasing it slowly over time. America has lost about 50 percent of the wetlands that it started out with, and I do not think that we can afford to let anymore of it be destroyed, Mr. Speaker. Yet, the Bush administration dramatically increased the ability of developers to develop the remaining wetlands, essentially losing those wetlands forever.
On January 14 of this year, 2002, the Bush administration undermined a balanced Army Corps of Engineers regulation protecting wetlands, which has opened the floodgates for building by developers. The EPA opposed a Corps of Engineers plan to allow more development permits, but the White House sided with the industries, with the corporate interests. This action resulted in increased wetlands development and the ability for developers to more easily qualify for development permits.
The Army Corps loosened the permit standards for this program, making it easier for developers and mining companies to destroy more streams and wetlands. Keep in mind that 50 percent of the wetlands in the country have already been destroyed, so now we are just accelerating the pace.
For more than a decade, the cornerstone of the United States' approach to wetlands protection has been a policy that calls for no net loss of wetlands. This is a policy, I might add, that originated with the first Bush administration.
I want to stress tonight that when I talk and criticize this administration and the Republican leadership in this House for doing things contrary to the environmental interest, I am not suggesting that historically the Republican Party or Republican Presidents have taken that view. In fact, it is just the opposite. We know about Theodore Roosevelt, a great conservationist. Most of the environmental protection laws that we have on the books date from the 1970s, when Richard Nixon was the President. Even the first President Bush did a lot to protect the environment.
But I see a concerted policy now with this President and the Republican leadership in this House to turn that around. With no notice or opportunity for comment, the U.S. Army's Corps of Engineers moved to reverse the long-standing policy of no net loss of wetlands by issuing a new guidance dramatically weakening standards for wetlands mitigation.
The new standards allowed wetlands to be traded off for dry upland areas, and will likely mean the loss of thousands of acres of wetlands annually. So instead of having to mitigate, when they develop, the loss of wetlands in the area, they are able to basically trade some other area in a different place, far away from the development. The consequence is that we continue to have a greater loss of wetlands.
The reversal of this no net loss policy on the part of the Bush administration is just one component, as I said, of a broader Bush administration effort to diminish wetlands protection.
Next, I want to talk a little bit, Mr. Speaker, about clean water. This is particularly close to my heart because, as I said, my district is mostly along the Atlantic Ocean, along the Raritan and Sandy Hook Bays, and along the Raritan River. Clean water is a major issue for New Jersey in general, as well as my district, because historically, we have suffered in my State from degradation of water quality.
One of the biggest problems we have had historically in New Jersey, and this is true around the country, is a problem with sewage and how to make sure that sewage is properly treated, and that we do not have raw sewage or partially-treated sewage go into our waters, into our rivers, into our harbors, into our ocean.
Sewage containing bacteria, fecal matter, and other waste is responsible each year for beach closures, fish kills, shellfish bed closures, and human respiratory illnesses. So understand, when I talk about the concern for clean water, it is not just because of human health, though that is the highest priority, but it is also because of the economic losses, the jobs that are lost because we have to close beaches, because people cannot use recreation areas.
According to the EPA, there were 40,000 discharges of untreated sewage into waterways in the year 2000. Before the current Bush administration took office, the EPA issued long overdue rules minimizing raw sewage discharges into waterways, and requiring public notification of any sewage overflows into our rivers and harbors.
The proposed rules were blocked. In other words, these rules that were going into effect to try to minimize the raw sewage discharge and the overflow, these rules were blocked by the regulatory freeze that was ordered by President Bush when he first took office in January, 2001.
Now, President Bush said then, as he did in many of these situations where he froze regulations that were about to go into place that were protective of the environment, he said at the time, in essence, ``Don't worry about it because I am going to review these in a short time, and I will come back and maybe continue the regulations, these good regulations, or come up with better ones.''
{time} 2045
Well, the fact of the matter is that it is well over a year later and the Bush administration still has not issued the sewage overflow safeguards. So the promise about coming up with a new system that maybe would make it better simply has not materialized. Meanwhile, sewage continues to flow into our waters around the country, and the Americans are still denied even rudimentary public notice of such contaminating in the waters where they swim and fish. Part of the regulatory scheme provided for notice about sewage contamination, and that also was taken away when the President essentially froze or took away the new regulations that were taken into place.
But when you talk about clean water, it is not just these regulations with regards to sewage overflows and raw sewage that have been negatively impacted. There are a number of other clean water programs that have been slashed because of budgetary cuts that have been put into place or suggested for the next year by President Bush, and also by the fact that there have been cutbacks in the people and the number of people that do enforcement to go out and survey and make sure that environmental laws are not being violated. I mean, if we have a law that is on the books; but you do not have the money or the people to go out and find the violators, then in effect we have no law because people may just not voluntarily abide by it. So I wanted to mention three programs that I consider very important that fall under the clean water rubric that have been slashed or are suffering because of lack of funds or enforcement.
The first is the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. Many people do not realize it, but when a new sewage treatment plant is built or upgraded or a new reservoir is constructed or upgraded to make sure that the drinking water is safe, a lot of money comes from the Federal Government. There is a Clean Water State Revolving Fund that the Federal Government basically puts money into for the States and the local municipalities or utilities to build or upgrade these sewage treatment or drinking water facilities.
That is where the biggest cut took place in the President's budget, in the Clean Water State Revolving Fund. This program provides loans to modernize and upgrade aging sewage and water treatment systems, and it is cut by $138 million in the President's proposed budget. The Drinking Water State Revolving Fund is similar. I was talking about the sewage treatment upgrading fund when I talked about the $138 million cut. But we see the same problem with this Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, which deals with the drinking water upgrades.
In fact, I think many people remember that the Bush administration reversed a previous executive order under President Clinton that increased the level of arsenic in drinking water to be deemed safe by the EPA after intense pressure by Democrats and moderate Republicans. Now they put in place better arsenic standards. I think it is ten parts per billion so they are back to what President Clinton had initially put in place. But we did have the lag time when in fact it was not the stricter safe drinking water standards for arsenic. But regardless of that, the bottom line is we need more funding to upgrade our drinking water; and that money has not been made available.
The third thing I would like to mention is what I call the ``beaches act'' and what I am very proud of because I was the Democrat in the House that sponsored the bill along with a Republican colleague on a bipartisan basis. This was modeled after the State of New Jersey where we started a program a few years ago after we had massive beach closings in the late 1980's and we lost billions of dollars in our tourism industry because we had to keep our beaches closed for almost one entire summer. We put in place a system on a State level in New Jersey that would require that each town that has bathing beaches, as well as any State or private bathing beach as well, would have to test on a regular basis the water quality; and if the water quality did not meet a certain standard, then the beach would have to be closed, and there would have to be public notice as well as posting of the fact that you could not use the beach.
Well, I tried to take this bill and one of my predecessors in Congress, Bill Hughes, also sponsored it, and we worked with some Republicans and passed this bill and finally got it signed into law in the last year of President Clinton's time in office, that would implement this type of program nationwide. Well, 2 years ago, as I said, this bill was passed, passed the House, passed the Senate, went to the President and was signed into law by President Clinton; but that bill provided $30 million a year in Federal grants to help coastal States protect their beaches through water quality monitoring and public notification, as I mentioned.
The administration's budget cuts $20 million out of this program. You are not going to be able to implement it with only $10 million as opposed to the $30 million. So I could go on and on about the clean water issues, but I would rather move on to some other issues.
I am very much concerned about the clean water issues because of the nature of my district, but there are many other areas where this administration and the Republican leadership have cut back on environmental protection. I would like to mention some of those as well before I finish tonight.
The third area I wanted to mention is clean air, obviously important to you no matter where you live in the United States. The Republicans, again, the Republican leadership, the President, and I do not mean to suggest that all Republicans support this but certainly the leadership does and they are basically deciding what bills are posted here and the President is deciding what agency actions are taken. Basically, as I said, the President and the Republican leadership have undertaken a very deliberate effort, in my opinion, to undermine the bipartisan clean air act that has been on the books now since the 1970's, one of the bills that was started, one of the statutes that was put on the books when President Nixon was in office.
Again, a lot of this breakdown or effort to downgrade and change in a very dangerous way the clean air act is linked to energy policies of the utilities in the energy industry. And, of course, we know that the President is very close to the oil industry. In fact, the top administration EPA official in charge of enforcing air pollution regulation for coal power plants, and coal power plants are a major source of air pollution, he was so tired of fighting the White House that he decided to resign I guess just a few weeks ago or about a month ago. And in his letter of resignation he said he was tired of
``fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce.'' That is from the New York Times last month, in March of this year.
The President issued with a lot of fanfare in this past February a new clear skies initiative. And this was his answer, I guess, to clean air and it met a lot of cheers in the big industry lobbyists that have been contributing to the Republican campaign coffers. But this clear skies initiative if passed into law will increase the amount of smog, soot, carbon dioxide, and toxic mercury emitted by power plants, by the smoke stacks, if you will, emissions by power plants and would roll back substantially the clean air standards found in the clean air act. The plan essentially provides no limits at all on carbon dioxide emissions, the prime culprit in global warming.
I wanted to spend a little time, if I could, on the national energy policy because I know that it is so important to the average American; and of course, our energy policy has been highlighted a great deal in the aftermath of September 11 and the conflict in the Mid East because of the concern that maybe oil supplies would be cut off and what would the United States do in those circumstances. And the national energy policy that has been proposed by the President and the Republicans differs dramatically from the national energy policy for the future that has been proposed by the Democrats.
The Republican leadership and President Bush continue to emphasize more production, more drilling. Democrats have talked about the need to address energy efficiency, renewable resources. And Democrats have been very much in favor of more production; but they want to couple that with more domestic production, I should say, of oil and natural gas and coal; but we want to couple that with energy efficiency, conservation programs, use of renewable resources because we realize that we cannot forever depend on fossil non-renewable fuels, and that we cannot assume that we will be able to consume the great amount of energy resources that we have been consuming and having that increase on a regular basis.
Well, anyway, if I could talk a little bit, I would like to this evening, Mr. Speaker, about the President's national energy policy and this will fold in again the clean air issue that I mentioned briefly before. As I said, the Bush national energy policy, the President's national energy policy, seeks to primarily spur exploration and production of domestic oil and gas and increase the use of coal and nuclear power. In fact, the White House plan calls for the construction of more than 1,000 new power plants over the next 20 years and of course includes the drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other environmentally-sensitive areas.
Now, thankfully, we all know that last week the other body killed the drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, so it does not seem that we will have to deal with that.
announcement by the speaker pro tempore
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Forbes). The Chair will remind the gentleman to refrain from characterizing Senate action.
Mr. PALLONE. I am sorry. I tried not to use the term Senate, but I will not characterize their action.
The point I am trying to make is that even though, I think, we do not have to worry about drilling in the Arctic anymore as an issue, the bottom line is that the Republican leadership in both Houses, as well as the President, continue to push for drilling and exploration as the major priority rather than energy efficiency, conservation, and use of renewable resources.
Let me give you, if I can, if I can just talk a little bit about some of these Republican energy policies and highlight them a little bit in the time that I have.
The President's energy plan encourages increased domestic oil production, as I said, whether that means using new technology to enhance oil and gas recovery from existing wells, modifying Federal land use plans that currently restrict energy development; and the plan also calls for more natural gas pipelines and for streamlining the permit process to build more refineries.
In addition to exploration in the Arctic refuge, they also suggest that this increased production is somehow going to correct other States' electricity problems. But I have to say, Mr. Speaker, the bottom line is even if we try, and we should try to increase domestic production overall in the United States, it is never going to provide the kind of demand that we are used to on an exponential level. We cannot assume that we will be able to continue to grow and use more and more energy resources. We have to come up with a way of refining that policy or defining that policy so it is more efficient and does not waste energy resources.
Let me talk about renewables for a minute because I think it is important to stress that when it comes to energy resources that it is possible to use resources other than fossil fuels, nonrenewables. Over the last 10, 20 years regardless of who was President, we continued a policy of trying to look for renewables in a way of coming up with energy resources, new types of energy resources. The President says in his plan, in his energy plan, that he wants an increased focus on renewable and alternative energies; but once again when we look at the budget and where the money is going and what is proposed for the budget, we see that those programs have been downgraded. They have not been prioritized. In many cases they have actually been cut.
In the President's 2002 budget proposal, it cuts Department of Energy funding for renewable and alternative energy sources by 37 percent; solar research funding is cut by nearly 54 percent; geothermal, hydrogen and wind research programs were cut by 48 percent. Funding to encourage the building of energy-efficient homes and offices and to reduce energy use at steel, glass, pulp and paper companies would also be reduced under the proposal.
Basically, what we are seeing, as I said, again, is a budget policy and an agency policy on behalf of the Bush administration that seeks to enhance the power of industry and the needs and the lobbying efforts, if you will, of the utility companies. I guess the best example of that in my opinion was when the President reversed his campaign promise with regard to carbon dioxide. The President's energy plan proposes requiring electric utilities to reduce emissions and improve air quality. And he talks about this multi-pollutant strategy to encourage a development of legislation that would establish mandatory reduction targets for sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and mercury. Because of pressure from industry and anti-environmental leaders in the Congress and Republican leadership, the President earlier this year reneged on a campaign promise to include the regulation of carbon dioxide emissions in this plan.
{time} 2100
Obviously, the environmental community and myself and most Democrats feel very strongly that carbon dioxide emissions have to be included if we are really going to get a handle on trying to fix the air pollution problem that we have.
The last thing I wanted to mention in this regard with regard to the national energy policy is a very important point I think; and that is, that under the Clean Air Act, when it was passed and with subsequent amendments, standards were put in place for any new power plants that are built, that they have to meet certain standards with regard to air emissions, but the plants that were built when the Clean Air Act came into effect are what we call grandfathered. In other words, they do not have to upgrade the plant to meet the air quality standards or air emission standards that exist for new plants.
When that happened back in the seventies and when the Clean Air Act was first passed, and again, that was under President Nixon, a Republican, it was anticipated that over the years, those old power plants would close and they would be replaced by new power plants that have the stricter standards. But what has been happening instead is that the older power plants continue to operate and, in fact, have expanded and used the grandfathering under the rubric of grandfathering to continue to go by the old standards that caused more air pollution.
What President Bush did or is proposing to do is to take aim at this so-called new source review. That is how we characterize the requirement, that for new power plants they have to adhere to stricter standards, and if just going by one of the environmental groups', National Resources Defense Council, quote that says, the Bush energy plan appears to invite all utility and coal industries, the Department of Energy and other agencies, to weaken Clean Air Act rules and interfere with pending enforcement cases.
What happened is that previously the EPA had actually sued some of the utilities that owned these older power plants and said that they were violating the law by expanding those older plants and letting them use the older pollution standards rather than build new power plants that would adhere to the stricter standards, and the EPA brought this suit, was very successful and, in many cases, were at the point where they were going to force some of the utilities to adhere to the new standards rather than expanding the older plants under the old standards.
Now the Bush administration has essentially said that they are going to step in and not require that these upgrades take place. So, once again, it is just another example of how this administration is taking a very anti-environmental position. After over 30 years of continual upgrading of the environment and environmental laws, now we are seeing the Federal Government go in the opposite direction.
There are two other areas, Mr. Speaker, that I wanted to talk about in this regard. I actually only have one other area that I wanted to talk about in this regard, and again, I take this back to my home State because this is such an important issue in New Jersey, and it is just as important really in the rest of the country and, that is, hazardous waste sites.
We have, as I think many of us know, again dating back to the seventies, we put in place on a national level a program called the Superfund, which essentially requires that the Federal Government identify the most severely polluted hazardous waste sites in the country, the ones that pose the greatest threat to the environment, and once they are identified and put on what we call the national priority list, that the Federal Government is obliged to go in and clean them up. And they work with the States in doing that.
The basic premise of the Superfund program is the concept of what we call polluter pays. In other words, that the company that caused the hazardous site to occur, the company that caused the hazardous waste to be produced and left on a particular site is the one that has to pay the cost to clean it up. The problem, though, is, as anybody who is familiar with corporate law knows, is that corporations, and therefore the polluters that caused this pollution or these hazardous waste sites, often will go bankrupt, will go out of business, or we cannot find them.
So even though the Federal Government and the EPA pursuant to the Superfund program goes out and identifies the Superfund sites and then finds out who the responsible party was that caused the pollution, oftentimes, usually in about a third of the cases, the corporation no longer exists or does not have any money, and they cannot go after them and force them to do the cleanup.
What they did, and this was basically what the Superfund law was all about from a financial point of view, was that when the Superfund law was set up, Congress established a tax primarily on the oil and chemical industry that is paid into a fund called the Superfund, hence the name, and that that money is then used to clean up those sites where we cannot find the polluter, the responsible party.
What happened, though, is that the Superfund program was moving along, and frankly, at the time when President Clinton took office and the 8 years that he was President, they accelerated the level of the cleanup at a lot of sites in the country so that now the majority of the Superfund sites are in some stage of cleanup, and many of them are actually completely done and totally remediated, as we said.
When the Republicans took the majority back in the House of Representatives, I guess 7 or so years ago, and Newt Gingrich became the Speaker at the time, the first thing or one of the first things that the Republican leadership did was to refuse to renew the authority for the Superfund tax. And so we have been going now for 7 years without that tax on the oil and chemical industry being renewed.
There was enough money carried over over those last 7 years or so that we have been able to continue to clean up a lot of these sites using the money left over from this Superfund tax, as well as providing some money through the budget from what we call general revenues. This is the money that the average American pays in their income tax primarily, or other taxes, to the Federal Government that has been used to make up for the fact that we do not have this Superfund tax in place.
The problem is that this budget year will be the last fiscal year when there is significant money left in the Superfund program generated by that tax on the oil and chemical industry. In the next fiscal year, even the President estimates there will only be about $28 million left in the Superfund to do these cleanups. Twenty-eight million dollars is woefully inadequate. I think the level of funding that we need on an annual basis is in the hundreds of millions.
So what do we do? Democrats have been saying since 1994, when the Republican leadership took over in the House, that it was wrong to abolish or not renew this tax on the oil and chemical industry because the consequences eventually would be that we would not have money to pay for hazardous waste cleanups, and also that the burden now would be shifted to the average American taxpayer to pay for this cleanup, rather than having it paid for by the companies of industry that primarily caused it.
Now we are faced with a crisis where in the next year or so we will not have any money coming from this tax because there is nothing left. We have been advocating as Democrats, I have been advocating as the ranking member on our Subcommittee on Environment and Hazardous Materials of the Committee on Energy and Commerce that we should simply renew the Superfund tax. It makes sense. That was the whole idea from the beginning, that the polluter pay, or if we cannot find the polluter, that the industry pay.
Again, so far as the Bush administration, President Bush has said he does not favor reimposing that tax. The Republican leadership in the House has said that they oppose it, and we are at a standstill and do not know what to do.
The President's budget this year calls for only about 40 Superfund sites to be cleaned up as opposed to the approximately 80 that have been cleaned up on the average, over the last 8 or 9 years. So we know that the program is already suffering because the number of sites to be cleaned up is half, and many of the States even in my own State of New Jersey and around the country, many of the States have been told that the money is not going to be forthcoming from the Federal Government to do the Superfund cleanup, even though those sites are ready and have a plan in place to do the cleanup.
In my home State, in my home district, in my congressional district, both in Edison, New Jersey, where we have a site called the chemical insecticide site, which basically produced Agent Orange during the Vietnam War, and a lot of the residue is still there on the site, they are ready to go with the remediation plan they have been working on for the last 20 years. And they have been told, no, they cannot start it, we do not have any money from the Federal Government.
There, again, the company that caused the problem went bankrupt, cannot be found, and so we cannot go after the polluter, and there is no money from the Federal Government.
Another site in Marlboro Township, again these sites are some of the most polluted Superfund sites in this country. This one is called Burnt Fly Bog. It was run by Imperial Oil Company, has all kinds of petroleum residue percolating from underground. That had experienced about 80 percent cleanup over the last 9 years, and they were supposed to do the last 20 percent starting now in the next few weeks, next few months. They were told by the EPA, we do not have the money to do it.
Here again what we are seeing, and maybe the Superfund program is the best example for me to use in the context of what I am trying to get across tonight, is that whether by regulatory action of the agencies or proposals to come to Congress or budgetary efforts to cut back on the amount of money that is available for cleanup or for enforcement, we have seen a concerted effort on the part of this administration of President Bush to try to cut back on environmental protections.
It is very unfortunate that on the anniversary of Earth Day, which was yesterday, we saw the President going around the country talking about Earth Day, but his actions and the actions of the Republican leadership in this House do not dovetail with real environmental protection. In fact, the opposite is happening, and they continue to work to downgrade the environment and not provide the funding and the apportionment that is necessary to adequately carry out the good environmental laws that are on the books.
I am not going to keep going, Mr. Speaker. I could use a lot of other examples. But I did want to come here tonight to stress what is going on, and I think that hopefully the American people and my colleagues will wake up and realize that this degradation of the environment cannot continue and that the historical commitment that this Congress and that previous Presidents, both Democrat and Republican, have been making on a bipartisan basis to try to improve the quality of our environment should continue and should not be allowed to reverse itself as we have seen in the last year or 18 months into this administration.
____________________
