Environmental Attorney Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

DATE December 4, 2003 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on the environmental policies of
the Bush administration
TERRY GROSS, host:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

Today we're going to talk about the Bush administration and its environmental
record, a subject about which there is great division in America, as you'll
hear from our two guests.

In an article in this month's edition of Rolling Stone, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
says that the Bush administration is rolling back America's environmental laws
and weakening the protection of our country's air, water, public lands and
wildlife but has hidden its anti-environmental program behind deceptive
rhetoric. We'll hear from Kennedy in a moment. Later we'll talk with Charli
Coon, the senior policy analyst for energy and the environment at the
conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation. She says that the president
is doing the right thing by trying to balance energy, the economy and the
environment.

My first guest, Robert Kennedy Jr., is an environmental lawyer and activist.
He's the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council and the
president of Waterkeeper Alliance.

You said that President Bush will go down in history as America's worst
environmental president. We'll get into some of the details of why you've
reached that conclusion, but give us the overview of why you say that.

Mr. ROBERT F. KENNEDY Jr. (Senior Attorney, Natural Resources Defense
Council): He's the worst environmental president we've ever had, because of
his deliberate concerted efforts to dismantle 30 years of environmental law,
and his capacity--because the anti-environmentalists now control not only the
White House but both houses of Congress, so his ability--his capacity to
actually do it. And if you look at NRDC's Web site, the Natural Resources
Defense Council, you'll see that President Bush currently has over 200 major
environmental rollbacks, or weakening of environmental laws, that are now
being promoted by this administration. If even a fraction of these are passed
over the upcoming year, we will, by this time next year, have effectively no
significant federal environmental laws left in our country.

This is not exaggeration. This isn't hyperbole. This is a fact. Many of our
laws will remain on the books in one form or the other, but they'll be
unenforceable, and we will be like Mexico, which has these wonderful, even
poetic environmental laws, but nobody knows about them and nobody complies
with them.

GROSS: You've said that the environmental laws will be unenforceable. What
will make them unenforceable if the Bush administration plans go through?

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, the laws are being chipped away within the agencies to
redefine them, to narrow their scopes dramatically. For example, the Clean
Water Act, under a new Bush proposal, would only protect navigable waters.
The Clean Water Act now forbids the discharge of pollution into any waterway
in the United States, whether it's a small stream or a wetland or Lake Erie.
But the Bush administration wants to change that definition so that it will
only protect waterways that are actually, in fact, navigable. This will
exclude up to half of the waters and streams, stream miles, in our country.

Another proposal the Bush administration has already passed and is already
doing tremendous damage to waterways across the country is it's rewritten the
Clean Water Act so that it will no longer protect waterways against the
discharges of solid waste. This includes mining waste, rubble from
construction debris, garbage. A year ago, if you wanted to discharge those
things into waters in the United States, you would have had to get a permit.
Under the current administration interpretation, a Clean Water Act permit is
no longer required.

But the most damaging part of these, the kind of neutron bomb of these
proposals, are a series of super mandates, what are known as super mandates,
which are small laws that seem innocuous, that can actually eviscerate all of
our environmental laws at once. One of these that has been voted by the Bush
administration is the Property Rights Protection Act, or `Takings' bill, which
they're trying to attach to some of these must-pass budget bills. And what
that bill says is that government can't enforce or pass a legislation that
diminishes somebody's property values unless it first goes and pays the
property owner the cost of complying with the law. Now if government had to
pay people not to do bad things on their property, government would simply
cease to exist. You could not print enough money.

If you had to pay people not to dump solid waste or not to dump sewage into
waterways from their property, or not to put toxics into the air, not to kill
endangered species or fill wetlands, even if in filling that wetland they're
going to destroy a community water supply, they're going to cause floods in
the local community, they're going to destroy local populations of fishes and
birds that other members of the community rely on, you still would be--we
would have to pay you not to do that in order to enforce the law. So, of
course, none of these laws would ever be enforced again. And it's ridiculous,
because every law diminishes somebody's property values.

GROSS: One of the things you do is prosecute polluters. You're an
environmental lawyer. Is your job, prosecuting polluters, becoming more
difficult?

Mr. KENNEDY: It is, because the laws themselves are being undermined. And
I'll give you a couple of examples. Twelve years ago I brought a lawsuit
against the utility--big power plants, for killing fish--against the industry
itself for killing fish. I actually sued EPA for failing to pass regulations
that regulate fish kills at power plants. Some power plants--these antiquated
power plants, that use once-through cooling to cool their steam coils, suck in
billions of gallons of water. For example, on the Hudson River, the Indian
Point power plant uses a million gallons a minute. Well, all the fish that
are in the river also get sucked in and killed.

On the Delaware River, there's one power plant, the Salem nuclear power plant,
that kills, according to its own consultant, Martin Marietta, 175
billion--with a B--bay anchovies every year and 155 billion--with a
B--weakfish every year. And Martin Marietta, although it's required to assess
all the impacts on all the fisheries, stopped counting after it counted those
fish kills, and said that if this plant begins operating, it will collapse all
the fisheries in the Delaware River. And, in fact, as soon as the plant began
operating, all of those fisheries did collapse.

Altogether on the East Coast, about a trillion fish a year are killed by the
industry. It's illegal. The EPA has an obligation, under the Clean Water
Act, to promulgate regulations that will require the industry to use the best
available technology for eliminating these fish kills. That technology is
cooling towers. It's expensive. Utilities don't like it, so they've been
able to block those regulations for 20 years. I sued them; we sued them 12
years ago, and last year we finally got a decision from a federal judge. We
won the case, and the EPA was ordered to promulgate regulations.

The Bush administration immediately came in and promulgated phony regulations
that say best available technology, essentially, is whatever technology you're
currently using, and just redefined the term `best available technology.' So
now we're going to have to sue the Bush administration, and the likelihood is
we'll win that suit. But it may take another eight or 10 years, and in the
meantime, global fisheries are collapsing, and this is one of the primary
causes.

GROSS: The Bush administration has a new proposal on regulating mercury
emissions. Before we get to the proposal, can you just describe what the
hazards are of mercury emissions?

Mr. KENNEDY: Mercury is a potent neurotoxin. It causes a whole inventory of
grim illnesses, including permanent IQ loss in children, renal damage, liver
damage and mutations, destruction to brain tissue and nervous tissue. Mercury
is now ubiquitous in many of our fishes. For example, I live two miles from
the state of Connecticut. It is now unsafe to eat any freshwater fish in the
state of Connecticut because of mercury, with one exception, which is
hatchery-bred trout. I've worked on protecting the New York City water supply
for almost 20 years, and New York's water comes from these upstate reservoirs
that have been protected from industrial pollution for over a hundred years.

A few months ago, we found that the fish in them are unsafe to eat from
mercury. There's no geological source of mercury in the state of Connecticut
or in the New York city water supply, but that mercury is coming from air
precipitation. And the primary source for those emissions in our country are
coal-burning power plants, mainly in the Ohio Valley. About 40 percent to 50
percent of the mercury emissions in our country come from these antiquated
dinosaur coal-burning power plants that the Bush administration has recently
given permission to continue discharging mercury forever.

GROSS: Can you briefly explain the Bush administration's proposal to deal
with mercury emissions and why you oppose it?

Mr. KENNEDY: Yeah. Under the Clean Water Act and under the Clean Air Act,
the mercury emissions from these power plants are illegal. When Congress
first passed the Clean Air Act, it recognized that there is no right to
pollute our air. But utility industry came in and said, `Wait a minute.
We've made large investments in old plants, in these big coal plants, that
cannot comply with the new standards in the Clean Air Act. Therefore, we're
going to oppose the Clean Air Act.' The compromise that was worked out was
that those plants would be allowed to operate until they made major changes in
their operations. That happened over the last 10 years. Most of them have
made those major changes. But most of them, or many of them, did not upgrade
as they were supposed to do under the Clean Air Act.

So the Clinton administration Justice Department began suing them and
prosecuting them, because what they were doing was, in many cases, a criminal
activity. The Bush administration came in, dropped all of those lawsuits, and
then changed the law so that they'll never have to comply with the new source
performance standards. They can continue discharging and polluting at the
same levels forever, and even increase that pollution without being prosecuted
or without violating the law.

GROSS: My guest is Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He's the attorney for the Natural
Resources Defense Council and president of Waterkeeper Alliance. More after a
break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Robert Kennedy Jr. He's an environmental lawyer and
activist. He's the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council
and president of Waterkeeper Alliance.

You've said that the Bush administration has already done a lot to turn back
environmental regulations, and he's been able to do that without having to go
through Congress. However, there is a bill going through Congress; it didn't
make it this year, but it will probably come back in some form in January, and
that's the energy bill. I know you oppose this energy bill. What is your
biggest problem with the energy bill?

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, the energy bill does nothing to address the principal
problem of our nation, which is dependence on fossil fuels and on foreign oil.
The energy bill, instead, is a $145 billion boondoggle to big oil, big coal
and the nuclear industry. It does--the principal winners are those industries
and the princes of Saudi Arabia. The big losers are the American people. The
energy bill was hatched in 106 days of closed-door meetings between Vice
President Cheney's energy task force, which was composed of government
officials, all with energy industry pedigrees, and energy industry lobbyists.

There's virtually nothing in the bill for conservation. The bill would exempt
the oil industry, for example, from any liability for putting MTBE in our
nation's water supplies. There are 2,000 towns and cities across the country
that now have found that their water supplies are contaminated with MTBE,
which was an additive that was put 20 years ago into our fuel by the oil
companies. They claim that, you know, EPA ordered them to do it, but, in
fact, the record shows that they rammed MTBE down EPA's throat. Now we find
that MTBE is cancer-causing, it flows easily through groundwater and it's
contaminated all of these drinking-water wells, and the well owners in the
towns and the cities across the country are now suing the energy industry for
compensation to clean up this mess.

What this bill does, which is a $50 billion value to the energy industry, is
to simply exempt big oil from having to pay any of these claims and force
local taxpayers and local consumers to clean up the mess that the energy--that
the oil industry made of their water supplies.

GROSS: There was a movement to remove that MTBE provision from the energy
bill. If that was removed, would you be anymore enthusiastic about the bill?

Mr. KENNEDY: No. The bill--there's nothing in that bill that does what we
need done for our country and for the American people, which is to give us a
more reliable energy supply and to reduce our dependence on oil and coal.
That's what we ought to be doing. For example, the best thing that we could
do would be corporate average fuel efficiency standards to improve the fuel
efficiency of the American automobile. If we raise fuel efficiency standards
in our cars by one mile per gallon, we get more oil than would be in two
Arctic National Wildlife Refuges. If we raise it by 2.7 miles per gallon, we
eliminate all of the oil that we import from Iraq and Kuwait combined. If we
raise fuel efficiency by 7.6 miles per gallon, we eliminate 100 percent of our
Gulf oil imports into this country.

Think of what that could do for America. We would reduce our vulnerability to
price shocks on the international oil market; we put money in the pocket of
every American. If I had a car that got 40 miles per gallon, rather than one
that gets 25 miles per gallon, I'd have an extra $1,000 in my pocket every
year and so would every American. And think what that would do for our
economy. At one point, President Bush sent us all a $300 check and called
that an economic stimulus package, and we had to gut the Social Security Trust
Fund in order to do it, and it was just for one year. Imagine if all of us
were getting an extra $1000 or $300 or $500 every single year forever. But,
you know, $78 million worth of checkbook diplomacy between Detroit and
Washington, DC, over the past 10 years has effectively excluded that.

The biggest advocate against fuel efficiency standards in this country over
the past 10 years has been Spencer Abrams, and he was one of the authors of
the energy bill. So obviously there's nothing in there that is going to do
what we really need to be done to benefit America and our people.

GROSS: One part of the energy bill that environmentalists successfully got
removed was the part that would have allowed the drilling of the Arctic
National Wildlife Refuge. How significant is it to you that that is no longer
allowed within the bill?

Mr. KENNEDY: It doesn't make the bill any better. It's like, you know,
putting lipstick on a donkey. The bill is bad, and you know, if you ask the
administration officials, `Is there anything good in here for the
environment?' they say, `Well, you know, we got rid of the Arctic drilling
provision.' But the entire bill is a catastrophe for the American people.
It's a huge boom for big oil which, incidentally, is making record profits.
The day that Cheney announced the energy task force report, Exxon announced
that it had tripled profits from the previous year. The energy industry has
quintupled profits since 1999. So while many Americans were struggling
through a recession, the energy industry was the one industry that was
profiting both from the president's foreign policy and from his domestic
policy.

GROSS: You know there are advocates of drilling of the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge who say if you want a reliable energy future, you've got to
start drilling there and that will make us less dependent on foreign oil.

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, that's nonsense. The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
contains less than .2 percent of global reserves. Oil is an international
commodity. The oil from the Arctic, most of it doesn't even come to our
country; it's shipped to Europe. And it was being drilled by BP, which isn't
even an American oil company. And it's very expensive oil. And even if you
got all of the oil out of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, it would not
reduce the price of oil at our pumps by even a penny per gallon. Our problem
is, we have trivial amounts of oil in this country now. We have about 2
percent of global reserves in our country so even if we extract all of it and
destroy our sacred places in the process, it's not going to--we cannot drill
our way out of oil dependence.

We have much cheaper sources of energy in this country and much more efficient
sources of energy in this country, beginning with conservation, but we ought
to be looking at renewables and we ought to be exercising leadership to make
the switch over the next 10 years to a hydrogen fuel economy. And that's the
kind of leadership that we need from the White House.

GROSS: Well, President Bush does have a proposal to increase development in
use of hydrogen fuel and the development of hydrogen-fueled cars.

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, yeah, he announced that proposal in the State of the
Union Address and it's been labeled or heralded, you know, as an act of
environmental leadership, but the devil is in the details. And if you look at
the details of that proposal, it's really a joke. First of all, it's a
trivial amount of money. We give about $55 billion a year in direct subsidies
to the oil companies, and this proposal is for, I think, $1.4 billion.

But that aside, the thing that environmentalists like about hydrogen is that
hydrogen can be extracted from water and its byproducts, when you burn it, are
oxygen and water. There's no pollution when it comes from your pipe and so
you could create a hydrogen economy without creating huge amounts of pollution
from fossil fuels. But the president took his $1.4 billion and gave it to the
automobile industry to figure out ways to extract hydrogen, not from water,
but from oil and coal, which puts the same global-warming gases and the same
pollutants into our air. So it's really kind of a, you know, a bait and
switch. It's kind of a perverse use of the environmental mantle to shield
something that is just going to benefit the oil and coal industry and the
automobile industry.

GROSS: Robert Kennedy Jr. is the senior attorney for the Natural Resources
Defense Council and the president of Waterkeeper Alliance. More on the Bush
administration and the environment in the second half of the show. I'm Terry
Gross and this is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.

We're talking about the Bush administration and the environment. Let's get
back to our interview with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., an environmental lawyer and
activist. He's the senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council
and the president of Waterkeeper Alliance.

One of your criticisms of the Bush administration, when it comes to energy, is
you say the administration cloaks its environmental policies in language
designed to deceive the public. What's an example of that?

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, everybody knows about the Healthy Forest Act, which is an
act that actually allows kind of 1950's-style industrial forestry on our
protected lands that were formerly protected from cutting, the Clear Skies
Initiative, which is really a way of adding more pollution to our water, which
will make our skies dirtier. Environmentalists call it the `Clear Lies
Initiative.' The administration, under the coaching of its pollster, Frank
Luntz, has been told that they should use words like `streamlining'
regulations, rather than weakening regulations.

The reason for this--this is a stealth attack. And the reason for it is
that--and Frank Luntz has said this himself in a secret memo to the Bush
administration that was obtained by NRDC, that the American public is against
the president when it comes to these environmental rollbacks. They do not
want our laws weakened. They want strict enforcement of our environmental
laws, and this is true across the board at the Republican Party and the
Democratic Party.

And Luntz warned the administration that if they're gonna roll back our
environmental laws, they have to do it secretly, and they have to cloak their
anti-environmental agenda in the mantle of environmentalism. And that's what
the administration has done, and it's been very, very successful at this.
Many of the rollbacks have occurred--the most damaging ones--behind the
scenes, in the dark corridors of the White House, in the Office of Management
Budget under the leadership of John Graham, who has essentially transformed
the agencies like EPA and the Department of Interior and the Department of
Agriculture that are supposed to be protecting America's interests in our
valuable resources and has transformed those agencies into arms of the
industries that they are meant to regulate. They are captured agencies. The
head of the Forestry Department is a former timber industry lobbyist. The
head of Public Lands is a coal and mining industry lobbyist. And the national
policies now reflect the agendas of those industries rather than the interests
of the American public.

GROSS: You have six children. Three of them have asthma. How does that
connect to your environmental activism?

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, you know, we are suffering, as a nation, an asthma
epidemic now. One out of every four black children in New York City has
asthma. We don't know why this pandemic is happening, but we do know that the
asthma attacks themselves are triggered by bad air days, particularly by
particulates and ozone in the air. The primary source of particulates and
ozone are Midwestern power plants that are operating illegally under the Clean
Air Act. The Bush administration was--and I can watch my children gasping for
air on bad air days. And, you know, I'm thinking to myself, we are living in
a science fiction nightmare right now where we are literally bringing children
into the world where the air is too poisonous for them to breathe because
somebody made a contribution to the Bush administration, because the industry
gave $48 million to the Republican Party and to the Bush campaign during the
2000 campaign.

And as a result of that, the industry itself has gotten billions of dollars in
relief by not having to comply with the new source performance standards in
the Clean Air Act that would've forced them to reduce the amounts of
particulates and ozone that they're discharging into our air.

I live three hours south of the Adirondack Mountains. That's the oldest
protected wilderness on earth. It's been protected since 1888. And yet, half
the lakes in the Adirondacks are now sterilized, and the reason for that is
acid rain from those same power plants which has destroyed the forest cover on
the high peaks of the Appalachians from Georgia all the way up into Canada.

So these power plants are imposing huge costs on the American public that they
should have to pay. In a true free-market economy, they would have to pay
those costs themselves. And that is the purpose of our federal environmental
laws, to reimpose the free-market economy. But what the Bush administration
has done is allowed itself to be bought off by this industry so that they are
now imposing these costs where my children can no longer breathe on bad air
days, they're gasping for breath, that they can't enjoy the seminal, primal
experience of American youth, which is to go fishing with their father and
eating the fish. And they can't go camping in the Adirondacks and enjoy the
forests that have been protected since 1888 in those conditions.

GROSS: You know, you mentioned that three of your children have asthma. They
were, of course, born before George Bush became the president, so anything
he's done is not directly responsible for the asthma that they have. But I'm
wondering if--say things continued to head in the direction that President
Clinton had been moving in environmentally. Do you think that we would've
been in much different shape than we are now environmentally?

Mr. KENNEDY: Well, first of all, to answer your first question, we don't know
why we're having an epidemic of asthma. Nobody knows what the causes are.
You know, there's all kinds of explanations for it. But I can tell you in the
last five years, the incidence of asthma has doubled in five years among
American children. We don't know why that is. There's plenty of suspicion
that it comes from pesticides or hormones that are now ubiquitous in our food
supply, but nobody really knows.

What we do know is that asthma attacks are caused by bad air days, by ozone
and particulates in particular. And those materials in our air have been
increased, not decreased, by the Bush administration. Under the Clinton plan,
those materials would gradually disappear. And in a short time, they would
be--the incidence of those materials in our air would dramatically diminish.
But under the Bush administration plan, which has already been implemented,
those materials will remain in our air forever and even increase.

GROSS: So much of America's attention has been focused on terrorism and the
war in Iraq. How do you think that terrorism and the war has affected the
amount of energy that the Bush administration is spending on environmental
issues, and how much do you think that the attention to terrorism and the war
is affecting public awareness of what's being done?

Mr. KENNEDY: If you think back to August of 2001, President Bush had his back
against the wall on environmental issues. He tried to pass regulations that
allowed arsenic in drinking water; he had abandoned the Kyoto Protocol; he had
abandoned his own promises about limiting carbon dioxide. And the press and
the public were furious, and the administration was feeling the political pain
of them.

All of that disappeared after September 11th. The environmental reporters and
newspapers across the country were reassigned to cover terrorism and the war
on Iraq, and the public attention was diverted. And, you know, when I go
around--Terry, I go around the country and talk to people about these
environmental rollbacks and the initial reaction, inevitably, is, `Oh, you
know, how could President Bush be doing this? How could this be true? We
don't believe you. He hasn't had time to do this.'

And the fact is that the relentless attack on the environment--you know, the
assault on the environment continued during the war in Iraq, but coverage of
it ceased almost completely. And it's allowed the president and his cronies
in the energy industry to dismantle our environmental laws without any public
debate, without any public scrutiny or public complaint. Plus, you have a
press that is very, very reluctant to criticize the president in a time of
war, and a press that is just not paying attention to these critical issues.

GROSS: Thank you very much for talking with us.

Mr. KENNEDY: Thanks for having me.

GROSS: Robert Kennedy, Jr. is the senior attorney for the Natural Resources
Defense Council and the president of Waterkeeper Alliance.

Coming up, we talk about the Bush administration and the environment with
Charli Coon, senior policy analyst for energy and environment at The Heritage
Foundation. This is FRESH AIR.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Interview: Charli Coon of The Heritage Foundation discusses
the Bush administration and the environment
TERRY GROSS, host:

We're talking about the Bush administration and the environment. My guest,
Charli Coon, says that many environmentalists, like our previous guest, Robert
Kennedy Jr., are alarmists. She admires President Bush for balancing the
environment, energy and the economy. Coon is senior policy analyst for energy
and the environment at the think tank The Heritage Foundation.

How would you rate President Bush's environmental record?

Ms. CHARLENE "CHARLI" COON (The Heritage Foundation): Well, I think that he
probably would get--if we were using the alphabet--perhaps maybe a B, C+. I
think that what he's trying to do is to bring balance to the arena and to look
at the three critical E's, and that is the energy, the environment and the
economy. All three are related, and they interact with each other. And in
making policy for one, you have to consider the consequences, whether they be
intended or unintended consequences, to the other. And I think that he is
trying to bring a balanced, commonsense approach to the foreground.

GROSS: What do you think have been the Bush administration's greatest
environmental accomplishments?

Ms. COON: This week, for example, the president signed the Healthy Forest
initiative. And as Congressman or Chairman Pombo has said, this is probably
the greatest environmental protection legislation that we've seen since the
Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. And he was able to get that through
both the House and the Senate, and I think that that is a positive step.

I also think that the president's original energy plan is a balanced, diverse
plan. I'm not talking about the legislation that the House and the Senate
recently reconciled, but his original energy plan had a diversity of fuel
resources and was a balanced plan.

GROSS: The Healthy Forest initiative has been criticized by environmentalists
for actually making it easier to deforest the forests, you know, easier to
hurt the forests, as opposed to making it easier to protect the forests.

Ms. COON: Well, the forests right now are unnaturally dense, diseased and
insect-infested. I imagine that what they're trying to say is that they would
rather see catastrophic fires that will sterilize the soil, that will destroy
wildlife habitat and wetlands and watersheds instead of using commonsense
management for our forests. The forests are no different than any other kind
of, quote/unquote, "property." If you do not maintain your house, if you do
not maintain your health, if you do not maintain your car, then eventually
you're going to have problems.

GROSS: The Bush administration wants to abandon a plan that was started under
the EPA of the Clinton administration that deals with mercury emissions. The
Clinton plan proposed that industry be required to install the best available
technology to dramatically limit mercury emissions from power plants. The
Bush administration wants to abandon that regulation and substitute a new one
that would give a lot more flexibility to the industry. There'd be more
mercury emissions under the Bush administration rules than under the Clinton
administration ones. What's your reaction to the Bush-proposed regulation?

Ms. COON: Well, first of all, I don't believe that it's accurate to say that
the Bush administration is abandoning regulation of mercury. Certainly, it is
proposing to regulate mercury but doing it in a different and more flexible
approach that will sufficiently regulate and reduce mercury emissions, number
one.

Also, power plants are just a minor source of mercury emissions anyway. So
even if you close down all power plants, say, coal-fired power plants, there's
still going to be considerable mercury in fish. That's where humans usually
get the mercury because it's a natural substance that's in the oceans and in
fish as well as wildfires and volcanos. So it's not just an issue related to
utilities.

GROSS: Robert Kennedy Jr. says that in Connecticut and New York, there's no
other source except power plants for the mercury that's in the fish. Would
you speculate as to what other sources might be causing the fish to have
mercury in their tissues?

Ms. COON: Well, again, I think the issue there is not so much is there
mercury there or not, but what is the amount that is harmful? The University
of Rochester and the National Institute of Health has conducted a study and
it's still conducting this study, and recently, a pediatric neurologist
testified at a hearing on the Hill and said, `We do not believe that there is
presently good scientific evidence that moderate fish consumption is harmful
to the fetus. Now that study is also based on people eating 10 times what the
normal individual eats in fish. So there's not all the scientific support out
there that the alarmists would have people believe.

GROSS: What is your overall view of the energy bill? It didn't get through
Congress this year, but it's likely to be introduced again in January, perhaps
in a slightly different form.

Ms. COON: The energy bill is a missed opportunity, regrettably.
Unfortunately, the energy bill is just laden with pork and does not go far
enough in enhancing the nation's domestic energy supplies. And the Energy
Information Administration, which is an independent statistical and analytical
agency at the Department of Energy, has consistently said and predicted that
our consumption is going to exceed our production over the next 20 years. If
we're going to have an energy bill, the purpose of an energy bill should be to
provide abundant and reliable and affordable energy supplies. This bill does
not significantly correct the imbalance.

GROSS: What measures would you recommend?

Ms. COON: Particularly with natural gas, that we open up the offshore areas
and the outer-continental shelf. Now Congress has for years, through their
different policies, advancing and encouraging the use of natural gas, and yet
on the other hand, they want people to use natural gas, but they're not
providing access to where the natural gas is. I think they need to be
consistent in their policies. If they're not going to allow access to natural
gas, then they ought not be making policies that encourage the use of natural
gas.

GROSS: What about cutting down dependence on foreign oil? Do you think that
that's a practical strategy, something that should be pursued?

Ms. COON: Well, certainly. I think that the more independent we are on any
of our fuel sources, the better off we are. However, having said that, we're
never going to be totally independent on oil, and I don't believe that anyone,
certainly in the administration, has been saying that we're going to be able
to be totally independent. But I do believe that the Congress made a bad
policy decision in not opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Only
2,000 acres of a desolate, flat, treeless tundra that has a mean estimate of
10.3 billion barrels of oil, which is considerably more than what we have
right now even in the state of Texas. Again, the issue there is that it is
reliable oil, and it's the equivalent of about, oh, 35 years' worth of oil
from Iraq.

GROSS: What about raising the fuel-efficiency standards in cars so that we're
saving on oil?

Ms. COON: Well, the fuel efficiency for automobiles--of course, we all want
fuel-efficient automobiles, but the problem with having a federal statutory
standard is that it causes the automobiles to be downsized to meet those
standards, and as a result of that, even the National Academy of Sciences has
said because of what we call cafe standards, automobiles or vehicles have been
downsized, and as a result, we have more fatalities. Downsizing automobiles
causes deaths.

Now having said that, the automobile industry has been developing and putting
out cleaner and better cars each year. The fuel-efficient standards don't go
to the issue that the alarmists are concerned about. It doesn't apply to
every automobile. If they're concerned about something, they should be coming
up with some proposals to get rid of the older cars because each new model of
vehicle is better and cleaner than the year before.

GROSS: You know, you're saying that the fuel-efficient smaller cars are
actually also unsafe, but, you know, a lot of people would say it's the larger
gas-guzzling vehicles like the SUVs and the Hummers that both guzzle gas and
present real safety hazards, both for the people in those cars and for any
smaller cars that they might collide with.

Ms. COON: Well, actually, the fatality rate is higher if you have two small
cars crashing into each other with a frontal crash. So I guess you can just
look at the statistics and spin them the way that you want to, but again, the
safest vehicles on the road are the large SUVs. And if someone wants to have
a fuel-efficient vehicle, they're available. There's hybrids out there and
there's fuel-efficient cars, but if an individual feels that the SUV meets
their needs for safety as well as for their other needs, whether it be for
hauling or for businesses or carting the kids around, going grocery shopping,
then they should be entitled and have the right to choose an SUV.

GROSS: My guest is Charli Coon, senior policy analyst for energy and the
environment at The Heritage Foundation.

We'll talk more after a break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

GROSS: My guest is Charli Coon. She's a senior policy analyst for energy and
the environment at The Heritage Foundation.

Critics of the Bush administration, including Robert Kennedy Jr., who we heard
from earlier, say the Bush administration is pushing for 200 major
environmental rollbacks in environmental actions, including action pertaining
to the Clean Water Act, a Bush administration proposal, if enacted, would mean
that the Clean Water Act would only apply to navigable waters and not to
streams and other smaller bodies of water that are navigable. Your thoughts
on that?

Ms. COON: Well, let me start with the second first in terms of the
rollbacks. I find it very interesting that whenever this administration wants
to make a change, it doesn't matter what it is--a change--to an environment
regulation or policy, it is immediately spun as being a rollback. Whereas in
the prior administration, any change that was made was automatically assumed,
incorrectly, I might add--assumed to be an improvement, and I think we're
seeing some media bias there and the spin from the left in that regard.

In terms of the Clean Water Act or any of the environmental acts, the Bush
administration wants to ensure that we have clean water and that we have clean
air. Conservatives--I'm a conservative; I drink water, I breathe air and want
it to be clean. I think that the goals are the same, but I think how we get
there is what is different. And particularly, conservatives do not believe
that you need Big Brother government command-and-control measures to actually
ensure that we have clean air and clean water.

GROSS: Are you concerned about the number of people within the Bush
administration who have ties to the energy industry, including the president
and the vice president?

Ms. COON: You know, only in Washington, DC, would expertise be a liability.
As many of your listeners may remember, when we were having the initial
election for the president, President Bush was being criticized because he
didn't have experience; he didn't know what he was doing. `You know, we need
somebody that's got foreign policy experience and more domestic policy
experience.' He wins the election, and you've got two individuals that
understand the energy industry. They know what it takes to produce energy.
They know what it takes to conserve energy. They know the industry from, you
know, top down, and yet that now becomes a liability. Who do you expect the
president and vice president to talk to? Brain surgeons for energy policy?
Of course you expect them to talk to the energy industry because they are the
experts.

And I might add that the administration has listened to many different groups,
not just the energy industry. Various environmental groups have been invited
to discuss the energy and environment legislation and initiatives with the
president. The fact that some of them don't want to sit down with the
president because they don't want him to have any type of a, quote/unquote,
"Green win," that is their problem, but the administration has certainly
extended its hand to all groups.

GROSS: In an article published this month in Rolling Stone magazine, Robert
Kennedy Jr. writes, you know, a few lines about The Heritage Foundation,
where you work, and he says that it was founded by the brewer Joseph Coors.
He writes, `Coors founded the right-wing Heritage Foundation to provide a
philosophical underpinning for the anti-environmental movement.'

Ms. COON: Well, first of all, I think that's just nonsense, and I think that
many of our donors would be surprised to know that they are purportedly
supporting an anti-environmental movement. The Heritage Foundation is a
conservative think tank. Less than 10 percent, might even be as low as 8
percent or 5 percent, of our funding comes from corporations. It's
individuals that support The Heritage Foundation, that support conservative,
commonsense principles as solutions to the nation's problems.

GROSS: Charli Coon, thank you very much for talking with us.

Ms. COON: Thank you.

GROSS: Charli Coon is senior policy analyst for energy and the environment at
The Heritage Foundation. Earlier we heard from environmental lawyer and
activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

(Credits)

GROSS: I'm Terry Gross.
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