by Gail Collins
“Can you give me a statistic suggesting it works?” asked Smith.
“I’m sorry, I’m going to tell you from my own personal life. Abstinence works,” said the governor.
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Cooling to Global Warming
“The worst possible sin”
There’s no better empty-versus-crowded divider than environmentalism, no federal bureaucrat more despised in the empty-place world than the one who wants to tell developers that they can’t expand their suburb into the wetlands, or orders farmers not to clear woodlots where an endangered species has set up shop.
“In their eyes, we have committed the worst possible sin, of being not in compliance with federal regulations,” Governor Perry once said of the Environmental Protection Agency, in tones of great aggravation. Since the EPA’s preeminent responsibility is, um, making sure everyone is in compliance with federal regulations, you would be sort of worried if its officials felt that the worst possible sin was drinking on the Sabbath.
Texas has a long history of hostility to environmental regulation, as befits its status as a place where everybody feels as if they’re in the wide open spaces—even if they actually happen to be in Sugar Land or Plano or some other mega-suburb in which the neighbors take strong exception to an out-of-the-norm mailbox or an untended lawn. Still, there’s space. You would not be driving sixty miles to work in the morning if there weren’t plenty of space. And the great tradition of Texas has been not to protect, but to extract. Oil, gas, minerals, timber—whatever you can wrestle from the land, you take it away and sell it. Screw the blue-pelted ferret. As Marshall Kuykendall, a famous white-haired Texas property rights activist, warned his fellow Texans, the federal government “can send guys down here with pistols who can fine you hundreds of thousands of dollars for stepping on a snail.” (Kuykendall is best remembered for having once compared the freeing of slaves to the unconstitutional taking of property.)
“The environmental consciousness is less in Texas than the rest of the country,” acknowledged Tom Smith, the executive director of Texas Public Citizen. Not to say there aren’t green patches in the state. Folks in urban areas recycle; everybody’s sensitive to wasting water in a drought, and while Texas probably doesn’t have the highest proportion of scenic beauty per acre in the country, people treasure what they’ve got. But still. “Texans had spent most of five generations trying to wring a living out of the land, and they associated environmentalism with flower children and other nonsense,” wrote historian James Haley.
Amazing, then, that Lyndon Johnson rolled up such a strong environmental record when he was president: the Water Quality Act of 1965, the Air Quality Act of 1967, the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965, the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, the Land and Water Conservation Fund Act, the Endangered Species Preservation Act, and the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act. He signed or otherwise endorsed 1,112 international treaties, agreements, conventions, and protocols dealing with the environment. “There was more environmental legislation passed than in all previous administrations combined,” said Martin Melosi, a professor of history at the University of Houston.
But Lyndon Johnson was one of a kind. It was also another era. It took a while for the people in the empty places to realize that all the feel-good talk about highway beautification might have an impact on their property and their businesses. Back in the day, Richard Nixon had a great environmental record, too.
“A cocked gun aimed at Texas”
There is, naturally, no part of environmental policy that touches as deep in the heart of Texas as energy policy. The last Democratic presidential candidate to win the state’s affection did it, in part, by sweet-talking the gas barons. “First,” Jimmy Carter wrote to Governor Dolph Briscoe when he was campaigning for president, “I will work with the Congress, as the Ford administration has been unable to do, to deregulate new natural gas.” The price of natural gas was controlled under a complicated system that allowed Texas producers to charge what they wanted in-state while most of the rest of the country paid artificially lower prices. Carter seemed to be leaning toward what Washington called “the Texas position,” which was that there would be no restrictions anywhere. The state’s power structure was in love with the idea. They responded to Carter’s overtures by handing over a ton of campaign donations, and Texas voters followed their lead, giving Carter the state’s twenty-six electoral votes in his 1976 victory over Gerald Ford.
The romance was brief. Within months after the inauguration, Texas had metaphorically returned the fraternity pin.
You may remember, if you’re old enough, that 1976 was the middle of an energy crisis of epic proportions. The United States spent much of the decade wrestling with the Middle East oil embargo, gas shortages, soaring energy prices. The government, shocked into action, had done everything from setting a 55 mph speed limit on highways to year-round daylight savings time. Richard Nixon imposed price controls. But we still had inflation, as well as a recession. So just a few months after his inauguration, Carter went on television to announce that the energy crisis was the “moral equivalent of war.” He urged Americans to “reduce demand through conservation” by giving up their big gas-guzzling cars, to car-pool and take mass transit, to turn their thermostats down to 65 during the day and 55 at night. He was even wearing a sweater.
If Carter had announced a real war he might have roused some Texan enthusiasm. But a state that sold energy for a living had no particular desire to see people buy less of it. Plus, where was that clarion call for deregulating natural gas? Briscoe called the speech “a cocked gun aimed at Texas.”
Carter acknowledged that he’d promised to try to deregulate natural gas prices, but noted that he didn’t say when. He also held a press conference where he warned about “potential war profiteering” by the energy industry which, he predicted, could develop into “the biggest ripoff in history.” By that point Texas Democrats and the White House were having one of the worst breakups in the history of politics—they might as well have been sitting in front of the TV sobbing and eating butter brickle ice cream. Remember that story about Bill Clements, the first Republican governor since Reconstruction, who started his campaign in 1978 by promising to wrap Jimmy Carter around his Democratic opponent’s neck? (It will be forever emblazoned in our minds as the “throwing a rubber chicken across the dinner table” incident.) It worked.
Texas voters paid Carter back in 1980, deserting him for Ronald Reagan in huge numbers. Carter took others down with him, hastening the Democrats’ decline. Among the victims was Representative Bob Eckhardt, a veteran Houston congressman who had calculated that legislation he passed to control oil prices, particularly the Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975, had saved consumers nearly $64 billion over the years. Eckhardt had been a favorite of consumer protection groups, whose support had previously protected him from being unseated, though not for the energy industry’s lack of trying. “If you can’t get Bob to vote with us, we’re just going to have to beat him,” Houston oilman Jack Warren had warned Eckhardt’s wife.
You might say the oilmen had tied the proverbial chicken around Eckhardt’s neck. His opponent was twenty-eight-year-old Jack Fields, a lawyer who had avoided any candidate debates but spent twice Eckhardt’s money. “I think the worst part about it is the oil industry can basically say they beat a congressman,” said Representative Jim Mattox of Dallas. Fields was appointed to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce.
So out went Jimmy Carter and in came Ronald Reagan, whose energy policy transition team was made up of oil company executives and geologists, led by Michel Halbouty, a Texas wildcatter, who helped produce an analysis of the Carter energy policy that concluded, “Instead of unleashing the resources of a wealthy nation, we have, in the name of saving energy for some unspecified future time, tucked energy away like a rare bottle of wine.” The new president would eventually sign legislation restoring many of the tax breaks that oil producers had lost in the 1970s. He also took
down the solar panels Carter had installed on the White House roof.
“We say to the lobbyists, ‘Help us’ ”
Ronald Reagan was hardly what you’d call an environmentalist—he once told reporters that trees cause more pollution than automobiles. After eight years with him, almost anybody might have looked good to the environmental lobby. But George H. W. Bush actually seemed better than not-as-bad. “I call him Bush the Good,” said James Marston of the Environmental Defense Fund.
“I never thought of him as a Texan—I just thought of him as a great guy,” said Sherwood Boehlert, a former Republican member of Congress from upstate New York who did endless battles against his party’s leadership on behalf of clean air and water.
When H. W. ran for president in 1988, the Republican platform—a document useful only for taking the party’s emotional temperature—supported the need to protect the air and water, and even mentioned climate change. The first President Bush said he wanted to be known as an environmentalist and the White House extolled his efforts to promote issues like reforestation, noting the president’s “personal commitment to planting trees.” More significantly, he approved the 1990 Clean Air Act, which significantly expanded on the versions passed during previous administrations, particularly in matters like acid rain. Its goal, the New York Times reported on the day Bush signed the bill into law, was “to cut acid rain pollutants by half, sharply reduce urban smog and eliminate most of the toxic chemical emissions from industrial plants by the turn of the century.” Never quite got that far, but a lot of progress was made thanks to that legislation.
Bush was certainly not an enemy of the oil industry. He was of the oil industry, and many of his biggest campaign donors were Texas energy barons. If you were feeling benevolent, however, you could argue that the first Bush mimicked the LBJ strategy in making sure that Texas’s many variations on the theme of Halliburton were taken care of when it came to federal contracts, while looking out for the country when it came to broader environmental policy. But H. W. had his limits, particularly when it came to global warming. He was reluctant to even attend the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, and when he got there, he refused to sign a treaty on biodiversity. He approved the global warming treaty only after it had been seriously watered down. ”The American way of life is not negotiable,” he said. During his campaign against Bill Clinton in 1992, he would memorably lash out at Clinton’s running mate, Al Gore, as “ozone man.” (“This guy is so far out in the environmental extreme we’ll be up to our necks in owls and outta work for every American.”)
As a campaign strategy, the ozone offense apparently had its limits. Bush lost. Bill Clinton became president, bearing with him a strong environmental agenda that ran aground after the Republican landslide in 1994. The new leadership was topped by Newt Gingrich and the two Texans we’ve met before—Dick Armey as majority leader and Tom DeLay as whip. It was a perfect Texas moment, heavy with triumphalism. No more the disempowered minority, embracing bipartisanship for the sake of a few scraps from the table of the perpetually-in-charge Democrats. It was time to kick ass.
As if this wasn’t enough of a nightmare for the environmental community, the new chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee was another Texan, “Smokey Joe” Barton. He was just back from an unsuccessful attempt to move into the Senate, in a campaign that lives on in memory for his argument against gay rights: “If homosexuality was normal, we wouldn’t any of us be here.” These days, Barton tends to be known best for his famous public apology to BP for the Obama administration’s attempt to get it to pay for the damage caused by its Gulf oil spill. (“I do not want to live in a country where any time a citizen or corporation does something that is legitimately wrong, is subject to some sort of political pressure that is, again, in my words—amounts to a shakedown, so I apologize.”) He later apologized for the apology. Barton represents the town of Midlothian, which is known as the Cement Capital of Texas, and he was particularly fierce about protecting the cement industry’s right to pollute. A cement company paid for his college education, for heaven’s sake.
The new Republican leadership attached seventeen addenda, known as riders, to the annual appropriation for the EPA. Known as the “Riders from Hell,” they were aimed at gutting the Clean Air Act and other legislation the new right loathed by cutting the agency’s money and prohibiting it from using what funds it had left to enforce certain regulations—like the ones relating to, um, pesticides and cement kilns. Although DeLay was of course getting tons of money from polluting industries for himself and his various political action committees, he wanted to make it clear he was doing this out of love: “You’ve got to understand, we are ideologues. We have an agenda. We have a philosophy. I want to repeal the Clean Air Act. No one came to me and said, ‘Please repeal the Clean Air Act.’ We say to the lobbyists, ‘Help us.’ ”
The period after the game-changing 1994 election was the first bellow of the louder, more aggressive, and far more conservative new Republicanism. The great realignment of the American political parties that began after Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act into law was handing over the South to the GOP while the Democrats took control of the old centrist strongholds in the Northeast and West Coast. The two parties would fight on, over a handful of toss-up states, in campaigns that sometimes seemed to be conducted entirely in Ohio and Florida. Meanwhile, the conservative Southern Democrats and the moderate Republicans would fade away, to whatever lobbying firms constitute the political equivalent of an elephant burial ground.
It was all coming on fast, but in the mid-1990s, the changes hadn’t quite solidified, and there was still a substantial contingent of moderates in the GOP House ranks. Frequently the thing that defined them as moderate was a positive attitude toward environmental legislation. Many of them represented suburban districts, and the whole point of the suburbs, when you got right down to it, was grass and birds and a breathable atmosphere. “I could sometimes count on as many as fifty [Republican] votes to go along with something my staff and I agreed was important to the environmental community,” said Sherwood Boehlert, the New York Republican who mobilized the opposition. DeLay—usually such a canny vote-counter—overestimated the support for the Riders from Hell and watched in shock as his fellow Republicans voted them down.
Boehlert, who was chair of the Science Committee, said he generally got along with DeLay, who tended to respect a worthy opponent and who appreciated the fact that Boehlert, if asked, would give him an accurate count of the votes that were against him. Dick Armey was a different matter. “Armey had these cowboy boots with the member of Congress seal on them,” Boehlert grumbled. “Glad I never took an economics course from him. DeLay was much more engaging.”
Engaging, in an enraging sort of way. “They came up with this cockamamie idea—let’s abolish the EPA,” Boehlert recalled. “I fought them all the way, and they were surprised to get opposition from the business community, but many in the business community felt they’d rather have one national standard to deal with than fifty states.” In the end, the main result of all of the Texans’ efforts was to move the center of debate further and further to the right, while stopping any future environmental legislation in its tracks. Presidents would come and go, but Congress would never pass a law to control the carbon output of American industry. Tom DeLay didn’t get his Riders from Hell, but he helped create a new discourse, in which the political debate about global warming, when it comes up at all, is usually about whether or not it exists.
“Let Texans run Texas”
By 2000, when George W. Bush was running for president, the days when Republicans could burble about protecting the forests and stopping climate change were pretty much over. The environmental discussion shifted to the need for “market-based incentives” and the rights of local communities. The 2000 Republican platform promised that the party nominee would approach environmental issues “just as he did it in Texas.” That sounded rather ominous, since at the time Tex
as ranked first in airborne carcinogens, first in ozone components, first in toxic air releases. Houston had the nation’s dirtiest air and Texas was number one when it came to unhealthy ozone levels.
Early in his days as governor, George W. had set the tone with his appointments to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the state environmental agency. The TNRCC is run by three commissioners, and Bush chose:
1) A cattleman
2) A former employee of the state agriculture department, who was known for his attempts to loosen the rules governing the use of pesticides
3) A career lobbyist for the Texas Chemical Council who had once testified in Congress that ozone was “a relatively benign pollutant”
To be fair, Governor Bush had an environmental plus side—sort of. When the pollution in Dallas became so bad that the federal government threatened to cut off road construction funds, Bush backed efforts by the state legislature to require power plants to cut their emissions dramatically by 2003—a year that he didn’t plan to be around to check on compliance. The state also tried to impose a new motor vehicle inspection program, but it ran into opposition from right-wing talk radio and the governor canceled it. When the firm that had won the contract to implement the program sued, the state settled for $130 million, which it paid for with funds from a state environmental protection program.
Bush’s one genuine environmental enthusiasm was alternative energy, or at least one form of alternative energy. “Pat, we like wind,” Bush told Pat Wood, the chairman of Texas’s Public Utility Commission, who he urged to “go get smart on wind.” It made total sense—if God had wanted to create a wind-power-generating heaven, it would have looked a lot like Texas. And it was apparently Bush’s enthusiasm for wind that caused him to order the creation of the Texas Renewable Portfolio Standard, which has one of those names that make you understand why some people hate government bureaucrats. It was basically a set of goals for production of renewable energy, which Texas more than met.
