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| Adapted from Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, by Carl Pope and Paul Rauber, now out from Sierra Club Books. |
The problem is that Superfund is popular program. "No matter
how many experts know that Superfund law or the Clean Water Act
or Clean Air rules don’t work as they should," pollster
Frank Luntz had warned GOP politicians in a leaked memo, "the
public doesn’t perceive them as broken. There is not a public
outcry to fix them." According to both Republican and Democratic
pollsters, among the Bush policies rousing Americans to the greatest
fury was letting companies that had dumped toxic wastes off the
hook.
To the radical right, Superfund’s very popularity made it
all the more dangerous. By showing Americans that the national government
(and, in fact, only the national government) could be counted on
to protect their communities, it encouraged them to think of protection
as a legitimate governmental function. To the right, that was reason
enough to put a stop to this coddling. Superfund was part of the
safety net created since the New Deal, which Bush’s circuit
court nominee Janice Rogers Brown called "our own socialist
revolution."
Superfund was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter in the wake
of the Love Canal scandal. During the course of ten years in the
1940s and 1950s, the Hooker Chemical and Plastics Corporation had
dumped 352 million pounds of highly toxic wastes in the abandoned
upstate New York canal, shoveled some dirt on top, and sold the
land, which eventually became the site of a school and housing development.
Eventually, the chemical poisons started leaching up through the
soil and seeping into basements, and Love Canal citizens organized
to demand that something be done. The eventual response was Superfund,
launched to clean up not only Love Canal but the thousands of toxic
waste dumps, abandoned factories, and played-out mines that littered
the country, endangering the health of nearby residents.
Superfund is—or, rather, was—based on the "polluter
pays" principle. If the company responsible for a toxic waste
site was identifiable and still in business, it was ordered to clean
up its mess. If the company did not act, then the Environmental
Protection Agency would do the cleanup and send the bill. Cleanups
of "orphan" sites, where the owners had fled or gone bankrupt,
were paid for with a tax on the oil and chemical raw materials that
had been the original source of the mess. The EPA set the standards
and ensured that the job got done.
Superfund was established in 1980, and reorganized in the 1990s
under Clinton. In its first 20 years, some 2,000 sites were listed
by the EPA, of which 840 have been cleaned up. Although new sites
are identified each year, real progress was being made toward eliminating
the backlog; as Bush came into office, it appeared that, all things
being equal, in another fifteen years America would have cleaned
up its toxic legacy.
But all things were not equal. Superfund was one of the first major
pollution cleanup programs to draw the full wrath of corporate conservatives,
who loathed the idea that operating a business entailed responsibilities
to the future. When General Electric dumped millions of gallons
of PCBs in the Hudson River in the 1950s and 1960s, it was arguably
legal. "Why, then, should GE have to clean up the mess now?"
ran the corporatist argument. If you break your neighbor’s
window, even doing something innocent and legal, you fix it. But
to the radical right, corporations were different. If people did
not want to be exposed to chemical emissions, they should not live
near factories or power plants. Superfund was especially offensive
because it reached back in time and held corporations responsible
for past deeds, whether doing so fell within the letter of the law
or not.
To the oil and chemical industries, Superfund was also expensive;
detractors routinely complained about its enormous legal costs (most
of which, however, were due to litigation among companies, or between
companies and their insurers, over how to allocate responsibility).
They also argued that the cleanup standards were too stringent.
Terry Anderson of the Political Economy Research Center complained
that Superfund "led to tough, costly standards for cleaning
up these places—such as the requirement that soil be clean
enough for children to eat, even if children are never going to
be near the place." (Never is a long time. Hooker Chemical
probably did not imagine that anyone would build a grade school
on top of its waste dump.)
The administration made toxic waste cleanups even dirtier, by exempting
them from the Clean Air Act. This meant that organic solvents in
a dump could be vaporized in an incinerator, converting pollutants
to air pollutants—which Bush’s EPA decided not to regulate.
In addition to the legal, ideological, and financial objections
to Superfund, it became a political football. In 1993, almost everyone
involved—environmentalists, small businesses, the chemical
industry, the Chamber of Commerce, the states, and the EPA—agreed
on a proposal to streamline the program. But Senate Republicans,
egged on by the insurance industry and corporatist ideologues, filibustered
the bill to death. After that, the Republican congressional leadership
refused to take up any Superfund legislation. They even allowed
the tax on the oil and chemical industries to expire, in spite of
Clinton’s efforts to renew it. The fund steadily declined
from its 1996 level of $3.8 billion, demanding ever heavier infusions
of taxpayer dollars.
The Bush administration was only too happy to see Superfund waste
away. Prior to 2001, James Connaughton, the head of Bush’s
Council on Environmental Quality, had earned his living lobbying
against Superfund. While a senator, Vice President Cheney voted
against allowing citizens to sue if they were damaged by toxic waste
dumping. Cheney’s company, Halliburton, was itself responsible
for Missouri’s Tri-State Mining District Superfund site.
During the 1990s, Superfund had been cleaning up about 86 sites
a year. By 2002, that number had dwindled to 40, and taxpayers—the
victims of the pollution—were footing half the bill. The inspector
general found that, in 2002, the EPA had failed to fund a single
dollar for toxic waste cleanups at 32 high-priority Superfund sites,
including those where toxic waste was still polluting water and
risking families’ health. In 2003 there was funding for only
10 new sites. Ten others originally proposed by the EPA were delayed
yet again.
By 2004, progress in reducing the nation’s backlog of hazardous
waste sites had come to an end. New sites were being added to the
list as fast as old ones were being cleaned up with the anemic levels
of funding. We now have a seemingly permanent backlog of 1,000 toxic
dumps, and a problem that had been on the verge of being solved
has become a permanent economic and public health nightmare for
millions of Americans.
To buy Strategic Ignorance or see the dates for Pope’s book
tour, go to sierraclub.org/books/strategicignorance.
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