All of us, I suppose, deep-down enjoy some occasional affirmation, some reassurance, that the stuff commanding a third or more of our waking hours is in some ways important, worthwhile.

That holds too, let it be said, for environmental journalists. They being human, at least arguably in most cases.

So it was with some despair as the presidential primaries approached their apparently decisive moments (this being written in the a.m. of “Super Tuesday”) that the issue of “environment” seemed so conspicuously absent from the major parties’ races themselves.

You say, I can hear you now, that nominee-apparent Vice President Al Gore had all but locked up the issue what with his 1992 Earth in the Balance tome’s having earned him the “Ozone Man” label from his political adversaries. Sure, I know, former Senator Bill Bradley, clearly no environmental nay-sayer, had sewn-up the endorsement of Friends of the Earth and of some few additional environmental heavies. But save for the Democratic primaries in Washington State and California, the issue barely made a ripple throughout the Democratic primaries.

Turn to the Republican primaries. Few would suggest, and in fact few Republican consultants or candidates did, that environmental issues were the stuff that would bring party loyalists out to vote in droves in the primaries. That said, and accepted, it’s no surprise that the issue was even less of one in the GOP primaries than it had been in the Democratic races.

Along, then, came the air quality issue in the closing moments of the pre-Super Tuesday campaigning.

Alas, for those needing the reassurances noted above, environment in fact registered as an issue. “I am important, and so too is what I do in my career!”

Oh, well. So what if it isn’t so much “air” that became the issue as what was “aired,” as in broadcast as a campaign ad by the newly established “Republicans for Clean Air”? So what if it was the airing of the ads in the run-up to the New York primary that captured the buzz, and not, after all, the air per se that we breathe.

You had, of course, environmentalists launching yet another opinion survey telling us all how important the issue will be in the general election, and in particular in some House and Senate races.

Believe that one?

And you had the Sierra Club “demanding” — yes, demanding — that the wiley Wyly “Republicans for Clean Air” ads be taken off the air.

Because, get this, they include “factually incorrect information.”

Now there’s a new standard for campaign ads, or, why not?, for ads of any other sort.

None of this is to suggest that environmental issues can’t, won’t, play a larger role in this summer’s and fall’s campaigning than they did in the primaries.

Talk about damning with faint praise.

Environmental journalists in the end may have to look elsewhere, other than in the general election for President, for their affirmation of their own importance and value and that of their beat. If they use national politicians’ attention this fall to the issue as leverage with their editors, they might find their efforts confined to the back pages.

Or to the cutting room floor.

One of the first emerging environmental flashpoints of the new decade is an issue few had anticipated: the use of MTBE, an oxygen enhancer added to gasoline in 16 states to make it burn cleaner.

But methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE), used as a gasoline oxygenate under the Clean Air Act, is also contaminating surface and ground water from Connecticut to California.

Since the new year began, MTBE has been investigated on “60 Minutes,” which concluded “it is threatening to become a national crisis” because “49 states have now detected MTBE in ground water at some levels.”

Well owners in New York have filed a class action suit alleging that major oil companies are responsible for statewide drinking water contamination caused by MTBE.

An unusual coalition – the Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management (NESCAUM), American Petroleum Institute, Natural Resources Defense Council, and American Lung Association – is calling for congressional action to change the Clean Air Act regarding MTBE, and put a cap on MTBE use in gasoline.

Some state legislators have MTBE on this year’s agenda, hoping to reduce or eliminate its use.

And California, which has banned MTBE by 2002, is hoping EPA will grant its request for a waiver of the Clean Air Act oxygenate mandate.

Here’s a synopsis of the MTBE issue, in excerpts from recent newspaper reports:

Dow Jones News Service: “Eight Northeast states stepped up pressure Wednesday for Congress to give them greater authority to regulate a gasoline additive that helps clean the air but is posing a threat to lakes, streams, and drinking water....

The Mysteries of MTBE MTBE is not listed on the Toxics Release Inventory. It is not listed in the Eighth Report on Carcinogens. It is not included in the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health’s Pocket Guide to Chemical Hazards. There is no information about MTBE on the National Institutes of Health’s Hazardous Substances Data Bank, or on the EPA’s Integrated Risk Information System. But there is an EPA MTBE Web site at http://www.epa.gov/swerust1/mtbe.

“MTBE was the additive of choice for the petroleum industry as it sought to comply with federal requirements to have at least 2% oxygen in gasoline in areas with major air-pollution problems....

“But last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency in a major reversal of environmental policy, urged that MTBE use be sharply curtailed because of worries that it is polluting waterways and aquifers used for drinking water.

“A blue-ribbon advisory panel said that while current levels of MTBE in water don’t pose a health risk – although some levels of water contamination have been detected in most states – the government should abandon its widespread use of the additive to prevent a potential environmental problem.”

Hartford Courant: “A group of state lawmakers will try for the second straight year to pass legislation to reduce or eliminate the use of a gasoline additive that was meant to clean the air but has tainted more than 200 drinking water wells in Connecticut.

“Methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, again is the target of lawmakers who say the chemical poses too great a danger to well water supplies, even if it helps make gasoline burn with less pollution from tailpipes....

“Three bills to deal with MTBE have been raised in the General Assembly. The legislation most likely will call for eliminating MTBE use in gasoline within three to five years, said Senate Minority Leader Pro Tem Louis C. DeLuca, R-Woodbury, a longtime proponent of banning MTBE....

“DeLuca and [House Minority Leader Robert] Ward said they understand that it would be difficult for Connecticut to ban MTBE unless neighboring states do so as well, because the state represents only a fraction of the gasoline market in the Northeast. They said a regional approach to eliminating MTBE would make sense, but the additive should be banned regardless of what other states do.”

Newsday: (Op/ed piece by Paul Granger, superintendent of the Plainview Water District) “The chemical that is supposed to be cleaning the air is now swiftly making its way into our sole-source drinking water supply. Gasoline spills, leaking underground tanks and atmospheric deposits have allowed this unique chemical with an affinity for water to make its way rapidly into Long Island’s vast groundwater system.

“As a result of vigilant monitoring by water utilities and county health departments, the chemical is now being detected only in trace levels in public and private water supply wells throughout Long Island. But based on several well closures in Suffolk County due to MTBE contamination, we may be seeing only the tip of the iceberg. MTBE must be immediately banned before the problem worsens....

“An alarming analogy can be drawn to the use of DDT in the 1940s and 1950s .... Despite the hard lessons of DDT and the grave risks already associated with MTBE, the petroleum industry still insists on using this additive. Gasoline companies, with the blessing of the federal government, seem to be placing profits over public health and safe drinking water.”

Omaha World-Herald: “It smells like turpentine and spreads through water so quickly and thoroughly that a scant spoonful can foul an Olympic-size swimming pool.

“MTBE, a widely used gasoline additive that makes cars burn cleaner, has posed a cruel problem: It’s making the air cleaner, but it’s polluting the water.

“A suspected animal carcinogen with unknown health effects on humans, MTBE has become the curse of water officials from California to New England.

“Leaking from gas stations’ underground fuel tanks, it has forced wells to close, run up millions of dollars in cleanup costs, sparked lawsuits and prompted state, local and federal investigations into a petrochemical that is still something of a mystery....

“MTBE has two critical characteristics – its ability to spread quickly, caused by its high solubility, and its permanency. Even in its tiniest proportions, five parts per billion, MTBE has an easily detectable smell.”

San Diego Union-Tribune: “California got some powerful new allies in its fight against a federal fuel-additive mandate yesterday when an unusual coalition of eight Northeastern states, two powerful environmental groups and the oil industry called on Congress to lift the requirement.

“Like Gov. Gray Davis, the coalition says the mandate complicates efforts to curb the use of MTBE, an air pollution-fighting gas additive that may cause cancer and has polluted water supplies in locations across America, including Santa Monica and Lake Tahoe....

“The issue is being watched closely in the run-up to California’s March 7 primary election. Some political observers speculate that the Clinton administration might grant the state’s request for a waiver of the mandate to boost Vice President Al Gore’s prospects in the Democratic primary there.”

St. Petersburg Times: (Editorial) “The unintended consequences of a gasoline additive, MTBE, that has contaminated groundwater in 49 states should be enough to prompt the EPA to take immediate steps to find a safer alternative. It made sense in theory, but a federal law requiring oil companies to sell cleaner-burning fuel to reduce air pollution has backfired....

“Blame for the confusion rests primarily with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, which failed to test MTBE adequately before clearing the way for widespread use of the substance as part of the 1990 Clean Air Act. Even though MTBE has been on the market as a gasoline additive since the 1970s, the EPA has never completed a long-term risk assessment of the chemical’s properties and effects on humans until well after the agency mandated its use in all or part of 16 states. In fact, the EPA recklessly pursued its plans knowing that independent tests had found MTBE caused leukemia and other tumors in some lab rats.”

Wall Street Journal: “A rare alliance of environmental groups, the oil industry and Northeastern states is pushing to reduce a controversial additive in gasoline and repeal the federal requirement that gasoline in many urban areas contain 2% oxygen.

“Congress required so-called reformulated gasoline as part of the Clean Air Act in 1990. But since then, one of the additives used to make gasoline meet the oxygenation requirement, methyl tertiary butyl ether, or MTBE, has been found to pose an environmental problem....

“Jason S. Grumet, who head Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management, said the alliance wants refiners to be allowed to find their own ways to blend fuel that will maintain the air-quality benefits of oxygenated gasoline.”

From villain to hero in just a few weeks?

New York Times science reporter William K. Stevens, trashed by a fossil fuels group just weeks earlier for journalism “that borders on the fraudulent,” now finds himself counted among those who have “now joined the skeptics” on global warming science.

The unaccustomed (and likely unwelcome, unwarranted, and unreal) praise of Stevens came from climate change skeptic S. Fred Singer in response to Stevens’ “fair account” of skeptics’ views in two pieces in the Times on February 29. (It’s perhaps something like being praised by your top managers on the great story you wrote in Time on the AOL/Time Warner merger …. Thanks, but …)

Stevens’ accounts — in pieces headlined “Surface or Air? The Great Debate Continues” and “Global Warming: The Contrarian View” — raise inevitable questions about whether they were written in response to tough rebukes of his reporting by the “Greening Earth Society,” funded by the Western Fuels Association. That group said Stevens “has cast aside any semblance of journalistic objectivity” for, in its opinion, under-playing differences between satellite and surface air temperatures. (See February 2000 Environment Writer, front page.)

While clearly appreciating Stevens’ February 29 pieces, Singer, who heads a group he calls the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), lamented that Stevens in the pieces “fails to mention that there are dozens if not hundreds of contrarians out there besides the half dozen he lists,” and quotes extensively, in his article.

Some might well see Stevens’ two February 29 pieces as building on what they describe as his own pattern of treating competing sides equally. But others clearly fear he “caved” under the weight of the interest group’s protests.

While his “skeptics” versus “the dominant view” approach to the surface and satellite temperature distinctions appears reasonably straightforward, generalizations such as “In some ways, though, adversaries in the debate are not so far apart” are too sweeping for those convinced of the serious risks they see posed by climate change.

Some are likely to be bothered too by Stevens’ largely ignoring in the pieces widely reported fossil fuels funding provided to some of the “contrarians” he quotes. For instance, Stevens describes Singer as “an independent atmospheric scientist who is an outspoken dissenter” and describes Environmental Defense’s (formerly Environmental Defense Fund’s) Michael Oppenheimer as “an atmospheric scientist …. the environmentalist.”)

Stevens’ “Global Warming” piece concludes with the paragraph: “If business continues as usual, the world is likely at some point to find out who is right.” As of deadline, at least, no one had apparently stepped forward to contest that assessment.

A big cop, missing from the streets since early last summer, is back on the beat in the Nation’s Capital.

The New York Times again has a dedicated reporter in its Washington, D.C., bureau, having named former Cairo bureau chief Douglas Jehl to the beat left by Jack Cushman since Cushman last June took on new responsibilities for managing some 40 reporters’ contributions to the Sunday and Monday Times.

Jehl, who from 1987 to 1993 had reported for the Los Angeles Times and who covered the Bush White House for The New York Times, will be reporting as a national correspondent, and not reporting directly to the Washington bureau chief.

"The paper wants to take the thrust of its environmental coverage outside of Washington and around the country, where people really are most affected," he told E.W. in a phone conversation.

The Times D.C. bureau’s decision last summer to leave the Washington environmental beat unfilled — coupled with the cross-town rival Washington Post’s around that same time not filling its environmental beat — raised concern in some about the potential decline in newspaper editors’ commitment to the beat.

Society of Environmental Journalists President Michael Mansur, of the Kansas City Star, wrote at the time in SEJournal of the “disturbing news” of “the nation’s top newspapers ignor[ing] the beat.”

“I suspect those newspapers will soon realize the practical problem of not having a reporter assigned full-time to the beat,” wrote Mansur. “It leaves quite a void.” He speculated in his column that “one full-time environment writer may be worth about three others part-time.”

The Post’s Joby Warrick, who had been on a team that won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize Public Service Award while with the Raleigh News and Observer, by last spring had moved from the daily environmental beat to the Post’s investigations division. His subsequent substantial uncovering of health risks imposed on Department of Energy facility workers in Paducah, Ky., has some journalists envisioning another potential Pulitzer for him.

At the same time, however, the Post still has no environmental beat reporter covering the issue nationally in Washington. Most of its coverage had been done either by general-assignment reporters or by Tom Kenworthy in its Denver bureau, but Kenworthy left the Post in January and now is covering western resources issues for USA Today from Denver.

The Times’ filling of the beat in Washington is leading to some speculation that the fiercely competitive Post may soon do the same, although expressions of interest in the beat by reporters both inside and outside of the newspaper have so far led to no movement to fill the slot.

With odd-couple alliances and big money stakes, the MTBE debate is rife with rhetoric. It’s hard at times to match the quotes with the quoted.

1. “I think we ought to ban it. There’s just no reason to continue the risk.”

2. “We have a successful cleaner-burning gasoline program in place, but we need to take action on a variety of fronts to ensure that the detections of MTBE in drinking water that we have seen – and which fortunately in the great majority of cases have not been of public health concern – do not continue to grow.”

3. “The federal oxygenate mandate is outdated and inappropriate national policy. These unified principles call on Congress to grant states and industry the flexibility to preserve clean air benefits while balancing other environmental resource concerns.”

4. “NESCAUM proposes a multi-component strategy that calls primarily upon the federal government to resolve the MTBE issue in a way that addresses air and water quality issues while preventing gasoline supply and market disruptions. Repeal of the federal oxygenate mandate and adequate time for any phase-down of MTBE are critical steps to avoid disruption of the supply and distribution chain of gasoline to consumers.”

5. “Elimination of the oxygenate standard could easily lead to a national fuel disaster which would result from the uncertainty of untested alternative fuel sources and their implications on health, safety, cost, and transportation concerns. Its repeal is an unsound political solution that would open the door for significant backsliding from the real-world air quality benefits that have been achieved through the use of oxygenates like MTBE.”

6. “We need to make sure that we are not throwing out the baby with the bath water. We must maintain the air quality benefits of MTBE while we allow sufficient time for the refining and distribution systems to develop an adequate supply of alternatives.”

7. “The problem is not the Clean Air Act, which does not require the use of MTBE. The problem is that the oil companies chose the wrong oxygenate. The Chicago/Milwaukee ethanol RFG program should serve as a model for the nation, achieving the air quality goals of the Clean Air Act while protecting water resources.”

8. “The stuff moves like wildfire. It increases exponentially. Once you find out you have a problem, you have a big problem. And once it’s in, how do you get it out?”

A. American Petroleum Institute
B. Dan Greenbaum, Chair, EPA Blue Ribbon Panel on Oxygenates in Gasoline
C. Jason Grumet, Executive Director, Northeast States for Coordinated Air Use Management
D. Steve Majkut, Rhode Island Air Director
E. Doug Marsano, American Water Works Association
F. Oxygenated Fuels Association
G. Eric Vaughn, President, Renewable Fuels Association
H. Robert Ward, Connecticut House Minority Leader

1. H
2. B
3. C
4. A
5. F
6. D
7. G
8. E

Whatever happened to labels such as “Dolphin Safe,” “Green Seal,” and other 20th century “green” consumer alerts?

Consumers Union would like to know. It would also like to know what those labels really mean, what they’re based on, and whether to believe them.

The non-profit consumer advocacy organization is developing a database of environmental labels, which will include the evidence or verification that exists for their claims, and the parties behind the certification.

“We’ll first look at food and wood products,” according to a statement in Consumer Reports (February, 2000). “When the project is completed next year, consumers will be able to access this information via the Web and in Consumer Reports. We’ll also work to increase consumer participation on international committees that set standards for labels.”

The Consumers Union Web site is at http://www.consumersunion.org.

The annual conference of the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), to be held April 13-14 in San Francisco, will tackle issues ranging from corporate responsibility after the WTO to the race for new transportation technologies.

Its program will feature company-oriented workshops that include Corporate Real Estate Practices, How to Read a Corporate Environmental Report, and Corporate Environmental Communications. It will also include sessions on climate change, genetically modified foods, disclosure and competitiveness, including risk management, and industrial rivalry.

For more information, go to the CERES Web site at http://www.ceres.org, or contact Alyson Muzila at CERES, (617) 247-0700, ext. 31; e-mail, muzila@ceres.org.

Across
3. Label for environmentally correct lumber products
7. Water in which to store carbon dioxide
9. Agency responsible for construction, management, and operation of Yucca Mountain (abbr)
10. ‘80s ideas for rain forests now staging a comeback
12. Newly discovered weather cycle (abbr)
13. Bill Bradley’s proposal to protect endangered species
15. Adversaries' nickname for Al Gore

Down
1. European putdown of genetically modified edibles
2. Chemical used for “green” dry cleaning
4. Includes the biggest proposed increase for EPA in 8 years
5. Company that told farmers last month not to grow genetically modified corn for its products
6. State where well owners have sued over MTBE contamination
8. New medium for "boarding" causing environmental concern
11. The Chesapeake, for one
14. Breathing ailment

Note: Formerly published by the National Safety Council. Reprinted with permission.