Under the Radar

There seems to be very little room for coverage of the regular business of government, while Americans and their media continue to be obsessed with the “War on Terrorism.”

It’s the perfect opportunity for mischief. Important government decisions will go on being made at a steady pace — but with fewer people paying attention. If you have a proposal that won’t hold up to the light of public scrutiny, this is the time to ask your congressional representative to introduce it as a bill.

We could blame it on the lobbyists, who, unlike hundreds of thousands of Americans, did not lose their jobs in the September 11 events and following economic downturn. They have been working overtime.

But some of the onus has to fall on the media themselves, who have taken very little time out in their 24-hour coverage of “America’s New War” to notice many of the loopholes and bailouts quietly being made into law.

Example: neither The New York Times nor The Washington Post sent a real live reporter to Marrakesh, where more than 160 nations involved in the Kyoto climate treaty were negotiating (successfully, it turned out) final implementation rules.

While newspapers and networks may have spent most of their deployable staff on the terrorism story, the corporations and associations who lobby government have few such handicaps. Their attention is more focused than ever because they have caught the scent of opportunity.

Meanwhile, the daily business of government must, can, and does go on. Congress must pass appropriations, war or not. Agencies like EPA and Interior must make certain regulatory decisions in time for deadlines set by law or the courts. And the courts themselves keep slowly and inexorably grinding out decisions. We have jotted down a list of some of these stories on pages 1-2.

Lack of press attention to government decisions means lack of public attention, which means little accountability of decision-makers for their actions. This is an excellent time for government to take actions that would normally outrage people — if they knew about them.

In the emotional days following September 11, we were all swept up in the “United We Stand” mindset. It seemed almost unpatriotic to discuss what government was doing. The old bumpersticker axiom, “My country, right or wrong,” called to us again, and we were ready to forget some of the errors in judgment it had led us to.

The war on terrorism, which itself may be good and legitimate, provides a special cover and justification for all sorts of dubious projects that have very little to do with terrorism or national security. The diagnostic test for monkey business is that many of these causes have been on the agendas of special-interest groups, largely for reasons of self-interest, since long before September 11.

The war on terrorism has become a new and handy rationale for these old chestnuts — one which silences all skepticism. Who would dare to question an action to counter terrorism? So proponents of drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge now claim a new danger and urgency stems from our dependence on oil from the volatile Middle East. This argument goes unquestioned even as gasoline prices slip below a dollar a gallon in parts of the United States. Nobody notices the inconsistency.

The visibility of important decisions has been further reduced by the fact that they are rushed. The war on terrorism is unquestionably urgent. As the FBI was literally in hot pursuit of terrorists, Congress swept through legislation loosening wiretap restrictions and the like. Almost at the same time, the Attorney General told government agencies to adopt a newly restrictive interpretation of the Freedom of Information Act. To the extent the story was covered at all, it largely came and went in a day, with little further press attention.

The networks have recently speculated that Osama bin Laden might escape the tightening noose of U.S. forces by flying a helicopter into Pakistan “under the radar.” The metaphor is apt. What other mischief, or mischievous public policy, is evading detection by flying “under the radar” of public and press attention?

Joseph A. Davis

It was hard to avoid news at the October 17-21 annual conference of the Society of Environmental Journalists in Portland, Oregon — and harder still to avoid interesting people and subjects. If you liked talking about salmon, watching them, shooting or looking at pictures of them, catching them, litigating over them, or eating them, you were in the right place.

Interior Secretary Gale Norton and Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christine Todd Whitman faced several hundred journalists as controversies swirled. Norton used the occasion to correct an error in written testimony to Congress which had underplayed the harm that could be done to caribou by drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Meanwhile SEJ elected officers (James Bruggers of the Louisville Courier-Journal will serve another one-year term as president) and unveiled a major new initiative: an annual series of cash prizes for achievements in environmental journalism (see story below).

Attendance was better than it had been at the 2000 conference in East Lansing, Michigan. SEJ organizers estimated that more than 600 people took part — with computers suggesting numbers quite a bit higher, although organizers said that included single-event visitors, vendors, and the like. The totals included 254 SEJ members and non-member journalists, 29 students, 140 paying non-member attendees, and another 221 non-member speakers.

Surprisingly, the nation’s war on terrorism and fear of flying seemed to have very little impact on attendance. There were scarcely more than two dozen cancellations that organizers knew about in all categories. In many cases, environmental reporters had been forced to cancel because their employers had assigned them to breaking events in the “war on terrorism” story.

Some of the best parts of the conference did not take place in hotel meeting rooms at all. Some participants dangled hundreds of feet above the ground in a metal cage among 500-year-old Douglas firs and western hemlocks at the Wind River Canopy Crane Research Facility operated by the University of Washington in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest.

All of Thursday, October 18, and part of Saturday, October 20, were devoted to real-world tours highlighting various environmental issues. One looked at the comeback of Mt. Saint Helens, another at the coastal tidepools, and still others at the effects of dams on salmon, at urban sprawl, and agriculture in the Willamette Valley.

But several tours which had planned to visit local dams found themselves beached by terrorism-heightened security precautions which allowed almost no one to drive over, fly over, or get near the dams.

Apart from the federal agency heads (and their beefed-up and well-armed body guards), a number of “players” on environmental issues attended. They ranged from Sea Shepherd Captain Paul Watson to Charles Cushman of the American Land Rights Association (a “Wise Use” movement bastion).

Notably unusual was the attendance of a group of public information officers from at least half a dozen EPA regional offices, who engaged in a frank and fruitful gripe-and-discussion session with several dozen reporters. No information officers from EPA headquarters attended.

No article of this length could suggest the overwhelming amount and breadth of program content that confronted conference-goers in the dozens of breakout sessions, scores of information booths, tours, and demonstrations. Some sense can be seen in the final printed agenda, online at http://www.sej.org/confer/port/agenda.htm.

Much of the SEJ annual conference program is planned as much as a year in advance. This year’s program content reflected very little of the profound and sudden changes in the news landscape which took place after September 11. An exception was the hastily organized session moderated by Mike Dunne of the Baton Rouge Advocate.

That session benefitted from hearing Dan Fagin of Newsday talk about what it had been like covering the events at “Ground Zero” in lower Manhattan in real time. Conference-goers still reeling from the anthrax scare of the moment got to hear Michael Skeels, director of the Oregon State Public Health Laboratory. He was the microbiological gumshoe who broke open what was arguably the first domestic bio-terrorism case of modern times — the 1984 effort by followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh to sicken native Oregon voters with salmonella salad bars in hopes that it would help the Rajneeshis gain control of a town in local elections.

But that and other sessions largely left undiscussed the many profound implications of September 11 for the future of environmental journalism — whether the blackout of public information, the ascendency of national security mandates, or the turning of national and media attention to other topics.

A new annual series of nine $1,000 “Awards for Reporting on the Environment” was announced by the Society of Environmental Journalists at its October 17-20 annual conference.

There are other awards for environmental journalism. But the SEJ prizes are likely to be coveted because they will be among the few decided by undeniably objective judges with no institutional axes to grind.

The deadline for the first-year round of the contest is April 1, 2002. Submissions must come from journalists or students, must have been published or broadcast, and must be “predominantly about an environmental subject.” But entrants need not be SEJ members, or even from the United States — in fact non-English-language work will be accepted if translated. Categories include:

• Print deadline reporting
• Print feature reporting
• Print series
• Print small market coverage
• Broadcast feature reporting
• Broadcast program or series
• Broadcast small market coverage
• Online Report

The print small market category is for publications with circulation under 100,000 copies. The broadcast small market category is for media markets totalling less than 1,000,000 households.

Winning entries will be selected by panels of journalists and journalism educators who will be appointed by the Awards Committee, who are appointed by the SEJ Board of Director and will be final arbiters in interpreting contest rules.

An informational brochure about the SEJ contest (including entry form and rules) is online at http://www.sej.org/about/contest/Awardsfinalbrochure2.pdf. You can also get more information by calling the SEJ office at (215) 884-8174.

While war and terrorism dominate the front page and air waves, there will be a prime opportunity for special interests of all stripes to slip through key environ-mental decisions with little public atten-tion. Congress, the executive agencies, and the courts will continue making decisions, even if nobody covers them.

Sorry, we can’t convince unwilling editors to run these stories in place of Osama bios or stories of how the war impacts celebrity couples. But here is a list of big upcoming environmental decisions with major impact on the public interest. Show them to your editor.

Legislative

1. Farm Bill
2. Fast-Track Trade Bill
3. Energy Bill (may include items below)
4. Drilling in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge
5. Public Utilities Holding Company Act repeal/electric industry restructuring
6. Clean Air Act amendments (4-Pollutant bill)
7. Nuclear Security/Price-Anderson legislation
8. EPA and other appropriations*
9. Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA)
10. Superfund and brownfields reform

Regulatory

1. Energy Department Yucca Mountain decision
2. EPA re-registration of Bt corn plant-pesticides*
3. EPA deferral of July 2000 impaired-waters (TMDL) rule
4. Forest Service pending decision on Clinton “Roadless Rule”
5. EPA Arsenic standard
6. EPA “New Source Review” Lawsuits
7. EPA Haze Rule
8. DOI/Bureau of Land Management Hard Rock Mining Rule*
9. EPA Animal Feedlot (CAFO) rule
10. Oil and gas drilling on federal lands

Other

1. Integrity in Executive and Legislative branches
2. Sprawl/local planning/zoning
3. Bush climate change policy/Kyoto treaty*
4. National Fire Plan
5. Electric deregulation
6. EPA/State enforcement
7. Pacific Salmon recovery
8. Gulf of Mexico “Dead Zone”
9. Energy Department nuclear cleanup
10. Sharks!

Something for Skeptical Reporters

Skepticism, for reporters, is supposed to be a virtue. This fall, however, they may have been treated to too much of a good thing. Arousing buzz is a new book by Danish statistician Bjorn Lombord, The Skeptical Environmentalist, which claims to debunk the standard “litany” of gloomy environmentalist predictions. It is selling fairly well, (especially among free-enterprise types). Now comes a “media kit” from the World Resources Institute, an environmentalist think tank, titled: “Debunking Pseudo-Scholarship: Things a journalist should know about The Skeptical Environmentalist. “ Honest — we are just reporting this. Skeptically.

Low-key Public Awareness Campaign?

Several suburban newspapers and newspaper-chains refused in November to carry a paid issue ad from the Healthy Building Network touting the health dangers of wood treated with chromated copper arsenate (CCA). Those papers earn heavy ad revenues from the home-improvement chains (Home Depot and Lowe’s) who were singled out in the HBN ad for selling CCA-treated wood. Refusing the ad were the DC-area Journal Newspapers; Essex County Newspapers of Beverly, Mass.; and Community Newspaper Co. of Needham, Mass. Carrying it were the Contra Costa Times, which reaches San Francisco burbs, and a Denver suburban paper. Ads that trash competing advertisers are commonly run in U.S. media — if the current battle between Progresso and Campbell’s soups are any indication. Although refusing companies declined to offer official or written explanations, one told Fenton Communications employees trying to place the ad they didn’t want to offend Home Depot, while another said the ad was unsubstantiated (a standard which apparently does not include ads for hemorrhoid cures). Although the health risks of CCA are indeed a matter of debate, the debate is legitimate enough that EPA and the CPSC have recently reviewed their positions. The wood treatment industry says stricter regs are not needed — only a voluntary public awareness campaign. (Irony not intended.)

FOIA SCHMOIA — or Paranoia?

Many reporters had come to view the Freedom of Information Act as an essential tool in uncovering government fraud, waste, abuse, and hanky-panky. Attorney General John Ashcroft, in an October 12 government-wide memo, may have fixed that. The memo reinterprets the conditions in which the Justice Department will defend agency decisions not to grant FOIA requests. FOIA experts read the memo as an encouragement to agencies to deny more requests. Coming a month after the September 11 attacks, the memo invokes “national security” concerns, while acknowledging the public interest in open government which FOIA serves. But is it just about national security? The memo goes on: “Any discretionary decision by your agency to disclose information protected under the FOIA should be made only after full and deliberate consideration of the institutional, commercial, and personal privacy interests that could be implicated by disclosure ....” Any campaign contributors among those “commercial interests?” You may never know. See http://www.usdoj.gov/oip/foiapost/2001foiapost19.htm.

Duncan Book Earns National Book Nomination

David James Duncan’s My Story as Told by Water was one of five nominees for the National Book Award nonfiction category for 2001. The collection of 22 essays explored threats to American rivers and reflected on the fly-fishing experience. Duncan had previously published a successful novel, The River Why. Both volumes were published by Sierra Club Books. The nonfiction award was ultimately won byAndrew Solomon’s The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

Just Another Sierra Outing

It could have been another media coup when Sierra Club member Linda Spencer of Cambridge, Massachusetts, landed a berth on CBS’ “Survivor Africa.” Definitely the outdoorsy type, this mother of two climbed to the summit of Mount Rainier only nine months after successful treatment for thyroid cancer. It looked like Sierra would reap bales of good publicity from this grueling African photo-op. Alas, it was not to be. She was voted out in the fourth episode November 1, taking one for both the Sierra Club and the Sambura tribe. (http://www.cbs.com/primetime/survivor3/show/episode04/story.shtml)

Backgrounder...

Let’s face it: while the Kyoto climate treaty may be arguably the most important story on the planet’s future, it can be stupefyingly dull. Barring live footage of the world actually ending, it may be hard to interest producers and editors.

Worse yet: straight talk is almost impossible to come by when Kyoto is involved. Everybody you interview seems to have an axe to grind, and they all seem to talk in code words, euphemisms, and epithets.

But climate change and international efforts to address it — via Kyoto or not — are worth covering because they affect your audience and your audience’s children and grandchildren. They affect people’s health, jobs, and quality of life, and they affect farms, forests, and fisheries.

And it’s important for reporters to keep trying to make sense of the climate change story, because if they do not, the field will be left entirely to spinners and special interests.

Finally there’s news there: something happening and a story to tell. After the Bush administration dropped out of the Kyoto treaty, some 160 other nations brought it back from its prematurely reported death by reaching a breakthrough agreement November 10 in Marrakesh. Now all eyes are returning to the adminstration — to see when it will come up with its promised alternative proposal, what form that will take, and whether the experience of building an anti-terror coalition will soften the go-it-alone foreign policy.

Story Ideas

1. How will climate change affect the area where you live? While predictions about local effects are the least certain, vulnerabilities are often obvious and well-understood. What does your area’s “Regional Assessment” say? What’s the update?
2. How will the United States relate to the “Kyoto treaty” — or the broader international negotiating process under the “Framework Convention on Climate Change”? When will the current administration come up with a proposal and what will that proposal be?
3. Is the seemingly significant warming that has been observed during recent decades in the global average temperature a result of human action or not? How much is random variation, how much is known climate cycles, and how much truly man-made? What are the ways of knowing? What evidence is available? What is the level of certainty, and has it been growing or shrinking? Finally, what is the wisest course of action in light of what is and is not known?
4. How much do people really care about the future? Economists use a concept called the “discount rate” to compare the value of a dollar in-hand today with the value of a dollar a decade or a century in the future. When industry groups say controlling climate change is too expensive, what assumptions are they making about discount rates? Are they talking about the costs to their shareholders or the costs to society?
5. If the electric utilities serving your area generate their own power, what mix of fuels do they use, and what are the greenhouse emissions? If they buy it from wholesalers, the same question applies, but consumers may have a choice of supplier. Do any suppliers offer “green” energy?
6. When were the coal-burning power plants in your area built, and how long can they be expected to last? What are the plans for repowering them at the end of their useful life?7. Do any companies in your area build or sell climate-friendly power sources or vehicles? What opportunities would they have under the Kyoto climate treaty for making money in other countries?

Background and Context

After more than a decade of scientific consensus-forming under the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), there remains little doubt that if human emissions keep raising atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide, the global average surface temperature will within decades begin to rise by several degrees centigrade. Most believe this warming has already begun.

The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), a diplomatic process that began at the 1992 “Earth Summit” in Rio, yielded in 1997 the Kyoto Climate Accords, which for the first time would have committed some industrialized nations to specific reductions in their emissions of six greenhouse gases by specific deadlines. The Kyoto accords have not yet been ratified by the United States.

On November 10, 2001, UNFCCC nations meeting in Marrakesh, Morocco, agreed on a further set of accords detailing rules for implementing the Kyoto agreement.

Most of the greenhouse warming effect comes from carbon dioxide, and most of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has come from western industrialized nations as they burn coal and petroleum for energy. Even today, the quarter of the world’s population living in industrialised countries consumes about 80 percent of the world’s energy.

This is why developing nations feel that it is only fair that industrialized nations, who have by and large caused the climate problem, should bear the brunt of responsibility for fixing it. They say the industrialized nations have emitted those gases while attaining their higher standard of living, and do not think it is fair for well-off nations to tell them they can not strive for better lives themselves.

But fossil-fuel and energy-intensive industries in the United States feel it is unfair to ask them to bear so much of the burden. In mid-1997, before U.S. negotiators headed to Kyoto, they got the U.S. Senate to adopt the “Byrd Resolution,” S. Res. 98, expressing the sense of the Senate that the United States should not enter into a climate treaty mandating emission reductions unless developing nations made similar commitments. It passed 95-0.

The Framework Convention was adopted during the first Bush administration, and the Kyoto treaty was negotiated for the United States by the Clinton administration. But the current administration, under George W. Bush, declared in early 2001 that it was abandoning the Kyoto agreement.

Kyoto Basics

• The Kyoto treaty will enter into force when 55 nations have ratified it, providing those nations include “Annex I” (developed and former Soviet) countries which accounted for at least 55 percent of the total carbon dioxide emissions in 1990. [Because the United States emits about 25 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions, this makes it hard for Kyoto to take effect without the United States.]
• The industrialized and former Soviet nations would commit themselves under Kyoto to collectively reducing their overall emissions of greenhouse gases by at least 5 percent below 1990 levels in the “commitment period” of 2008 to 2012.
• At Kyoto, different reduction levels were set for different industrialized nations. The treaty would commit the United States to reductions of 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2008-2012. Most European countries would have an 8 percent reduction target.
• The treaty allowed trading of emission reductions — so that one nation could partially meet its target by buying reduction credits from another nation which could achieve equivalent reductions more cheaply.
• The treaty also allowed for “Joint Implementation,” and a “Clean Development Mechanism,” under which industrialized countries could get partial credit toward their reduction targets by funding installation of relatively climate-friendly energy technologies in developing countries.

Marrakesh Agreement

• The agreements reached in Marrakesh involved detailed rules for implementing the Kyoto treaty, and “consequences” for nations who fail to achieve their Kyoto targets.
• Observers believe the Marrakesh agreement paves the way for most industrialized nations to ratify the treaty in 2002. To date about 40 nations have ratified it, but only two industrialized countries, Romania and the Czech Republic, are among them.
• The “consequences” formula agreed to by Marrakesh negotiators for nations failing to meet Kyoto emissions-reduction targets was that they would have to meet those targets later — with a 30 percent additional cut added on. Some doubt apparently remains as to its legal force.
• Marrakesh delegates also agreed on more detailed rules for emissions trading, Clean Development Mechanism, and Joint Implementation. They limited the ability of industrialized countries to claim credit for carbon “sinks” (such as carbon-dioxide-absorbing forests) by forbidding the banking of such credits for use in future commitment periods. But they nearly doubled the credits Russia can claim for its forestry sinks.

Sources and Players

• Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Working Group I. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. http://www.ipcc.ch/
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. http://www.unfccc.de/
• International Institute for Sustainable Development. Publisher of Earth Negotiations Bulletin, which while pro-Kyoto in its slant, is one of the few free publications systematically covering the climate treaty. http://www.iisd.ca/voltoc.html, http://www.iisd.ca/linkages/climate/ba/perspectives.html, and http://www.iisd.ca/climate/index.html.
• ENB published an exhaustive summary of the Marrakesh accords at http://www.iisd.ca/linkages/vol12/enb12189e.html
• Congressional Research Service, Report for Congress 98-2: Global Climate Change Treaty: The Kyoto Protocol. http://cnie.org/NLE/CRSreports/Climate/clim-3.cfm
• World Wildlife Fund’s Climate Change Campaign offers an environmentalist perspective on the Kyoto treaty and Marrakesh accords at http://www.panda.org/climate/.
• For an opposing viewpoint, see the Web site of the Cooler Heads Coalition, at http://www.globalwarming.org/. That group is affiliated with the National Consumer Coalition and a number of other groups with pro-business, free-market ideologies, many funded by fossil-fuel and energy-intensive industries.
• President George W. Bush, June 11, 2001, remarks on climate policy: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/06/20010611-2.html

The House Transportation Subcommittee on Water Resources and Environment held a hearing November 8 about whether chemical risk information should be withheld from the public because of terrorism concerns. The panel, chaired by John Duncan (R-Tenn.) focused on community right-to-know provisions under the 1986 Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (EPCRA) and the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments.

Witnesses included Elaine Stanley, director of EPA’s Office of Information Analysis and Access. Her office is reviewing all of its Web-based information sources in light of terrorism concerns — but so far has only pulled from the Web the “Risk Management Plans” (RMPs) mandated by the 1990 Clean Air Act. She noted: “There are important statutory directions to the federal government at large and to EPA in particular, promoting and maintaining the public’s right to know about the environment.”

Another witness, Gary Warren, representing the International Association of Fire Chiefs, spoke for the “first responders” to chemical and biological emergencies, who he said needed RMP information. He said the information dissemination “must be controlled in a way that allows public access, with appropriate documentation, while ensuring that it is not used by anyone who would do us harm.”

Jeremiah D. Baumann, from the U.S. PIRG, testified: “Government agencies should be taking steps to protect the public from hazards, including vulnerabilities to terrorist attacks, not hiding those hazards from the public. Simply restricting public information, and thereby public discourse, is worse than failing to address the problem. It’s ignoring the problem.” A 1998 U.S. PIRG report, Too Close to Home, estimated that one of every six Americans lives in a zone where there could be serious injury or death in the event of a chemical accident.

Terrorism expert Amy Smithson of the Henry L. Stimson Center testified that hazmat responders were far less worried about terrorist attacks with exotic agents like Sarin than they were about “the sabotage of a hazardous materials facility, whether by terrorists breeching site security or a disgruntled employee pulling off an insider job.” Such facilities, she noted, are “ubiquitous” in this country. She noted that RMP information is still available in restricted reading rooms, rather than on the Web. “Stripped to its barest essentials,” she said, the access restriction debate “is about convenience.” “Not to mince words,” she said, “but public safety always trumps environmental concerns... .”

The text of testimony is online at http://www.house.gov/transportation/water/11-08-01/11-08-01memo.html. At least for now.

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