Texas Chainsaw Management (RFK, Jr. in Vanity Fair)

[seafan]

Texas Chainsaw Management
Vanity Fair

by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
May 2007

The verdict of history sometimes takes centuries. The verdict on George W. Bush as the nation's environmental steward has already been written in stone. No president has mounted a more sustained and deliberate assault on the nation's environment. No president has acted with more solicitude toward polluting industries. Assaulting the environment across a broad front, the Bush administration has promoted and implemented more than 400 measures that eviscerate 30 years of environmental policy. After years of denial, the president recently acknowledged the potentially catastrophic threat of global warming, but the words have no more meaning than the promise to rebuild New Orleans "better than ever."

Most insidiously, the president has put representatives of polluting industries or environmental skeptics in charge of virtually all the agencies responsible for protecting America from pollution. Some egregious officials are now gone, often returning to the private sector whose interests they served. But the administrators who remain in place continue to carry the torch—people such as Mark Rey, a timber-industry lobbyist appointed to oversee the U.S. Forest Service; Rejane "Johnnie" Burton, at Interior, a former oil-and-gas-company executive in Wyoming, who has failed to collect billions on leases from oil companies active in the Gulf of Mexico; and Elizabeth Stolpe, a former lobbyist for one of the nation's worst polluters, Koch Industries, who is an associate director (for toxics and environmental protection) at the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

This trend is consistent across all of the departments of government that pertain to the environment: the Department of Commerce (which regulates fisheries); the Departments of Agriculture, Energy, and the Interior; the E.P.A.; and even the relevant divisions of the Justice Department. More than 100 representatives from polluting industries occupy key spots at the federal agencies that regulate environmental quality. The revolving door between business and government—turning the regulated into the regulators—has never before spun so fast. And as a consequence environmental protection has been advancing backward on a broad front.

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The Top 12

Ann Klee (2001–6), general counsel, E.P.A.; counselor to Interior secretary Gale Norton

J. Steven Griles (2001–4), deputy secretary, Department of the Interior

Lynn Scarlett (2001–present), assistant secretary, then deputy secretary, Department of the Interior

Gale Norton (2001–6), secretary, Department of the Interior

Richard Stickler (2006–present), assistant secretary, Mine Safety and Health Administration

William Wehrum (2005–present), acting assistant administrator, E.P.A.

James Connaughton (2001–present), chairman, Council on Environmental Quality

Jeffrey D. Jarrett (2006–7), assistant secretary, Department of Energy

Francis S. Blake (2001–2), deputy secretary, Department of Energy

William Gerry Myers III (2001–3), solicitor, Department of the Interior

Rebecca W. Watson (2001–5), assistant secretary, Department of the Interior

Thomas Sansonetti (2001–5), assistant attorney general, Department of Justice

Be sure to read the article's details of each of the above individuals.



We have a great deal of work ahead of us.

[seafan]

1. A kick for the night crew. n/t