George W. Bush and the Environment
LANELL ANDERSON TAKES TO the road early this warm spring morning for a tour of Houston real estate. Perfectly coiffed and smartly turned out in a black pantsuit and a black Lexus, cell phone bleating every few minutes, Anderson is an independent real estate agent – seven closings this month alone. But we are not taking a standard home tour today. As we head north on a high bridge over Buffalo Bayou, the Houston Ship Channel sprawls ahead in all its petrochemical glory. It is this horizon-spanning complex of refineries, power lines and chemical factories that makes the Texan economy bigger than all but ten of the world’s sovereign nations.
The sight is literally breathtaking. An odor like cat urine seeps through the Lexus’ advanced AC and filtration system. “That would be caused by acrolesin,” Anderson says. It’s one of hundreds of toxic chemicals routinely discharged into the region’s air by some 300 facilities. Xylenes, styrene, 1,3-butadiene, methyl isocyanate – Anderson, tosses off the names of carcinogens, mutagens and just plain bad-to-breathe gases. Her knowledge is born of volunteering for the last ten years with citizens’ environmental groups across Texas.
A tall plume of black smoke billows from a refinery. “They call that an ‘upset,’ ” Anderson explains – “venting something they can’t control and burning it off into the atmosphere. The black smoke is when the chemical just overwhelms the pilot flame that’s supposed to burn it. Lots of upsets around here.”
She turns the Lexus down a residential street on Houston’s east side that has clearly seen better days. She slows down by her old home, the one she bought in 1981 “because we could afford a bigger lot out here. I remember the chemical odors, so strong that two or three times a year they would awaken me out of a sound sleep at night.”
Anderson’s parents lived nearby, until her mother died of bone cancer and her father succumbed to respiratory disease. She and her two sisters all struggle with a variety of autoimmune and respiratory diseases. “I wonder, if I had only known more, could I have somehow protected my family?” she asks. “Do I believe what’s happened to us is from the air pollution? Yes. Is it provable scientifically? That would take a lot of time and money. Am I bitter? You’re damn right.”
Anderson, along with other citizens, is negotiating with two chemical companies for a voluntary cut in emissions of benzene, a carcinogen – with no help from the governor’s environmental agency. She is not impressed with Gov. George W. Bush‘s claim that “the air in Texas is cleaner” than when he was first elected in 1994. Texas still leads the nation in toxic-chemical emissions, with 108 million pounds a year of airborne toxins. The state has continued a trend that began in 1987 of reducing such emissions, but at a slower rate than other big industrial states.
The airborne-toxins figures do not even include Texas’ record-breaking measures of smog. As Anderson drives back to Houston through another petrochemical suburb, Deer Park, she points out how just last October 7th, the girls’ cross-country team at Deer Park High School was overcome by fits of coughing. This happened on the same day that Houston capped a smog season so intense, it surpassed Los Angeles as the nation’s lousy-air champion – the first time in half a century that another city had won that dubious distinction. Protesters waved signs on a Houston street during rush hour: “We finally beat L.A. – Houston No. 1 in air pollution,” one said.
Bush’s Texas nabbed the smog title by stalling on cleanup while cities like Los Angeles made significant progress. A California oil refinery, for example, contributes only a fifth as much to smog as one in Texas does. While California’s environmental agencies have made reducing pollution a priority, Bush’s officials have been lobbying Congress not to punish Texas for its violation of environmental laws. Among the first bills signed by Bush as governor was one that dismantled a key plan to reduce smog in Texas through a centralized network of auto-exhaust inspection stations. Bush and the legislature agreed with angry motorists and talk-radio hosts that the Environmental Protection Agency was sticking its nose where it didn’t belong and that inspections would be too inconvenient.
Whatever the environmental problem, Bush typically insists that mandatory regulations are ineffective and that businesses should be persuaded to institute voluntary reforms. On the presidential campaign trail, Bush often touts his flexible approach. “The command-and-control structure out of Washington, D.C., won’t work,” he said recently in Pittsburgh. “The idea of suing our way or regulating our way to clean air and clean water is not effective policy.” But it is the laissez-faire policies that Bush has pursued that have proved to be dramatically ineffective.
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