Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
This is On The Media's Midweek Podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
Last Friday, the official website of the Environmental Protection Agency featured a press release with this headline. Praise all around for EPA's greatest and most consequential day of deregulation in U.S. history.
This fulsome language was extolling recent moves by the president's chosen EPA chief, Lee Zeldin. The EPA is rolling back environmental protections and eliminating a host of climate change regulations in what it calls the biggest deregulatory action in U.S. history. The EPA administrator is cutting 31 environmental rules regarding climate change, pollution, electric vehicles, and power plants. It's basically a gutting. It would be a gutting of environmental regulation in this country.
Administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in a statement, "We're driving a dagger straight through climate change religion to drive down costs of living for American families, unleash American energy and bring back auto jobs." Quite the contrast to Ronald Reagan's approach during his second White House run in 1984.
The White House recognizes that the environment is a very potentially strong election year issue. It doesn't cut both ways like an abortion issue, where any stand you take can lose you as many voters as it wins. It's held strongly and dearly by a lot of people. In a piece I reported back in 2017, I wondered, how did we get here? How did environmental protection morph from an issue of near universal concern to a political football?
And how did the EPA, an agency created 55 years ago by Richard Nixon, become, in the eyes of the GOP, a job killer? For clues, you gotta go back to the late 60s. When you drive along the look around on either side
In 1966, dozens in New York City died from oppressive smog over a single weekend, and other cities suffered too.
In 1969, the Santa Barbara oil spill released an estimated 3 million gallons of crude oil into the ocean, damaged sea life, and spoiled California beaches. This is a view inside Santa Barbara Harbor, showing pleasure boats that have turned black above their water lines, where the crude oil lapped up against their hulls.
The oil slick fouled nearly 50 kilometers of coastline. Polluted waterways were clogged with flammable goo. The Cuyahoga River in Ohio is so loaded with the waste products of petroleum distillation...
that it is actually in danger of catching fire. In fact, fires on Cleveland's Cuyahoga River weren't rare, but a 1969 blaze caught the country's attention. Randy Newman penned an ironic serenade. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶
It was a time of noxious, visible pollution. People cared. Nixon noticed. The great question of the 70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water?
Beset by protests over the Vietnam War, civil rights, and women's rights, Nixon was in a bind. And he saw environment as an opportunity...
to jump in front of this mob coming toward him and call it a parade. Richard Andrews is a professor emeritus of environmental policy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Environment was just a dramatically popular cause. Four months into that period, into the 1970s, in April, came the first Earth Day. And it's hard for people today to really imagine
how big a celebration that, and it was a celebration, not just an angry protest. Good evening. A unique day in American history is ending, a day set aside for a nationwide outpouring of mankind seeking its own survival.
There were demonstrations, there were projects, there were things that really added up to the biggest nationwide celebration since the celebrations at the end of World War II. And in Washington, the dire warning of civil rights leader James Farmer, at the time a Nixon administration official. We all have a stake equally, because if we do not save the environment and save the earth, then whatever we do in civil rights,
or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction.
and the Brotherhood of the Grave. Nixon had no environmental policy when he entered office, but he grabbed one quick. Then he started doing a lot of things administratively to use the president's power to reorganize government, which existed at that time, to create the EPA, to pull together these regulatory functions from the different agencies, put them into one place.
and put in charge of them Bill Ruckelshaus, a respected, aggressive prosecutor from Indiana, Republican, somebody who believed in public service and enforcing the laws. My feeling was that what we needed to do at EPA was convince the public that we were serious about protecting their health primarily and protecting the environment. William Ruckelshaus, founding administrator of the EPA. So we filed a number of enforcement actions
We sued in one day Cleveland, Atlanta, and Detroit, filed actions against big corporations to get them moving toward compliance, to convince them that the government was serious about carrying out the public's wishes. Did you yourself have any particularly strong feelings about the environment when you got pulled into the EPA? Oh, yes, I did. I had seen it already in my home state of Indiana that absent any government interference,
Not much was going to happen, no matter how bad the situation got. You couldn't rely on the individual causing the pollution to take steps themselves without being pushed by the government on a more or less common basis with their competitors. So when you say you saw it happening in Indiana, what were you seeing? Seeing people that were grossly polluting the water and the air, discharging raw sewage into the rivers.
It was very clear that something needed to be done. Having attempted to regulate industry from the state, doing that alone in that one state was not going to do it because they would move someplace else. In fact, George Wallace, who was then the governor of Alabama, would take out ads in the Indianapolis newspaper saying, come on down to Alabama. We need jobs. We don't care about the environment. But.
But because the EPA established an idea known as environmental federalism, it could set national requirements in Washington and leave it to the states to enforce them. Richard Andrews. I think Bill Ruckelshaus has referred to EPA as the gorilla in the closet, that the states could then say, you know, we have to do this, all the other states have to do it, EPA's making us do it, and if we don't do it,
then the EPA is the backup to do it itself. And surely, Mr. CEO of one of our in-state corporations, you wouldn't want the EPA to be doing this directly to you. And in fact, the EPA...
had 10 regional offices, still has. Half of the EPA staff is out in these offices? Yes, partly overseeing, but really also partly sort of backing up and assisting the states. They've built enormous capacity at the state level in many states, although their philosophies under different governors vary about how tough they want to be. And now, according to reports this week, the Trump administration is considering eliminating two of those regional offices.
Back to the Nixon era, a bit of a tangent. But during the fallout from Watergate in 1973, William Ruckelshaus was shuffled around, first as acting director of the FBI and then deputy attorney general. I was only there as deputy for about 23 days.
before we got involved in a squabble with the White House and the president over Archibald Cox. The independent prosecutor appointed by the Justice Department to investigate Watergate. Nixon wanted Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson quit in protest.
Then the president ordered Ruckelshaus to fire Cox. Richardson's deputy, William Ruckelshaus, has been fired. Ruckelshaus refused in a moment of constitutional drama to obey a presidential order to fire the special Watergate prosecutor. The events became known as the Saturday Night Massacre. Afterward, Ruckelshaus took a break from government.
In the meantime, the 70s saw the rise of deregulation from airlines to stock markets to telephone companies, and not just under Republicans, Jimmy Carter, too. But Richard Andrews said it was Reagan who expanded that philosophy to environmental protections.
Rather than trying to reform or tweak the environmental regulations that had come into play in the 70s, he tried to just reverse them, and it didn't go well. Reagan nominated Ann Gorsuch Burford as the EPA administrator. Incidentally, her son Neil is Trump's Supreme Court nominee.
Anne Gorsuch and most of Reagan's other EPA appointees had no experience in environmental regulation, and so the EPA was blasted for supporting polluters over people and mishandling the Superfund program created to clean up toxic waste. Critics charge Superfund hasn't been used enough because of political delays or because EPA has been too easy on the industries which polluted.
Political delays? Example, the Stringfellow Acid Pits, where not a penny of the federal Superfund has been spent yet. More than 20 EPA officials resigned or were fired from the agency. Public outcry led to congressional investigations, and the head of the Superfund account went to prison. Well, the public was riled up. They were mad. They were angry. They believed that this agency created to protect the environment and their health was being undercut. So they demanded change.
Once again, in the midst of public outcry, Ruckelshaus was asked to run the EPA by a president backed into a corner. When he returned to Washington, he was free to repair the tattered agency any way he saw fit. It was the one promise I asked the president to make, and that was to let me find the people who could take the place of those who were being replaced.
President looked at me in the Oval Office and said, go ahead. Obviously, we don't know what we're doing. So these were people that had been there before that I'd kept in touch with, and we straightened it out in a big hurry. You mean you didn't want to drain the swamp of all those experienced bureaucrats? We didn't think of it as a swamp. It was a wetland, which is to be preserved.
You wrote in the New York Times this week that as you were awaiting Senate confirmation for becoming the EPA chief the second time, you had conversations with the execs at chemical companies that stunned you. They were worried about the EPA having been gutted. Yes, they really were. This group of chemical manufacturers, which were heavily regulated by EPA,
asked to see me, and I assumed they were going to complain about over-regulation. Because that's what happened the first time you were at the EPA. Yeah, everybody was complaining then. They came in and said just the opposite, that they had no credibility with the public, that the agency charged with regulating their conduct had essentially been eliminated as far as the public was concerned.
And I needed to get in there and start regulating and start showing that the government was serious about protecting public health and the environment. What were they afraid was going to happen if the public couldn't trust them or the EPA? Then the public will turn on them and take away their license to operate. They were finding that they had so little support from the public, even from their own employees, that
that the government needed to step in and say, "We're going to protect your health. We're going to keep you safe." They requested that. You need an agency there to ensure that the rules are followed, that the rules are clear and fair and protect the public. Clean and fair rules, but not too many.
In the mid-'80s, the Democratic Congress overcorrected for Reagan's cuts by writing environmental laws that directed the EPA to issue a certain number of new requirements a year. And this, according to Richard Andrews, is when the EPA's reputation began to sour. We'd already regulated the big companies, and so now we were doing things like regulating drinking water and underground storage tanks and things that hit much more heavily on
on small businesses and local governments. But still, this issue remained bipartisan for a time. The first President Bush made maybe the last serious effort to really define himself as a Republican environmentalist president. I don't have to tell those of you who are hunters and fishermen how important the wetlands are as a habitat for fish and ducks and geese and other waterfowl.
but they also help control flooding. In 1990, he spearheaded the Clean Air Act amendments that gave us cap and trade for sulfur and nitrogen, really one of the most effective innovations in environmental policy we've seen since the 1970s. But in 1992, he was then beaten by Clinton running with Al Gore, who was clearly identified as an environmentalist. Saving the Earth's environment.
must and will become the central organizing principle of the post-Cold War world. Over these several events, the Republican Party generally decided that no matter how much they tried to burnish their environmental credentials, there would always be some Democratic opponent who would push for more government action than they were comfortable with as a party. And so
They began to dig in deeper with the anti-environment constituencies and so forth, while the Democrats in turn said, okay, this is our winning issue, and the environmental groups can be our ground-level support troops, sort of like teachers. And so my own assessment is I think it's unfortunate that environment has sort of been
captured by this increasingly polarized partisan dynamic as a big government issue. My first day in office, I'm also going to order a review of every single regulation issued over the last 10 years. All needless job-killing regulations will be canceled. Do you have a sense of deja vu? Well, it's hard not to. People in EPA are afraid.
They're afraid they're going to lose their jobs, that they're going to lose their ability to function as they believe they should. And I would guess that their fear is justified. What do you think the EPA's number one priority should be now? Well, I think they should do their job. I think they should do a better job of communicating with the public as to what they're doing and why they're relevant issues.
to their lives. The EPA doesn't have a whole lot of constituencies. There's not people who say my favorite agency in the government is the Environmental Protection Agency. Quite the contrary. I also think that there are some legitimate criticisms of EPA. Sometimes regulators and inspectors get arrogant. They push people around unnecessarily. They need to be firm and they need to be fair.
But at the same time, they need to recognize that a lot of the people they're dealing with are their customers. They've got to be better at convincing people that they really are on their side. I think also EPA can make some better choices in terms of what they really focus on. It would be a tragedy for this country to drop out of paying attention and taking a leadership role in dealing with climate change.
If EPA were to go away, the ability to deal with climate change by our government would be severely compromised. Why do you think, then, that so many congressmen and senators in the GOP are climate change deniers or agnostics? Well, it's a number of factors. I think part of it is religious reasons.
In the sense that the climate of the world is pretty much predicted by events that will occur in the future by the Bible. But weren't they just as religious under Nixon and Reagan? Yes, but they weren't as politically organized. Pollution was smell, touch, and feel kind of stuff. You could see it. So you didn't need to be told it was either coming as part of some biblical revelation. It was there. Climate change is a gradual process.
kind of problem that religiously you can explain it in terms of something that's going to happen anyway. So why worry about it? And there are concerted efforts on the part of the fossil fuel industry, scientists that they hire who will contest the overwhelming number of scientists who say climate change is real and it's coming at an accelerated rate.
and that we need to do something about controlling carbon and other gases that cause climate change. If we don't do that, then we have to adapt to it, and that's a lot more expensive than trying to mitigate it. There was a Pew poll last year that found that most Americans, 74%, say that the country should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.
But in terms of priorities, the environment ranks below issues like the economy and terrorism. It's almost as if the public is saying, hey, could you just take care of this, but, you know, don't make a big fuss about it? That's about right. They say get to it, but it's not our first priority. In fact, when the economy is in trouble, it usually drops down to about the last priority. They think we can get at that when everything else is in good shape.
So where does this leave the EPA? Unless the public rises up and tells their congressmen, we won't stand for this, then it will continue to deteriorate in terms of its effectiveness. I think people have to make their voices heard as they are supposed to in a democracy. If they do it, they can stop this deterioration of regulation necessary to protect their health. But if they don't, then it'll continue and we'll be in real trouble.
William Ruckelshaus, founding director and then reconstructor of the EPA under Nixon and Reagan, died in 2019. Thanks for listening to the Midweek Podcast. On this week's big show, we're examining the dissolution of the Department of Education and checking in on the crypto grift at the White House. See you Friday. I'm Brooke Gladstone.
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