Christie Whitman Using The Climate Issue In A Blatant Attempt To Rehabilitate Her Awful Environmental And Climate Record
Memory Hole: Whitman’s Horrible Environmental Record As NJ Governor Was Exposed But Is Now Forgotten
Whitman As Head Of Bush EPA Injected Over A Decade Of Delay In Regulating Greenhouse Gas Emissions
A friend sent me Christie Whitman’s disgusting Op-Ed at the Star Ledger last night and I lost a night’s sleep over it, see:.
Whitman’s opening first two paragraphs are transparently self promotional attempts at rehabilitation. They are outrageous misrepresentations of her environmental record as NJ Governor and EPA Administrator in the Bush administration.
This claim is perhaps the most egregious lie, because Whitman issued an Executive Order (EO #27) that explicitly reversed NJ’s longstanding policy of adopting stricter State DEP standards than the federal EPA counterparts:
States have long been the laboratories of democracy, and New Jersey has a long history of working to protect our environment.
NJ media knowingly provided a platform for Whitman’s lies. Unforgivable, and I let my old friend and Star Ledger editor Tom Moran know that and demanded that he give me an opportunity to set the record straight. No way he’ll do that.
I also reached out to Bergen Record editor Jim O’Neill to demand that he defend the Record’s award winning series “Open For Business” and the work of Record reporters Dusty McNichol and Kelly Richmond, both of whom are dead and can’t defend their work and set the record straight.
I won’t waste my time today on the substance of that remarkable cynical and self promotional Op-Ed, but instead drill down on one egregious lie that belies the core premise of the piece: Whitman’s own failed record of delay, inaction, and deregulation on the climate issue.
For those interested in the totality of Whitman’s environmental record – which I closely followed, strenuously opposed for 8 years, and have documented extensively with receipts – a good starting point would be to read the Bergen Record’s national award winning series on Whitman’s environmental record aptly titled “Open For Business” (as an intro, read this American Journalism Review article:
Other good accountability stories include two from The Nation:
Thanks to Whitman’s evisceration of state enviro regs as well as a raft of subsidies and tax cuts to developers, suburban sprawl gobbled up more open space and verdant land during her tenure than at any other period in New Jersey’s history. Moreover, she decapitated the state Department of Environmental Protection staff by 738 employees in her first three years in office, cut the remaining staff’s workweek by five hours, eliminated fines of polluters as a source of DEP revenue and made large cuts in the DEP’s budget. That’s why the New Jersey Sierra Club’s Bill Wolfe has warned that Whitman might “dismantle [federal] EPA and take it out of the enforcement business. I believe that this is precisely the policy Whitman has presided over and legitimized in New Jersey.” One mechanism was the Office of Dispute Resolution, which she established to mediate conflicts over environmental issues (usually resolved in favor of business). She also installed an Office of Business Ombudsman under the Secretary of State (the Star-Ledger labeled it “essentially a business lobby”) to further grease the wheels of the bureaucracy for polluters and developers, and to act as a counterweight to the DEP.
Whitman’s environmental record is in sharp contrast to Florio’s. As a Congressman, Florio wrote and passed the toxic cleanup Superfund program, and as governor he passed two major state laws–the New Jersey Pollution Prevention Act and the Clean Water Enforcement Act–that were among the toughest in the nation. Whitman, however, downsized the state Department of Environmental Protection by one-third, and under her administration, enforcement fines and penalties are down a whopping 80 percent. Any state limits on pollution that exceed federal standards are now subject to a cost-benefit analysis, an antiregulatory approach. Whitman has favored a “voluntary compliance” program, under which polluters are allowed a “grace period” to negotiate with state agencies before fines and penalties are imposed. “I call it ‘Let’s Make a Deal,’” says the Sierra Club’s Wolfe. “Whitman is no moderate on the environment. This administration has done nothing on environmental quality–air, water and waste issues–but starve the bureaucracy and put enforcement on a short leash.
Whitman was so bad, the New York Times even weighed in:
A coalition of environmental and public-policy groups yesterday gave Governor Whitman a grade of C- on how she has handled environmental issues. The biggest problem, according to Bill Wolfe, a policy specialist with the New Jersey Environmental Federation, is cuts she has made in the budget of the Department of Environmental Protection.
For the fact checkers and policy wonks, I also provide a detailed analysis of Whitman’s record, with links to source documents and mainstream media, in this post.
Whitman also brought energy deregulation to NJ in 1999, initiated the right wing attack on, rollback and politicization of regulations (see Ex. Order #27 and Ex. Order #15) and abolished the Office of Environmental Prosecutor (see Ex. Order #9) There are numerous similarities between Whitman and Trump policies.
She was playing to the same corporate interests that brought the Gingrich right wing “Contract On America”.
But Whitman’s record on climate is the worst. Let me tell two inside baseball stories that perfectly illustrate that.
1. When Whitman went to EPA, she brought a lawyer from her Governor’s Office named Bob Fabricant along with her as EPA’s General Counsel.
Fabricant subsequently wrote a legal memorandum which reversed the Clinton Administration’s legal position on the crucial issue of whether greenhouse gas emissions were regulated “pollutants” under the Clean Air Act.
Clinton EPA’s legal position was that yes, they were. Fabricant reversed that and concluded that greenhouse gas emissions were NOT regulated air pollutants under the Clean Air Act.
The US Supreme Court cited Fabricant’s legal memo in the groundbreaking case of Massachusetts v. EPA, which mandated that EPA make a finding regarding the regulatory status of GHG missions with respect to the Clean Air Act. The Obama EPA subsequently made that finding and GHG emissions are now regulated (I think EPA regs are far too lax, but that a different issue).
The Supreme Court cites Fabricant’s legal opinion in the text of the opinion, (@ p.8) citing EPA Federal Register notice 68 Fed. Reg. 52924 – . 52925–52929 (2003 ):
On September 8, 2003, EPA entered an order denying the rulemaking petition. 68 Fed. Reg. 52922. The agency gave two reasons for its decision: (1) that contrary to the opinions of its former general counsels, the Clean Air Act does not authorize EPA to issue mandatory regulations to address global climate change, see id., at 52925–52929; and (2) that even if the agency had the authority to set greenhouse gas emission standards, it would be unwise to do so at this time, id., at 52929–52931.
Whitman’s own EPA Legal Counsel injected over a decade of delay in EPA action of controlling GHG emissions – and she now claims that the window to act is rapidly closing!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
2. When Whitman was NJ Governor, her environmental policy was that NJ was “Open For Business” – and she backed that slogan up with Executive Orders rolling back NJ’s more stringent State standards, slashing DEP budgets and staff by 30%, eliminating the Environmental Prosecutor, gutting NJ’s toxic site cleanup law by allowing partial cleanups (caps and deed notices, known legally was “engineering and institutional controls”) and vesting cleanup decisions in the hands of polluters (i.e. Brownfields Act of 1997), enforcement grace periods, voluntary compliance, self disclosure immunity, and a failed attempts to gut NJ’s clean water laws (eliminate the Clean Water Enforcement Act and the propose the “Mega-Rule” to gut DEP clean water regulations). I could add more.
On climate, to her credit, while DEP Commissioner Shinn was the first to establish an emissions inventory, he made any emissions reductions totally VOLUNTARY, thus setting back efforts to force emissions reductions by a decade.
These are facts in the public record.
Either NJ media editors have very poor memories or they are just as corrupted as Whitman.