Angling for Industry

Anyone who’s been picking up the Washington Post lately has seen the enormous feature about Dick Cheney, “The Angler.” Each day, the Post has covered a different manner in which Cheney has expanded and reinvented his power and influence as vice-president. Today’s feature, “Amending Environmental Laws to Benefit Business”, hits home. The post laid out Cheney’s calculating efforts to ease environmental regulations in favor of industry, in the face of law and science. In the case of endangered fish in the Klamath basin, “law and science seemed to be on the side of the fish. Then the vice president stepped in.” This cowboy of the American bureaucracy, this patient angler, worked gradually but persistently to overturn environmental regulations. When all else fails, challenge the science and create doubt!

“The thing to do, Cheney told Smith, was to get science on the side of the farmers. And the way to do that was to ask the National Academy of Sciences to scrutinize the work of the federal biologists who wanted to protect the fish.”

Gee, where else have we seen pro-industry politicians “challenge the science”? Cheney was able to get a panel from the National Academy of Sciences to claim that there was “‘no substantial scientific foundation’ to justify withholding water.” And what happened after Cheney hooked the panel?

“Months later, the first of an estimated 77,000 dead salmon began washing up on the banks of the warm, slow-moving river. Not only were threatened coho dying -- so were chinook salmon, the staple of commercial fishing in Oregon and Northern California. State and federal biologists soon concluded that the diversion of water to farms was at least partly responsible.”

The government had to pay $75 million in disaster aid to farmers and fisherman because of this decision, which was meant to benefit farmers in the first place. The article goes on to tell the narrative of Christine Todd Whitman’s clash with Cheney over just how fast and how pro-industry the overturning of environmental legislation had to be, a clash that ultimately lead to her resignation.

Kudos to the Post for trying to revive the tradition of investigative journalism in this country, letting the people know just what those politicians they elected are doing behind closed doors. It’s encouraging to see such an enemy of the environment get blasted in such an important publication. And while it’s unfortunate that the Post waited to blast Cheney until after the fact, this article raises serious questions about the kind of elected officials we want to send to the hill in ’08.

Marc