The Green Thing: Politics in This Country Are Driven by Green Issues, However Snoozy

I found a nice old postcard in a junk store the other day. It featured a family aboard a Pan Am Clipper, flying the Atlantic. Smiling couple lounging in vast armchairs; children stretched out; flight attendant plying them with sumptuous viands. An atmosphere of graceful ease.

Now, pony up many thousands of dollars and you can get a first-class ticket on British Airways where the chair turns into a bunk and you can drink without cease the beakers of champagne handed you by the steward. But the norm this summer will be constriction of the limbs in motionless torment, hour after hour, scorned by the attendants and poisoned by their loathsome snacks. These same attendants, ill-paid and overworked, naturally try to reduce their labors by switching on the seatbelt sign and suspending all services at the first sign of turbulence.

It was on a BA flight from Sydney to London that healthy, 28-year-old Emma Christoffersen was killed by a blood clot incurred by protracted imprisonment in her tiny space. Her death has prompted many airlines around the world to advise "in-seat" exercises and walks around the plane whenever possible. In other words, the airlines are trying to head off liability suits. Imprison your passengers in their seats at extortionate rates, then when they get stricken with thrombosis tell them it's their fault for drinking too much and not doing their toe exercises. Can you imagine what a jumbo jet would look like if, in mid-Atlantic, everyone on board tried to take the obligatory stroll to save their lives?

All in all, what we have here is a neat parable about airline deregulation (which happened in the Carter era, zealously promoted by liberals and conservatives alike). The doomsayers (lefties, Naderites, etc.) said service would go to hell, unprofitable but socially necessary routes be abandoned, ticket costs soar and safety standards head through the floor. Though the computer-literate classes can get good rates through services like Priceline.com, this has mostly happened. It's getting riskier every day to fly, government regulators remain inert and all we get is a lousy leaflet telling us to crawl across three irritable passengers and walk up and down the aisle.

The Green Thing

Every time I file a green item for this column, the groans from editor John Strausbaugh or New York Press supremo Russ Smith can be heard billowing down 7th Ave. They regard green issues as having the same sex appeal for Press readers as a thoughtful discussion of the Law of the Sea treaty as it applies to political tensions in the southern Baltic.

After my excursion into global warming a couple of weeks ago, Strausbaugh relayed the news that Supremo Smith regarded it as the most boring column I'd ever written. So of course I made haste last week to rush in some lighthearted stuff about Hitchens, Kissinger, Putin and the rest of the gang.

But here's the problem. Politics in this country?a topic in which Supremo Smith has a passionate, virtually all-consuming interest?are driven in considerable part by green issues, often of a tedious nature. Take the current situation of Gov. Gray Davis of California, a major player in the Democratic Party in a state crucial to the Democrats' national strategy.

Davis has plummeted in the polls in California because people here ascribe the rolling blackouts, the high price of gasoline, natural gas and propane in part to Davis' incompetence or venality or both. It's a story that goes back to the mid-1990s, when the California state legislature voted unanimously to deregulate some of the affairs of the state's private utilities, starting with PG&E, permitting them to pass so-called "stranded costs" of foolish investments in nuclear plants on to the consumers.

But hold! Do I sense the eyelids of Smith and Strausbaugh ever so smoothly descending into the oblivion of another refreshing nap as columnist Cockburn brays on about "stranded costs"? I believe I do. Now, there may be a way of making the issue of energy deregulation as alluring as an item about MONICA LEWINSKY'S ROLE IN THE CONDIT SCANDAL (Smith & Strausbaugh awake abruptly), but it's not easy.

Another, bigger example. George Bush is currently making a lousy showing in the polls. In the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll released last Thursday he's at a scrawny 50-percent approval rating, the lowest for a presidential incumbent in the last five years, which of course include those in which Bill Clinton endured the travails of the Lewinsky affair. Bush may have restored dignity to the White House, but it seems the people either don't care or actively dislike him for doing so. A Harris poll also released last week similarly had Bush with a 50-percent positive rating, and a negative rating of 46 percent, 11 points higher than at the beginning of May and 20 points higher than in February.

A glance at the pie charts accompanying the Wall Street Journal/NBC poll showed that of all the major national issues?healthcare, defense, Social Security, the economy etc.?the one the poll indicated the Republicans are currently faring worst in is the environment. And in negative ratings on the environment, the numbers that really count, the Republicans are making a poor showing. Almost a quarter of all independents say that Bush's environmental policies are his main shortcoming.

So, the possibility that the Democrats might recapture the House next year, and that George Bush will lose the White House in 2004, depends in considerable measure on the way people right now are assessing the impact the Bush-Cheney crowd is having on the environment. We're talking here in part about voters in congressional districts in the eastern part of the country who have almost zero interest in whether a 50 parts per billion (ppb) amount of arsenic in water in certain western municipalities is actually harmful, or whether the oil industry's claims about clean drilling techniques in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge have merit. But these voters have formed the vague overall impression that the Bush-Cheney crowd is pro-arsenic and anti-caribou. It's a deadly combo.

Of course, Bush and Cheney soon woke up to the fact that it wasn't smart politics to reject the last-minute 10 ppb arsenic standard provision Clinton left behind him as a booby trap, and that it was incredibly dumb to threaten caribou. But first impressions are what count here. Bush can have himself photographed in front of sequoias and caribous for the next three years and it won't make much difference.

On green issues the Democrats are smarter by far. They've got the corrupted national green organizations in their corner. (One example: Last week John Podesta, Clinton's former chief of staff and a man not noted for his green zealotry, announced he was joining the board of the League of Conservation Voters and the Natural Resources Defense Council.) The press is mostly lazy or complaisant, and the public more forgiving. You can demonstrate, as Jeffrey St. Clair and I have been doing for years, that when it comes to green issues the Democrats are as bad and often worse in their impact on the environment than Republicans, that Gore and Babbitt handed Alaska over to the oil companies, shredded the Endangered Species Act, opened the Rockies to further ruin, doomed the Everglades, jimmied the air quality standards. No matter that we demonstrate all this, because then we see Democrats often go on to get that crucial edge in elections because enough voters reckon the Republicans truly want that McDonald's next to Old Faithful.

Take arsenic. Over last weekend the same Natural Resources Defense Council that now hosts Podesta got some headlines with the announcement of a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's decision to suspend stricter limits for arsenic in drinking water. Barbara Boxer, California's junior Democratic senator, said she would file documents in support of the lawsuit at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, DC. Also signing the friend-of-the-court document were Democratic Sens. Harry Reid of Nevada, Charles Schumer of New York, Jon Corzine of New Jersey, Paul Wellstone of Minnesota and Hillary Clinton.

The last-minute Clinton boobytrap was the issuing of a plan in January to cut the maximum amount of arsenic allowed in drinking water from the current 50 ppb to 10 ppb. As has been widely noted, for almost the whole of Clintontime, the White House took zero interest in arsenic and the EPA spent some 20 years considering arsenic levels in drinking water. Bush's EPA is now saying that it will sharply reduce the amount of arsenic permitted in drinking water, but it's too late. Here we have Erik Olson, an NRDC lawyer, shouting that "The Bush EPA's suspension of the arsenic is a distressing, unscientific, and illegal threat to the health of millions of Americans. There is no excuse for delaying or weakening the standard just finalized in January of this year."

Has anyone in the mostly western areas where natural levels of arsenic are found in water ever suffered ailments of consequence? I've never seen any such claims. In fact, though very toxic at high concentrations, arsenic at much lower levels was reckoned earlier in the century to have therapeutic properties. I quote from the 11th edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica: "Internally it is useful in certain forms of dyspepsia... Children as a rule bear it better than adults. It should never be given on an empty stomach, but always after a full meal. It is the routine treatment for pernicious anaemia and Hodgkin's disease, though here again the drug may be of no avail. For the neuralgia and anaemia following malaria, for rheumatoid arthritis, for chorea and also asthma and hay fever, it is constantly prescribed with excellent results. Certain skin diseases such as psoriasis, pemphigus and occasionally chronic eczema, are much benefitted by its use, though occasionally a too prolonged course will produce the very lesion for which under other circumstances it is a cure."

This learned disquisition concludes with the news that "occasionally, as among the Styrians, individuals acquire the habit of arsenic-eating, which is said to increase their weight, strength and appetite, and clears their complexion." Styria, you should know, is a chunk of Austria distinguished by the city and university of Graz. This notwithstanding, the Britannica did not scant the deadly nature of arsenic, and neither do I. Let no New York Press reader take arsenic to cure any complaint. However, in view of the forgoing, a study of one of these supposedly afflicted western water districts would be useful.

The overall point is, if you want to be a decent reporter or predictor of politics in this country, you have to cover green issues, often rather boring green issues. After six months of scarcely believable political stupidity by the Bush crowd, the people have pretty much made up their minds. Smith and Strausbaugh can scoff, but a lot of our political agenda is set through vague impressions, behind which lurk abundant mystifications, both about science (as I've tried to indicate in the case of global warming) and about the Democrats who continue to get away with murder on this issue.