The Greening of George W. Bush
The Governor's 'Clean Air' Bill Hasn't Cleaned Up Texas' Air
By Louis Dubose, Fri., Oct. 27, 2000
One of the final acts of the 76th legislative session was the passage of Senate Bill 766, the voluntary emissions control bill that would allow major industrial polluters exempt from the state's pollution controls since 1971 to volunteer to clean up their toxic emissions. The bill's House sponsor told Austin Rep. Glen Maxey that the bill represented an opportunity to improve the governor's image in the environmental community; its passage would "make Gov. Bush green for the presidential primaries." The bill was passed in May 1999 and signed into law by the governor, and a year after it went into effect in September of 1999, it has done little to clean up the air. An analysis of Texas Natural Resources Conservation Commission pollution statistics, which was funded by a coalition of 44 environmental and good government groups -- ranging from the League of Women Voters of Texas to the Odessa NAACP to the Texas Environmental Defense Fund -- found that the actual volume of air-pollution reduction brought about by Senate Bill 766 is negligible.
Even if the TNRCC's official statistics were correct, and not inflated -- as the coalition known as the Texas Air Crisis Campaign claims in a very detailed study -- the voluntary compliance law promoted by Gov. Bush has done little to clean the air. "The TNRCC's own Web site says grandfathered pollution has only been reduced by 3%," said Texas Environmental Defense director Jim Marston six weeks ago when the Air Crisis group was still working on its study. Pollution from the grandfathered facilities accounts for roughly 30% of the total air pollution volume in the state that leads the nation in air pollution volume. The Air Crisis report, released early this month, is based on the state agency's own data. It concluded that the TNRCC inflated its claims.
For example:
Overall, the Texas Air Crisis Campaign report claims, reductions that are a direct result of the bill Gov. Bush supported in the last legislative session account for less than 1% of the state's grandfathered emissions. Yet even if the agency's numbers are correct, the results are modest. "Even if you use the TNRCC numbers, it's too little too late," said Marston, who directed the study.
Voluntary vs. Mandatory
In the 1999 legislative session, two competing bills addressed pollution problems caused by the state's 800 grandfathered facilities. (The grandfathered plants were exempted from modern pollution-control technology when the state's Clean Air Act was passed in 1971. At that time it was assumed the grandfathered facilities would gradually install modern pollution-control technology.) Sen. Gonzalo Barrientos, D-Austin, and Rep. Glen Maxey, D-Austin, introduced a bill that would require grandfathered plants to clean up their emissions and install what is known as Best Available Control Technology (BACT). Sen. Buster Brown, R-Lake Jackson, and Rep. Ray Allen, R-Grand Prairie, introduced SB 766, which allows grandfathered polluters to volunteer to clean up emissions, and allows polluters to use emission control technology no more than 10 years old -- rather than the best available control technology that is required in most states and would have been required by the Barrientos-Maxey bill.
The fact that the bill Gov. Bush supported and signed into law is generous to industrial polluters who had already had 30 years to clean up might be related to the fact that the law was written by an industry lobbyist who had served as general counsel to the Texas Chemical Counsel. SB 766 was drafted by R. Kinnan Golemon, of the Austin law firm of Brown McCarroll & Oaks Hartline. Peter Altman, of the Austin-based environmental coalition SEED, used the Texas Open Records Act to establish a paper trail that includes Golemon's draft of the bill, which was sent to Terri Seales of the House Environmental Affairs Committee and Dan Eden at the TNRCC. "Attached you will find a draft of the legislation our office has put together to address the voluntary permit program to bring the grandfathered facilities into the permit realm," Golemon writes in his Jan. 22, 1999 cover letter.
Also included with the draft of the bill are notes from Texas Chemical Council executive director Jon Fisher to TNRCC Chairman Ralph Marquez, a Bush appointee and former Monsanto chemical company executive. "I think you need to back off on the latter date a bit and say 2002 for the early stuff and 2007 (applications due, not permits issued) for the analysis mentioned above. Also, you might consider putting a deadline of 2017 for issuing permits, which gives people the idea that some might have a while to negotiate."
Fisher concluded: "You know these are not official TCC [Texas Chemical Council]. I am tryig [sic] to head off undue opposition."
In short, a lawyer/lobbyist and general counsel for a powerful interest group that represents the regulated industry wrote the law that would regulate the industry. And the executive director of the industry lobby group asked for an additional 18 years for major industrial polluters that had already escaped regulation for 30 years. All of this was done in back-channel communications with the House Environmental Affairs Committee and the regulatory agency.
Considering the origins of the governor's voluntary emission law, a 3% reduction might be considered substantial.
Let's Volunteer
Yet before the Legislature set out to address the problem, there was a voluntary program operated under the auspices of Gov. Bush's office. This voluntary program provided the early framework for Senate Bill 766, and it, too, was a program designed by the regulated industry -- with no citizen input and no participation by the representatives of environmental groups or legislators who had demonstrated an interest in the state's air quality. Information about the governor's voluntary program was only made public because of the work of Altman. (TNRCC commissioners, in fact, were concerned about the public and legislators' reaction to the volume of grandfathered pollution. Shortly before the agency released a list of "companies that continue to have grandfathered facilities and the magnitude of the emissions from those facilities," then-TNRCC chair Barry McBee wrote a memo to select members of his staff. "Have we given thought to whether and if so how we will share that sort of listing with legislators and or the public?" McBee wrote on Aug. 28, 1998. McBee now works for Lieutenant Gov. Rick Perry)
The governor's voluntary emissions program was developed under the guidance of two oil company executives: V.G. Beghini of Marathon Oil Company and A.L. Condray of Exxon, USA. Bush himself, according to the oil company executives' letter found in TNRCC files, requested Beghini and Condray to meet with representatives of the grandfathered industries and devise a pollution-reduction program. "In early March, while discussing the National Ambient Air Quality Standards issue with Governor Bush, he asked us to work with his office to develop the concepts of a voluntary program to permit grandfathered facilities in Texas," the oil company executives wrote in a joint letter.
Invited to the first meeting on the governor's voluntary emissions program, held June 19, 1997, at Exxon's corporate office in Houston, were representatives of: Alcoa, Amoco Oil, Valero Energy, Chevron, Coastal Corporation, Conoco Inc., Dow Chemical, Lyondell Petrochemical, Lyondell- Refining Company, Mobil, Phillips 66, Shell Oil, Simpson Paper, Texaco, and Texas Utilities. John Howard, who handled environmental affairs for Gov. Bush, also attended.
The meeting was described in an angry memo written by Jim Kennedy of DuPont. The chemical industry is generally far cleaner than oil and gas refiners, and Kennedy evidently believed that oil and gas refiners were running the show. "Exxon and Amoco made the presentations, with occasional contributions from Marathon ... the approach was pretty much like 'This is the way it's going to be -- do you want to get on board or not?' The feeling of at least three of the chemical folks here seemed to be 'Not.'"
Kennedy complained that the term "TNRCC" "did not even appear in the overheads that were used in the meeting." The state regulatory agency, he wrote, would "participate with us" and be available for industry representatives "to call them in as a resource." Kennedy also complained that the original proposal had no "meat" with respect to actual reductions. "One of the leaders actually stated that emissions reductions was not a primary driver for the program. I know for a fact that in the mind of at least one TNRCC commissioner, emissions reductions is the primary driver for the program."
The argument has been made by the Bush campaign and some at the TNRCC that cleaning up the grandfathered plants was the governor's idea, and that since 1971 other governors had the opportunity to reduce grandfathered emissions. As recently as last week, for example, TNRCC commissioner Ralph Marquez told The Philadelphia Inquirer that cleaning up the grandfathered plants was "the governor's idea."
Yet the June 11, 1997, letter written by the Marathon and Exxon executives concludes with the warning that "that our state law makers are ready to end grandfathering." With four of the state's major urban areas already out of compliance with the Federal Clean Air Act, and therefore facing penalties that include loss of federal funds and restrictions on growth, there was increasing momentum in the Legislature to get tough with the grandfathered industries. Bush, instead, allowed oil company executives to devise his voluntary program. And when pressure to pass a law grew, he supported a bill written by an industry lobbyist, backed by the industry lobby, and opposed by every environmental organization in the state.
Among the factual findings in the Texas Air Crisis Campaign report is that the Marathon-Ashland Plant (permitted in March of 1999) and the Exxon-Mobil Baytown refinery (permitted in March of 2000) are scheduled to reduce emissions by 1,024 and 2,439 tons respectively. But Marathon's permit allows it until 2006 to complete its reductions; Exxon has until 2007.
There is no smoking gun that connects Marathon's Beghini and Exxon's Condray to the lax emissions reduction policy. Only smoking refineries. These guys wrote the guidelines that were incorporated into Senate Bill 766, then lobbied to make the bill a law. No one would expect that law to be too hard on them. 
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