OVERVIEW

Environmental forces enter the year 2000 legislative session with some momentum, having successfully beaten back a series of environmentally destructive riders in last November’s closing budget negotiations. Most impressive was the successful last-minute drive to defeat a rider championed by Senator Robert Byrd, the powerful senior Democrat on the Senate Appropriations Committee. The rider would have suspended the environmental protections that apply to mountaintop removal mining, including clean water requirements that restrict the dumping of mining waste into stream beds. The big question now is how far this momentum will carry into the final session of the 106th Congress, where environmental issues are once again poised to play a major role in the legislative maneuvering, as well as in the election campaigns and national debates in Congress and beyond.

This report offers a comprehensive review of the legislative issues that Congress is expected to confront in the year 2000. Included in the following pages are: a summary description and analysis of each pending legislative proposal on the environment, a short review of the various regulatory reform bills, charts showing the legislative status of each pending environmental bill and regulatory reform bill, and a compilation of laws and appropriations riders impacting the environment that were passed in the first session.

While the reauthorization of a major environmental statute like the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act or the Endangered Species Act is highly unlikely, there is every reason to expect heated engagements over environmental assaults buried in the budget process, and possibly over attempts to de-fang environmental enforcement and regulatory protections through so-called regulatory reform initiatives. But that may not be the end of the story. There remains hope that Congress, increasingly anxious to shed its "do nothing" image, prompted by a president seeking to leave an environmental legacy, fully aware of the overwhelming public support for the environment, will move environmentally positive legislation forward.

There is no shortage of issues should Congress want to pursue meaningful legislative action on the environment. The 106th Congress has the opportunity to secure historic progress on long-term protection of public lands, to achieve crucial long-overdue reductions in air pollution from the nation’s most heavily polluting power plants, and to lay a foundation for the protection of our global climate. The specific bills in play include: the Conservation and Reinvestment Act (CARA)(H.R. 701/ S. 25) which, if it is not misused to promote increased offshore oil drilling, could at last ensure delivery on Congress’ long-ignored commitment to provide permanent funding for public lands acquisition; the Clean Energy Act of 1999 (S.1369), the Clean Smokestacks Act of 1999 (H.R. 2900), and the Fair Energy Competition Act of 1999 (H.R. 2569), each of which would achieve dramatic reductions in the pollution from power plants by closing the loopholes in current law; legislation providing for the restoration and long-term protection of the Everglades (this bill is not yet introduced), and the Energy Efficient Technology Act (H.R. 2380), providing tax incentives to reduce energy and cut global warming pollution.

Progress will not come easily. There are still those in Congress who ideologically oppose environmental protection simply because it involves a role for government. But having been soundly rejected by voters in 1996, this point of view seldom is articulated publicly anymore, and today ideological opposition is only a small part of the problem. The real issue is money. Election year means a heated search for campaign dollars, especially in the overheated context of today’s skyrocketing campaign costs. Voluminous contributions from the oil, chemical, timber, utility, mining and other industrial interests give these forces influence on a scale very hard for public interest advocates to match.

In the absence of a high-profile controversy that focuses public attention on legislative developments, money today speaks louder than the voice of the electorate in the halls of Congress. One manifestation of this sad reality, at least where the environment is concerned, is Congress’ shift in 1996 from frontal assaults, on statutes like the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act, to a drive to reshape national environmental policies through "riders" tacked quietly onto appropriations bills. Congressional leaders are apparently aware of strong public support for environmental protection even as they pursue a diametrically opposed agenda.

Recent history, in fact, suggests that Congress has essentially abandoned the traditional legislative process on environmentally issues; eschewing the usual democratic safeguards of public hearings, open debate and public voting.¹ In the 105th Congress, more than seven times as many environmental provisions were enacted as budget riders than through the direct and open process of voting to change our environmental laws.² In the first year of the 106th Congress, 1999, the record was even worse: Congress attached or proposed to attach nearly 70 anti-environmental riders to various appropriations bills, and it enacted nearly 50 on issues ranging from fuel economy standards to grazing on public lands to logging in the Tongass National Forest. (A complete list of attempted and enacted riders is included in Appendix D) Meanwhile, in that same year, not one major environmental bill moved through the traditional legislative process into law.

The prospects for progress on the environment are further dimmed by the loss of Senator John Chafee (R-RI), who was chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee and one of the most important environmental leaders in Congress until his untimely death last October. Senator Chafee worked hard not only to protect the nation’s landmark environmental statutes from the recent assaults in Congress, but also to make the Senate more receptive to positive environmental legislation.

The dynamic at the Environment Committee now clearly will change. Not only is Senator Robert Smith (R-NH), Chafee’s successor as chairman, new to the post, he also lacks Chafee’s history of environmental commitment. Senator Smith has a lifetime voting rating from the League of Conservation Voters of 36 percent, compared to Senator Chafee’s 70 percent. Environmentalists are cautiously optimistic that as chairman, Senator Smith, will continue Senator Chafee’s legacy. However, there is concern that Smith may be receptive to environmental assaults that his predecessor doggedly refused to move through the Committee.

As we enter the new century, the choice confronted by Congress is clear: whether to give in once again to an unpopular, but well-financed, effort to weaken environmental and health protection, or to pursue far more popular initiatives to strengthen and build upon America’s landmark environmental laws. It is, in a nutshell, the almighty campaign dollar versus the public in an election year, and anything could happen…even genuine progress.³

References

1. Riders on the Storm: Environmental Assaults in FY 1999, NRDC, September 1998, p.5; Damage Report: Environment and the 105th Congress, NRDC, October 1998, p.3; Backdoor Legislating: Status Report on the Environment and the 106th Congress, NRDC, September 1999, p.3.

2. Ibid., p. 236.

3. In the last weeks of the 104th Congress in 1996, legislators desperate for something positive to point to on the environment finally approved important measures on drinking water protection, food safety, and fisheries management. For a more detailed description of these bills, see NRDC’s Damage Report: Environment and the 104th Congress, October 1996.