Opinion> Molly Ivins> Molly Ivins April 20 1999 04 20

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Molly Ivins April 20

AUSTIN, Texas — Good times! Protests, arrests, people raising Cain in the halls of power. Well, actually, it was the sidewalk in front of the Governor's Mansion.

As one who admires a succinctly made political case, I can do no better than to quote the full-page ad run by the protesters in this instance: "Texas Needs to Quit Coddling Polluters. Call Governor Bush and ask him why polluter profits are more important than children's health."

Now there's a spiffy example of how to take an old (meaning not newsworthy) and slightly technical issue and simplify it so that even the media can understand it. Congratulations to the activists at Public Research Works, who inspired the protest with their report "Follow the Money ... Grandfathered Air Polluters & Campaign Contributions."

The unofficial motto of this session of the Legislature is "Now Let's Not Embarrass the Governor."

Although all the Republican members and, indeed, most of the Democrats have signed off on this program, who knew that the Texas Department of Public Safety was participating, too?

A menacing horde of eight demonstrators, facing a mere 20 DPS officers, so threatened the public order and alarmed the minions of the law that four of them were busted for standing on the sidewalk. A DPS officer explained that unlike the normal tourist with a camera standing on the sidewalk — of whom several were present at the time — the protesters were (gulp) carrying signs!

The First Amendment has not been rewritten lately and does still protect "the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." And as of this writing, Embarrassing the Governor has not yet been made an actual crime.

The governor certainly should be embarrassed.

As the people at Public Research proved, he's taken huge campaign contributions from the state's worst polluters while creating a policy that allows these corporations to continue to pollute — legally.

A memo unearthed by the researchers shows oil-industry lobbyists thanking "the governor's office and John Howard," Bush's environmental policy director, for coming up with the notion of "voluntary compliance" for grandfathered polluters.

This was after the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, a notoriously do-nothing outfit, had actually worked up the nerve to start planning to get these companies to obey the same laws that every other company in Texas has to obey. And it only took 28 years to get that far!

The acronym for the TNRCC is pronounced "train wreck" by people in state government, and it would be difficult to overstate the extent to which this is not a bunch of environmental militants. Very difficult.

Nevertheless, after all these years, even Train Wreck was gearing up, "fixin' to" do something about the last of the behemoth polluters.

Most of them are in the oil and gas or utility industries; this relative handful of exempted companies accounts for 36 percent of the industrial pollution in Texas. But this handful of huge companies also has big-time political clout and lots of lobbyists, and they make lots of campaign contributions.

When the big polluters were first grandfathered in — that is, exempted from pollution laws because they had so much political clout — there were no requirements to report campaign contributions in Texas. So no one actually knows how much these companies have spent to protect their right to pollute. But the folks at Public Research estimate that the $10 million over three election cycles that they can document is only a fraction of the total.

The biggest grandfathered polluter is Texas Utilities, with 20 plants producing 247,089 tons of air pollution a year. We don't know what the public health risk is because the grandfather loophole also exempts these plants from requirements to conduct public health reviews.

In January, a study by three environmental groups in seven Texas counties found more than 225,000 children attending schools that are within two miles of at least one grandfathered plant. Of the 292 schools identified, 107 are within two miles of at least two grandfathered plants.

What do Alcoa, Amoco, Arco, Enron, Central Power & Light, Champion International Corp., Coastal Corp., Dow Chemical, Eastman Chemical Co., El Paso Energy Corp., Enserch, Entergy Gulf States, Exxon, Gulf States Utilities, International Paper, Oryx Energy Co., Panhandle Eastern Pipeline Co., PG&E, Phillips/GPM, Southwestern Electric Power Co., Tenneco Inc., Texaco Inc., Texas Utilities, Texas Mid Continent Oil & Gas Association, Ultramar Diamond Shamrock, Union Carbide, Union Pacific Resources, Valero Refining and West Texas Utilities Co. all have in common?

They are all major contributors to Gov. George W. Bush's campaigns. And they will continue to have the right to pollute the air and the water of this state to their hearts' content, thanks to Bush's policy.

Molly Ivins is a columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. To find out more about Molly Ivins and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate web page at www.creators.com.

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