Environmental Battles
    The New York Times | Editorial

    Wednesday 17 May 2006

    The annual appropriations bill for the Interior Department and the Environmental Protection Agency will hit the House floor later this week. This bill always inspires passionate debate over important questions decided in the course of an afternoon.

    This year's measure contains some pleasant surprises, including a resolution acknowledging that Congress must do more about global warming. But on the whole it is a mediocre bill that could be improved by corrective amendments on the floor.

    Money - The bill would cut funds for the EPA and reduce a critical open-space program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, to a $26.8 million joke (President Bush once promised to "fully fund" it at its authorized level, $900 million a year). Any effort to increase spending to meaningful levels deserves support.

    Wetlands - The EPA and the Army Corps of Engineers, exploiting an ambiguous internal regulation, have allowed commercial development in sensitive wetlands and streams in violation of the Clean Water Act. A bipartisan amendment will be offered that would reverse this policy and restore protection to all the waters of the United States.

    Offshore Drilling - The bill would lift a 25-year-old ban on drilling for natural gas at the Outer Continental Shelf. This would be a major policy shift and should not be decided until the public has a more complete understanding of its risks and rewards. In any case, the issue should be part of a larger debate over energy policy.

    National Forests - The Bush administration has stripped Tongass National Forest in Alaska of protection against clear-cutting. Now the Tongass's friends are fighting back. Representatives Steve Chabot and Robert Andrews will offer an amendment blocking the continued federal subsidies that fleece taxpayers of some $40 million annually while encouraging destructive road-building.

    The House should support that amendment. In the same protective spirit, it should also kill a mischievous free-standing bill sponsored by Greg Walden of Oregon that would suspend environmental rules to accelerate logging in burned forests.

    Approving these amendments - and beating the Walden bill - would be a good week's work.