Regime Change Must Bring Open Government

By Todd Wilkinson, 11-17-08

There is a time to be sanguine about the past and let it go, and a time to take stock of reality.

Nearly eight years ago, David Orr, a distinguished professor of environmental studies at Oberlin College, joined a group of leading natural resource experts who sought a meeting with newly elected president George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney to discuss green issues they believed were pressing for the nation.

The concerns were packaged in a white paper. Among them: addressing climate change and the need for a sound American energy policy that would emphasize renewable fuels as a way of reducing CO2 emissions, achieving a healthier environment, and enhancing our strategic defense against hostile Middle Eastern nations with huge oil supplies.

It was way ahead of T. Boone Pickens.

Orr and company were not merely rebuffed; they were greeted by arrogant laughter, handed off to White House staffers and given a token, hostile eyeballing by Karl Rove who showed them the door.

9/11 had yet to happen. The Vice President was already engaged in hosting closed door sessions with oil and coal company executives who helped write the Bush Administration’s still-ethereal National Energy Strategy.  Republicans controlled both houses of Congress, but no one affiliated with the Grand Old Party expressed any grave worries about their brand having total control of the executive, legislative and judicial branches of government.

How do I know professor Orr went to the Bush Administration with a good faith pitch to get on top of those issues?

Because a few months later, I accompanied him on a weeklong float down Alaska’s Copper River. Orr also shared details in a remarkably foresighted book, The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror.

So where are we today?

We are not back where we started.

We’re in a worse position than that, with an economy in ruin from unregulated, unmitigated greed; an auto industry on the verge of collapse because it refused to heed the looming impact of explosive gas prices caused by rising global consumption and shortages; and a balmier average climate, with mushrooming CO2 levels acceleratng the warming and hastening, in front of our own eyes, the largest expanding outbreak of mountain pine beetles in recorded history.

What the last eight years also delivered—besides the obliteration of fiscal conservatism—was a sneering attitude toward open government.

The weirdest phenomenon of all, a litmus test applied for patriotism, demanded support for the war in Iraq yet domestically was expressed as government actually declaring strict government oversight the enemy of citizens.

The “either you’re with us or against us” credo yielded its own intriguing displays of loyalty when lobbyist Jack Abramoff and coal industry professional turned deputy U.S. Interior Secretary Steven J. Griles went off to prison on convictions related to corruption and obstructing justice.

On top of it, an investigation by the independent Government Accountability Office revealed recently that workers in the same Interior Department were engaging in sex and drugs with energy company managers they were supposed to monitoring in the West.

Laugh, but GAO also found that lack of adequate government bookkeeping in tracking oil and gas industry revenues on resources extracted from public lands may mean the loss of billions of dollars in royalty payments owed to the U.S. Treasury. I could go on for another 5,000 words.

When the next regime comes into power in January, there will be one immediate dramatic change for the better in the West—a return to regular Capitol Hill oversight hearings on the conduct of America’s public land management agencies.

Along with them hopefully will come a change in attitude. Rather than encountering stonewalling from Washington and resistance in complying with federal Freedom of Information Act requests on energy and other issues, the public will gain a clearer understanding of how the Forest Service and BLM at the field level have been ordered to expedite energy development across the Rockies.
Holding government accountable for its actions isn’t a liberal tenet or a conservative one. It’s necessary no matter what regime is in power. If you doubt the consequences, professor David Orr has a lecture you ought to hear.

Todd Wilkinson, who has been writing about the environment for 20 years, lives in Bozeman and is completing an authorized biography about the environmental work of media mogul, bison rancher and humanitarian Ted Turner.