Earth Shakers: The Counter-Enviro Power List

With "the death of environmentalism" being debated across the land—and with the mainstream movement under siege from without and within—it’s time to meet the winning side in America’s new green wars. Here they come, ready or not: the 20 most powerful voices leading the environmental counterrevolution.

Dick Cheney: Vice President of the United States

Why Is Cheney on this list instead of the man he works for? Because the 64-year-old veep has brought unprecedented clout to his position, taking the lead on everything from national security to energy policy. After stints as a Wyoming congressman (he grew up in Casper), as secretary of defense for President George H. W. Bush, and as CEO of Halliburton, the world’s largest oil-services company, Cheney emerged as the ideal candidate to head the administration’s National Energy Policy Development Group when Bush took power in 2001. As the leader of this 15-member task force, he masterminded a ground- up restructuring of America’s energy policy, convening behind closed doors with oil, gas, coal, and nuclear executives and lobbyists.

On May 17, 2001, when the task-force findings were made public, Big Energy emerged as the clear victor. The very next day, the president issued an executive order that urged federal agencies to begin expediting gas- and oil-drilling-permit requests on public lands.

The report also became the foundation for Bush’s as yet unpassed energy bill, which would offer hefty subsidies to energy companies and step up oil, gas, and mining activities on federal lands.

Finally, the report led to the formation of another team of policy strategists, the Energy Streamlining Task Force, which has been compiling a list of backlogged drilling-permit requests for areas within the Bureau of Land Management’s jurisdiction. The new approach definitely seems to be working: Drilling permits were up 62 percent in 2004.

SOUND BITE: "I see this... as one giant giveaway to special interests," Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) has said about the Cheney-stamped energy bill. "With a half-trillion-dollar deficit, we’re giving tax credits for—guess who?—the oil industry, which, last time I checked, was doing really well."

NEXT UP: Bush’s national energy plan jumped every legislative hurdle in 2003 except the Senate, where it died in a filibuster over exemptions for corporate polluters. A major Bush-Cheney goal—opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to petroleum exploration—moved one step closer to reality in mid-March, when the Senate voted 51-49 to approve drilling as part of its budget deliberations.

Gale Norton: Secretary of the Interior

Norton doesn’t breathe fire in the style of onetime mentor James Watt—the Reagan-era Interior secretary who tutored her in the late seventies at Colorado’s Mountain States Legal Foundation, an important center of antiregulatory lawsuits. But no one should underestimate Norton’s impact. Since her 2001 appointment as Interior secretary, a post that gives her command over 507 million acres of public land, the Denver- raised 51-year-old has aggressively campaigned to open up large swaths of territory for oil exploration. Norton argued in favor of lifting a moratorium on offshore drilling in California, advocated for drilling in ANWR, and, in September 2004 alone, auctioned off nearly 360,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management country in southern Utah and made 8.8 million acres of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve available to oil and gas developers.

Norton is also pushing to allow off-road vehicles into wilderness study areas and national forests. As with most issues on Norton’s agenda, the ORV changes stem from her belief that public lands should not be restricted to activities like hiking, hunting, and fishing but instead governed by policies that afford equal access to everyone.

SOUND BITE: "Norton has been a success because she’s kept her head down," says Sharon Buccino, a senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "From her Washington power base she is methodically and strategically changing the landscape of the West forever."

NEXT UP: Norton commissioned Water 2025, a sweeping proposal designed to mitigate the West’s water-rights issues and worsening drought. So far, enviros have had a hard time finding flaws in the proposal, which offers grants to companies that are developing new technology to improve the efficiency of water usage, includes financial incentives to farmers who buy water-saving irrigation equipment, and provides a system for property owners to buy and sell surplus water. Some, like Thomas Graff, a regional director for Environmental Defense, have touted it as a "real achievement" and say it’s a long- needed revamping of the West’s water policies.

Mark Rey: Undersecretary for Natural Resources and Environment, Dept. of Agriculture

A former timber-industry lobbyist from Ohio, Rey is head caretaker for America’s 193 million acres of national forest. Throughout his career, he’s been a forceful opponent of what he considers the red tape surrounding wildlife-preservation measures and environmental-assessment reviews, and he has advocated giving state and local agencies real input into the management of federal lands. His critics claim this is just a cover for hardball rollbacks that will open protected lands to more road building and logging. "Rey is the architect of an across-the-board attack on national forests," says Niel Lawrence, director of the forestry program at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

As forest chief since 2001, Rey, 52, has been instrumental in creating new "categorical exclusions" to environmental-impact reviews required by the 35-year-old National Environmental Policy Act. Typically, these exclusions have allowed forest managers to relax the reviews when they want to fix a trail or structure. The new exclusions, part of the Bush administration’s Healthy Forests Initiative (first introduced in August 2002), allow the removal of "hazardous fuels"—like trees—in forests where wildfires pose an increased threat. The change has already led to fire-prevention logging on more than 11 million acres.

SOUND BITE: Rey once described forest-conservation laws as "bedtime reading for insomniacs as an alternative to War and Peace."

NEXT UP: Rey plans to revamp the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, a Clinton-era regulation that halted new road building and logging in designated areas in national forests. The rule, which was already repealed in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest, is expected to be replaced in May with a far less stringent one, potentially giving the timber, oil, gas, and mining industries access to 58.5 million acres of currently protected areas.