Money for cleaning up waste from producing nuclear weapons would be greatly reduced, while money for nuclear bomb-making would be boosted. The Bush administration wants to shift significant responsibility for enforcing federal environmental laws from the U.S. EPA to the states. The fiscal year 2002 budget proposed by the White House would eliminate funding for 9 percent of the federal enforcement staff and instead provide states with money for enforcement grants and environmental assessments. EPA chief Christie Todd Whitman said yesterday that states are better positioned to clamp down on pollution. But many environmental groups think the shift would result in less enforcement and more pollution.
Some states have a checkered record of enforcement, letting slide even egregious pollution problems.
Under an emergency order issued last week that is expected to last much of the year, the Bonneville Power Administration is using what water remains to spin turbines to generate power on the Columbia and Snake rivers, overriding Endangered Species Act requirements to spill water over the tops of dams to help young salmon migrate downstream. Brian Gorman of the National Marine Fisheries Service says the shift will increase salmon mortality by about 15 percent, while some environmentalists say the figure could be as high as 95 percent. Yesterday, the BPA predicted a 250 percent increase in power rates unless energy conservation efforts took off and aluminum smelters idled themselves for two years. It is highly likely that Sonar transmissions from U.S. Navy ships caused an unprecedented number of whales and a dolphin to strand themselves in shallow waters off northern Bahama islands last March, according to a task force from the Navy and the National Marine Fisheries Service. But the Navy is still hoping to get a permit from the NMFS for a new sonar system to detect submarines in 80 percent of the world's oceans.