marnefirstinfantry asked: It’s become almost an annual tradition. Every year for the past five years, the Pentagon has gone to Congress and asked to be exempted from the country’s environmental laws.
Being forced to abide by clean-air and water standards - as well as by hazardous-waste disposal and cleanup laws - could jeopardize military readiness and open the door for expensive and excessive rulings by state and federal environmental regulators, the Pentagon argues.
Every year, Congress sends the military brass away all but empty-handed.
Lawmakers agreed only to allow the military to train without worrying about endangered-species habitats and to allow the Navy to use sonar that might harm marine mammals.
Not even a pro-military Republican-controlled Congress was willing to let the Pentagon off the hook for cleaning up past pollution problems or to allow disposal practices that are considered criminal violations in the private sector.
Still, the Pentagon asks again and again.
“It shows the attitude and shows how they prioritize - and probably explains why they haven’t cleaned up pollution problems faster,” Alex Fidis said. Fidis is a lawyer specializing in health and environment issues for U.S. Public Interest Research Group, a national government-watchdog organization. “Anyone who has any sort of foresight can see how bad an idea this is.”
The Pentagon argues that unhindered training is more important than ever because of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Military officials have pointed to a 1997 ruling by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency that prohibits live-fire drills at a base on Cape Cod, Mass. There, public drinking-water supplies have been contaminated with cancer-causing gunpowder and rocket fuel.
That shows that environmental regulations now may be used to limit military preparedness, and the military should therefore be exempted from those requirements, the Pentagon argues.
“It’s a typical response from a bureaucracy that large,” Craig Williams said. He’s director of the Chemical Weapons Working Group, a grass-roots environmental advocacy organization in Kentucky.
“They say, ‘Our mission is so noble, we should be exempt,’ which is preposterous,” he said. “They don’t look at protection in an environmental sense. They look at protection as weapons systems and troop deployments only.”
Jon
