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Swartz doesn’t oppose CBM development. “It’s not a bad program, if it’s done right. But these people are all blow and go, and to hell with everybody else.” Swartz has no faith in the Interior Department. “The U.S. EPA is the only friend I’ve got in government,” Swartz said. He’s probably right.

Six days after the Senate shut off access to the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, a lame-duck regional EPA director in Denver delivered a nine-hundred-page environmental-impact statement that declared the Powder River drilling scheme an environmental disaster. Region 8 EPA administrator Jack McGraw ruled that the plan to drill fifty-one thousand new wells on eight million acres of ranch land in Wyoming could not proceed. McGraw graded the project EU-3: the lowest possible environmentally unsatisfactory rating. He warned that

• the plan did not deal with the increased salinity in groundwater;

• groundwater will be produced in volumes exceeding federal law;

• insufficient attention is paid to air pollution the drilling will create;

• the coal-bed methane water will so increase the salinity of the Belle Fourche and Tongue Rivers that they will no longer be usable for irrigation (they account for 98 percent of surface water on the Wyoming side of the Powder River Basin);*

• soils that come in contact with the CBM water could be permanently damaged.

The anti-government evangelists on the right of the Republican Party have taught the public to loathe the words “career bureaucrat,” but many of the nation’s nameless, shirtsleeved, not-very-well-paid functionaries try to serve their assigned mission rather than an individual administration. This story should have ended with the EPA living up to the mandate spelled out in the first two words of its name by forcing the Interior Department to obey the law.

If you need a happy ending, try a romance novel.

As he had done in 1988 when he savaged U.S. Fish and Wildlife for pointing out the environmental risks of drilling off the California coast, Steve Griles assaulted a public servant. Under his “United States Department of the Interior—THE DEPUTY SECRETARY” letterhead, Griles attacked EPA assistant administrator Linda Fisher. “I learned yesterday that your Region 8 Acting Director is proposing to send a letter indicating the above draft Environmental Impact Statements are deficient from a water quality analysis. The Acting Director is taking this significant action despite the fact that the Regional Administrator for Region 8 starts on Monday, April 15, 2002.”

Not a subtle message. THE DEPUTY SECRETARY of an executive department, a man four pay grades below THE PRESIDENT, was leaning on a bureaucrat of lesser stature at another federal agency. The letter implies that with the new regional administrator, the fix was in and on the way. Griles even argued that the EPA letter and report should not be sent. It would “create, at best, misimpressions and possibly impede the ability to move forward in a constructive manner.” In other words, an environmental-impact study conducted by experts in the field that took one year and one million dollars to complete—and concluded that two of the nation’s rivers could be destroyed—was a “misimpression.” Griles had no environmental or engineering study supporting his conclusion. He didn’t need facts; he had raw political power.

There is another parallel between Griles’ 1988 letter to Fish and Wildlife and his 2002 letter to the EPA: both disappeared from the files of their author. When Leon Panetta filed a Freedom of Information Act request with Interior in the 1988 case, he was told the letter Griles wrote didn’t exist. He obtained it through a FOIA request at Fish and Wildlife, the recipient of the letter. When we filed a Freedom of Information request with Interior in April 2002, we were told the letter Griles wrote didn’t exist. We obtained it through a FOIA request at the EPA, the recipient of the letter. Every federal agency has