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In January 1997, Bush was in a meeting with Ralph Marquez, his appointee to the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission, the state's environmental agency. Near the end of the meeting, one of Bush's staff members made a reference to something called "grandfathered plants." "What are those?" Bush asked. Marquez explained that in 1971, when the state's Clean Air Act was passed, the bill had exempted all existing industrial plants from the new antipollution regulations. (Texas is funny that way.) Lawmakers assumed that many of these aging plants would soon shut down, but that didn't happen. They just kept spewing. By 1996, state environmental officials discovered that 36% of the industrial air pollution in Texas--which has one of the worst pollution problems in the country--was billowing from these 830 grandfathered plants, many of them operated by the biggest oil and chemical companies in the state. Hearing this, the Governor was incensed. "They've had 26 years to fix this? Don't you think it's time for them to do it?"
Marquez said the TNRCC had been exploring ways to bring the grandfathered plants into compliance. "Well, let's get moving," Bush said. Then he added, "But can you make it voluntary?" He may have been impatient with the polluters, but he still wasn't willing to get tough with them. Perhaps because of his own career in the West Texas oil fields, Bush shares the mind-set of the industry, believing that "you can't sue or legislate your way to clean air and clean water."
History teaches the opposite. Progress against pollution has come because of regulation, not the beneficence of industry. At the time of Bush's meeting with Marquez, some TNRCC officials had been pushing for a law that would have required the plants to clean up. Bush's insistence on a voluntary approach--an attitude shared by Marquez, a former executive at Monsanto--quashed that idea. In early 1997, Bush's team held a series of private meetings with oil-, gas- and chemical-industry leaders and invited them to draft a plan for a voluntary emission-reduction program. The secret meetings came to light last summer, when an Austin activist named Peter Altman filed an open-records request. Despite cries from environmentalists, the plan passed the legislature, in only slightly tougher form, last year. Bush says he is proud he got the grandfathered plants to the table, and to his credit, no Governor before him did as much. (He also backed a bill that forces electric utilities to clean up.) But advocates say his voluntary plan isn't working. It levies some fines, but they apply to less than 5% of the plants, according a study by the Environmental Defense Fund. And since November 1997, when sign-up began, only 33 of the 160 biggest industrial plants have volunteered. Of those 33, only three have taken steps to cut their emissions. Questioned about this during an interview with TIME, Bush became irritated. "Well, maybe we need to increase the fines during the next legislative session," he said. "I'm a practical person. I'm sorry you're skeptical, or the Sierra Club is skeptical. Sometimes when people don't get their way in politics, they put out a signal: 'Let's be skeptical.'"