Bush's choice for Energy Secretary.

• Author: Leopold, Jason
• Position: Sam Bodman

In the strange world in which President Bush lives, it pays--literally--to be a miserable failure, a criminal and a corporate con man. One of the President's most outrageous decisions has got to be choosing Sam Bodman to serve as Secretary of Energy. This is a man who ran a Texas-based chemical company that spent years on the top five lists of the country's worst polluters.

It's not just a few clouds of smoke emanating from an oil refinery or a power plant that got Bodman's old company, Boston-based Cabot Corporation, those accolades. It was the 54,000 tons of toxic emissions that his company's refineries released into the air in the Lone Star state in 1997 alone that made Cabot the fourth largest source of toxic emissions in Texas.

In 2000, the year Bodman left Cabot to join the Bush administration as Deputy Commerce Secretary, Cabot accounted for 60,000 of the more than half-a-million tons of toxic emissions released into the Texas air, according to a report by the Texas State Summary of Emissions.

A loophole in the 1972 Texas Clean Air Act exempted or "grandfathered" industrial plants built before 1971 from new, stricter pollution control rules. In the mid-1990s, companies such as Cabot were supposed to curb the pollution coming from their refineries. As the air in Texas became smoggier, environmentalists demanded that then Gov. Bush rein in the polluters and close the so-called grandfather loophole.

Instead, in 1997, Bush asked two oil company executives to outline a voluntary program that allowed the grandfathered polluters to decide on their own exactly how much to cut the pollution at their plants. The oil executives held a meeting of industry representatives at Exxon's office in Houston and presented them with the program. Two years later, this program was enacted into law by a bill written by the general counsel for the Texas Chemical Council who also lobbies for energy and utility companies. The bill was denounced by newspapers across the state.

According to people familiar with the legislation, Bodman was part of the original working group that drafted legislation that Bush signed into law. Cabot, and other companies, were permitted to continue to emit the same, and in some cases greater, levels of toxic emissions

Bodman's shoddy environmental record aside, he may also be complicit in one of Africa's deadliest wars. In October 2002, Bodman's former company came under fire when a United Nations Panel of Experts produced a report...