Trashing the Environment
by Don Monkerud
www.dissidentvoice.org
June 3, 2006



 

Overall environmental protection under the Bush Administration, a Republican Congress and Republican-appointed federal judges has fallen like bowling pins in a master's tournament. Since taking office, President Bush has weakened environmental laws by applying a number of tactics, such as appointing industry lobbyists to head agencies, and changing or ignoring rules and enforcement.

A third of Bush's appointments to federal courts have worked as lobbyists for polluting industries, such as oil, gas, timber and mining. By May 2004, Bush had appointed over 100 former lobbyists and company lawyers to head agencies that regulate industry and the environment. These former lobbyists redefine policies to shift regulations in favor of their former clients, most often polluting industries.

Bush undid changes in Clinton policies to enforce environmental laws by rolling back over 300 regulations. Reversed policies include Clean Air and Clean Water regulations, mining regulations, the roadless forest initiative, the Northwest Forest Plan, Sierra Nevada logging policies, the ban on snowmobiles in Yellowstone Park, fisheries management, hazardous waste regulations and coastal zone planning. The administration encourages loggers, developers, snowmobilers and property-rights advocates to sue the government to overturn environmental regulations, and the Department of Justice, formerly entrusted with enforcing laws, defends environmental laws in language clearly intended to weaken them.

There are dozens of lowered standards. Civil penalties imposed by the EPA against polluters have set a record 15-year low, and cases against refineries and coal-fired power plants have declined 90 percent. In August 2003, Bush's EPA allowed thousands of power plants, oil refineries, and industrial plants to upgrade their operations without reducing pollution. In April 2006, Bush suspended environmental rules for gasoline manufacturing and he continues to push for drilling in the protected Alaskan wilderness and other environmentally fragile areas.

Bush's Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted oil and gas drilling on public lands from abiding by the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts and other environmental laws, and encouraged the BLM to issue a record 7,000 drilling permits on public lands. Bush oversaw the largest timber sale in modern history -- 372 million board feet or 30 square miles -- in southwest Oregon, despite over 20,000 citizens' opposition, and his 2007 budget proposes to sell off $1 billion worth of public land.

Far-right Congressmen consider environmental protection bad for business profits and are attempting to repeal or seriously weaken the Wilderness Preservation Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Endangered Species Act, as well as regulations that conflict with special treatment for private property and commercial development.

In February 2006, Karl Rove bragged that President Bush has transformed conservatism from "reactionary" to "forward looking" by incorporating liberal ideas into foreign policy. The GOP highlights Bush's environmental saving efforts such as increasing mileage requirements for SUVs by .03 miles per gallon and cutting taxes so people can buy larger cars.

In April 2006, studies revealed that the US was the world's biggest polluter in 2004, emitting more greenhouse gases -- the major cause of global warming -- than any time in history, a record 7.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide. These increases are the result of greater consumption of electricity, increased industrial output and more traffic, which collectively accounted for 94 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. There are higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere now than at any time in the last 10 million years.

Carbon dioxide emissions lead to global warming, which continue to create new weather records. In May, the National Climatic Data Center announced that April in the US was the hottest since record keeping began in 1895. Dry conditions and severe drought persisted across 31 percent of the country, from the western high plains to the Missouri Valley. Phoenix recorded 143 days without rain, breaking the previous drought record of 101 consecutive days, set in 2000. Last year, parts of the Mississippi and the Ohio rivers filled with sandbars as the drainages experienced the worse drought since 1988.

Evidence from numerous sources reveals that Bush and the Republicans have been a complete disaster in preserving the environment. They reward polluters and blissfully trust unregulated "free enterprise" to curb oil consumption and voluntary regulation to halt pollution. These policies arouse little public outcry as long as easy credit and massive Chinese imports make life abundant, if pressured, for the average person, but the effects of the nation's gluttony for oil, automobiles, energy and an exorbitant standard of living has serious repercussions.

With only five percent of the world's population, the US consumes 30 percent of the world's resources and faces increased disruption from hurricanes, tornadoes, flooding, drought, and other climate changes that will increasingly impinge on our lifestyle. Global warming is irreversible but the longer we wait to reverse policies and begin protecting the environment, the greater the climatic shifts and human dislocations will be and the more arbitrary and restrictive the changes necessary to curb the resulting damage.

In the meantime, the nation will continue to suffer man-made disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina. It's time to place environmental protection at the top of the priority list for national action.

Don Monkerud is an Aptos, California-based writer who follows cultural, social and political issues.

Other Articles by Don Monkerud

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* President Expects to Use Idiot Defense
* Better Working Conditions Lead to Better Economy
 

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