America the Beautiful? (Controversial!)
I'm wondering what Americans think about the environmental problems that Bush seems to be generating at a high rate of knots. He and his administration may be causing a lot of problems for Europe and the rest of the world, but are you aware of what he's doing to your own country? This is for people who are interested enough and have time enough to read through it all and are willing to give their own assessment. Of course, if you just think it's all a pack of lies or not significant, you're welcome to say so, but keep it short.
I happen to think that it's rather important. (No frivolous jokes thank you Richard).
Both Democrats and Republicans are welcome to state their opinions!
"The destroyer" Wednesday September 1, 2004 The Guardian
George Bush's war on terror may have made the world a more dangerous place. But it is his atrocious record on the environment that poses the greatest threat.
'Prosperity will mean little," declared George W Bush while on the stump as presidential candidate, "if we leave to future generations a world of polluted air, toxic lakes and rivers, and vanished forests." By the time Bush departed his job as governor of Texas in December 2000, Texas had - according to a report from within the ranks of his own party - become the number-one state in the nation in manufacturing-plant emissions of toxic chemicals, in the release of industrial airborne toxins, in violations of clean water discharge standards and the release of toxic waste into underground wells. Under Bush's governorship, Houston had even passed Los Angeles to become the city with the worst air quality in America. The Republicans for Environmental Protection (REP) study could find not a single initiative by Bush during his term as governor that sought to improve either the state's air or its water. What would he do as president?
On January 20 2001 - Bush's first day in office - he called in the chief of staff, Andrew Card, and told him to send directives to every executive department with authority over environmental issues, ordering them to put on hold more than a dozen regulations left over from the Clinton administration. The regulations covered everything from lowering arsenic levels in drinking water to reducing releases of raw sewage.
Big Republican donors expected a return on their investment following the 2000 presidential election, and Bush was more than willing to deliver. Bush convened his National Energy Policy Development Group nine days after taking office. This was the panel that came to be known as the vice president's Energy Task Force. For four months, Dick Cheney, energy secretary Abraham, other cabinet secretaries and their deputies formulated the nation's energy policy behind the closed doors of the vice president's office and the cabinet room. Eighteen of the Republicans' top 25 donors from the energy industry were invited in and asked to contribute to the plan.
Kenneth Lay of Enron, who had loaned Bush his company jet during his presidential campaign, met the group numerous times. Executives from such companies and organizations as Chevron, ExxonMobil, the Nuclear Energy Institute, Westinghouse, Edison Electric Institute and the American Petroleum Institute consulted with the committee between six and 19 times. Upwards of 400 executives from 150 corporations and trade associations met with the task force from February to May 2001.
The Cheney group did not speak to a single environmentalist during the hearings. Abraham said he didn't have time to meet them, and Cheney's office denied their requests for inclusion.
Cheney and his colleagues emerged with a National Energy Plan in May 2001, which included 100 proposals and led to a massive energy bill with tax breaks for US energy interests estimated by Congress's Joint Committee on Taxation at $23.5bn (£13bn) - a pretty good return on the $44m (£24.5m) it had donated to the Republicans during the previous year's election.
There wasn't a single line in the energy bill requiring an increase in the fuel efficiency of the nation's 204 million passenger vehicles. (Nor, for that matter, was there any mention of global warming.) The plan did include proposals that would have a new power plant built every week for the next 20 years, however. Senator John McCain, the Arizona Republican who joined the Democrats in eventually getting the legislation watered down, called the bill the "Leave-No-Lobbyist-Behind Act". After its passage, McCain said: "With a half-trillion dollar deficit, we're giving tax credits, for guess who, the [oil] industry in America, which last time I checked was doing really well."
The Bush White House has produced its assault on the environment with little in the way of public scrutiny, which is especially remarkable considering the devastating effects its initiatives will have on America's land, air and water for generations to come. Reports or programmes that the administration must by law announce, but would rather go unnoticed, it gives to low-level officials to deliver.
Environmental enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has plunged under Bush. Since 2001, monthly violation notices - the most important tool against polluters - are down 58% compared with Clinton's monthly average.
Partly as a result, three decades after the passage of the Clean Air Act, almost one in three Americans still breathe air filled with nitrous oxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, coal dust, mercury, and hundreds of other toxic pollutants. The pollution comes from myriad sources, but within the energy business, the prime culprit is coal, which powers half of the US's electricity and causes 90% of the electric power industry's pollution. Two years after Bush took office, the rollbacks of pollution regulations meant that dirty coal plants that upgraded their facilities would not necessarily have also to upgrade their pollution-control equipment.
This easing of controls has been calculated to cause the release of an additional 1.4m tonnes of air pollution. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that the change in the law will result in 30,000 American deaths.
In December 2002, an alliance of attorneys general from 24 states and attorneys from 30 cities and municipalities sued the EPA, arguing that the new rules would violate the Clean Air Act. A year later, the DC circuit court agreed, for now, and issued a temporary injunction preventing the EPA from implementing the new laws until the case is settled.
Undeterred, Bush announced in 2002 that his Clear Skies initiative would lower most power plant emissions by 70% by the year 2018. In fact, environmental groups all say that Clear Skies targets are dramatically lower than those of the existing Clean Air Act. The EPA produced its own programme for reducing power plant emissions that was much tougher than the White House's plan. The White House rejected this proposal. And Congress rejected the Bush administration's plan. The Clear Skies legislation remains stalled in Congress.
The other major source of air pollution, of course, is motor vehicles. The US has 5% of the world's population and uses between 25% and 30% of the world's oil. (The UK, by comparison, has less than 2% of the world's population and uses 2% of the world's oil.) The US imports 63% of that oil, and more than two-thirds of that foreign oil is burned as transportation fuel. Incredibly, overall fuel economy ratings in the US are worse now than in 1988. By comparison, in Europe, petrol mileage in 1998 was already close to 30 miles per gallon, and now averages almost 35mpg. Japan, by 2002, was averaging more than 34mpg, fast approaching its 2010 goal of 35.5 mpg. Even the Republican-controlled EPA estimates that a three-mile per gallon increase in overall fuel efficiency standards would save Americans $25bn a year in oil costs and reduce annual CO2 emissions by 140m tonnes. Why is America so far behind? Simple: the 2.5m SUVs sold every year.
SUVs produce almost 45% more air pollution than average cars. The federal government sets fuel economy standards for new passenger cars at 27.5mpg. But this excludes SUVs, which are not even categorised as "cars"; they are on the books as "light trucks" and therefore only have to average 20.7 mpg. Because of the complexities of the regulations, it is technically possible for SUVs to have fuel efficiency standards as low as 12mpg.
Not only did the White House energy bill not set fuel standards for SUVs, the Republican-led Congress maintained a bill offering a tax benefit that encourages the purchase of the largest, least-efficient brands. If you're in the 35% tax bracket, and you buy a $106,000 Hummer for "business" use, the IRS gives you a refund of $35,000 on the purchase in the first year.
Another of Bush's first-day-in-office moves was to order a moratorium on Clinton-era Clean Water Act regulations controlling the discharge of raw sewage from what the waste industry likes to call "sanitary sewers". By November 2003, the administration took the moratorium a step further when the EPA announced a plan to allow sewage treatment plants to release biologically untreated waste into rivers and other waterways. But only on rainy days.
Clean water has been under systematic attack by the Bush administration, whose policies have sought to remove protection from 20m acres of wetlands and allow mountaintop mining companies to dump their waste directly into waterways.
The Clean Water Act, passed by Congress over Nixon's veto, was established in 1972 not only to regulate the nation's drinking water, but to protect its rivers and lakes for activities such as fishing, swimming and other water sports. According to the Natural Resources Defence Council (NRDC), 30 years later, 75% of Americans live within 10 miles of a polluted river, lake or coastal water.
With water safety standards declining, the administration, ever mindful of the next election, was faced with two options: make water cleaner, or just tell the public its water was cleaner. The Bush White House being the Bush White House, it chose the latter. In early 2004, the EPA's own Office of the Inspector General issued a report that said the agency had repeatedly made false and misleading statements about the purity of the nation's drinking water. In 2002, the EPA claimed that 91% of Americans were drinking safe tap water. In 2003, it upped the number to 94%. According to the NRDC, scientists within the EPA say the percentage of Americans drinking safe tap- water can be estimated at only 81%.
Much of this pollution is due to insufficiently regulated industrial activity. By the 1980s, mining interests had pretty much given up on traditional coal mines, and had come up with a new technique that involved literally blasting the top off a mountain and then digging straight down. In the Appalachia region of Kentucky, Tennessee, West Virginia and Virginia, millions of tons of mountaintop waste has buried 1,200 miles of streams.
A September 2003 EPA report finds nearly 300 Clean Water Act violations by the mountaintop mining industry. How does the Bush administration react? It moves to change the law by establishing the Mountaintop Mining Self-Reporting Programme, which would allow the industry to police itself and issue small fines for violations. The mining industry donated $3.3m to the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign and other Republican candidates.
The despoliation of Appalachia is but a portent of things to come if the Bush administration gets its way. Three months after taking office, Bush announced that all public lands, including wilderness areas and national monuments, would be considered for oil and gas drilling. The industry, by the way, donated $46,620,134 to Bush-Cheney, the Republican National Committee and other Republican candidates in the 2000 and 2002 elections, according to the Centre for Responsive Politics.
In order to prevent hundreds of thousands of acres from being placed under the protection of the Wilderness Act, the Bush administration is allowing the gas industry to stockpile leases and drilling permits on 34m acres of public lands in the Rockies, even though oil and gas is being produced on less than one-third of that land. Once an oil and gas company puts a road on a leased parcel, the land can no longer be protected by the Wilderness Act.
It is something of a mystery, however, why the administration has been so fixated on giving up the 19m-acre Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, with its 1.5m-acre coastal plain, to oil interests, since 95% of Alaska's North Slope is already open to drilling. Deputy interior secretary Griles has said that opening it up is his "greatest wish". Naturalists have called the ANWR, which is teeming with all manner of vegetation and wildlife, "America's Serengeti". Interior secretary Gale Norton calls it "a flat, white nothingness".
Proponents of drilling in the ANWR coastal plain claim it "may" contain between 6bn and 16bn barrels of recoverable oil. The Geological Survey estimated that the coastal plain could profitably produce 3.2bn barrels of oil - enough for six months' worth of US consumption. In the end, even the Republican-led Senate felt the administration had overreached. It blocked all the White House's proposals for drilling in the ANWR. Bush vowed to keep on trying.
Bush's attitude can be seen in the favors he has done to the logging firms, which donated $6,854,321 to the Bush-Cheney campaign and the Republicans in 2000, and which gave a further $3,617,921 in the 2002 electprogramion cycle. Almost a third of the US is covered in forest - some 737m acres. Only around 6% of that is protected by federal law. According to the NRDC, there are already over 380,000 miles of roads that cut through national forests - eight times more than the entire interstate highway system. The Clinton administration, under the Roadless Area Conservation Rule, sought to protect a third of the true wilderness national forest area from further road- building. In its first month in office, the Bush administration set in motion a program to reverse that plan. Henceforth, the industry would get logging and road-building permits whenever it asked for them.
And the Bush administration has taken its reckless approach to the environment far beyond American shores, not only causing damage to global ecosystems, but also further eroding the US's already spotty reputation as a responsible superpower. In its first three years in office, the Bush White House has rejected, undercut or ignored many of the world's international environmental treaties.
On February 14 2002, the day Bush announced his Clear Skies proposal, he laid out his plans for tackling global warming. "My administration is committed to cutting our nation's greenhouse gas intensity - how much we emit per unit of economic activity - by 18% over the next 10 years." In fact, the proposal's wording and its accounting would allow emissions actually to increase by 14% over the next decade, according to the NRDC - exactly the rate of increase for the previous decade.
The Bush White House inherited an environment that had been all but saved by the Clean Air and Clean Water acts of the 1970s. The administration thus turned its back on more than 30 years' worth of advances in environmental legislation and global treaties in order to reward its campaign backers from the oil and gas industries - from whose ranks of executives so many important government posts have been filled. As with the environment, so it is for everything else: it is difficult to point to a single element of American society which comes under federal jurisdiction that is not worse off than it was an administration ago. One can only hope that this is not to be the story of our times, a terrible dream from which we will one day awake only to realize what we've lost.
This is an edited extract from What We've Lost, by Graydon Carter, published by Little Brown on September 9.
Another interesting article
Bush: Global warming is just hot air
The planet's getting hotter, ecosystems are going haywire, government scientists know it -- and still the president denies there's a problem. Guess which industry continues to fuel his campaign?
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By Katharine Mieszkowski
Sept. 10, 2004 | Don't expect President Bush to discuss global warming -- the world's most serious environmental problem -- on the campaign trail in the next eight weeks. The former oilman from Texas doesn't dare alienate his friends in the fossil fuel and auto industries, prime purveyors of global warming. Bush still refuses to admit that burning Chevron with Techron in our Jeep Grand Cherokees, not to mention megatons of coal in our power plants, has brought us 19 of the 20 hottest years on record since 1980.
"You're talking about a president who says that the jury is out on evolution, so what possible evidence would you need to muster to prove the existence of global warming?" says Robert F. Kennedy Jr., author of the new book "Crimes Against Nature." "We've got polar ice caps melting, glaciers disappearing all over the world, ocean levels rising, coral reefs dying. But these people are flat-earthers."
In fact, Bush's see-no-evil, hear-no-evil stance on global warming is so intractable that even when his own administration's scientists weigh in on the issue, he simply won't hear of it.
In a report sent to Congress at the end of August, government scientists argued that the warming of the atmosphere in recent decades cannot be explained by natural causes but must include such human sources as energy consumption and deforestation. It's a conclusion that a consensus of the world's climatologists reached years ago but that Bush has ignored throughout his presidency.
When the New York Times quizzed Bush about why his scientists had shifted their positions on what caused global warming, he appeared entirely ignorant that they had. "I don't think we did," he said. When tipped off to the paper's coverage of the report, he added: "Oh, OK, well, that's got to be true." Maybe he really doesn't read the newspapers. His aides then assured reporters that, no, this report wouldn't signal any change in his policies around climate change.
In other words, Bush will continue to delay regulatory action related to global warming, while pledging to invest in more study of the issue in the name of "sound science," before doing anything about it.
"The Bush administration has been playing whack-a-mole trying to beat back its own scientists on global warming; every once in a while they miss one," says Jeremy Symons, who worked at the Environmental Protection Agency in 2001, when the president reneged on his campaign promise to regulate global-warming pollution -- a move, Symons says, done for "no reason other than to appease polluters."
"The strength of the science is overwhelming and it's reflected in this new report," adds Symons, now climate change program manager for the National Wildlife Federation. "It doesn't leave the administration anywhere to hide about the fact that it's not doing anything. The science hasn't changed, but when it comes to policy the Bush administration still has its head in the sand."
It's a repeat of a situation early in Bush's presidency, when he asked the National Academy of Sciences to look into global warming and they found that it is happening and is likely caused by such human activities as burning fossil fuels. The response? The administration just continued to call for further study and even infamously censored mentions of the harmful impact of global warming from a federal environmental report.
"Since the first time President Bush has marginally said global warming could be real, he has delayed, denied or tried to derail any advancements to address it," says Betsy Loyless, vice president for policy for the League of Conservation Voters, which has endorsed John Kerry for president in 2004.
The Bush administration has refused to allow climate experts to even participate in climate policy discussions, asserts Rosina Bierbaum, a former director of the White House science office. Rather than consult with its own scientific advisors when devising a strategy on climate change, the White House constructed a plan primarily from conversations with the National Economic Counsel.
"I wasn't asked anything," says Bierbaum, now dean of the University of Michigan's School of Natural Resources and Environment. "In fact, I was told to stop sending weekly science updates to the White House, as had been the tradition with the previous administration."
Now that Bush is seeking reelection, he's certainly not going to bring up global warming, which he's done so little about. "Bush is not mentioning it because it goes against the major interest of his supporters," says Ross Gelbspan, author of a new book on global warming called "Boiling Point," which calls for buying out coal miners to speed the transition from CO2-intensive coal to electricity made from renewable sources. "Bush has given the reins of our climate and energy policies to the coal and oil industries completely."
Oil and gas companies have contributed more than $2 million to Bush's reelection effort, making him the largest recipient of the industry's campaign dollars, according to the Center for Responsive Politics; and the coal industry has given his reelection effort more than $200,000, making the president that industry's biggest beneficiary too.
When you dig into Bush's reelection campaign, you find that he euphemistically refers to global warming as "climate change," and that his 2005 budget includes nearly $2 billion for scientific research "focused on reducing significant uncertainties in climate science."
"His response to everything is we still need more study," adds Kennedy. "You're never going to get a scientist to say there is an absolute certainty that this consequence is going to happen. You're standing on a railroad track and a train is coming. A scientist is not going to say that there is a complete 100 percent certainty that that train is going to hit you, but it's still a good idea to get off the track."
When Bush does address climate change, he brags about his programs "Healthy Forests" and "Clear Skies," chipper names that mask what they actually do. The programs allow companies to voluntarily reduce greenhouse gas intensity, not overall greenhouse gas emissions.
That means that as the economy grows, the ratio of greenhouse gas emissions to economic output should not grow as quickly. Yet that phenomenon is already happening on its own; as the economy becomes more service-oriented, it's naturally becoming less CO2-intensive. According to the Government Accountability Office, emission intensity was already projected to drop 14 percent between 2002 and 2012.
"The core of the Bush policy was a voluntary goal of reducing emissions 'intensity' by 18 percent by 2012," says Aimee Christensen, executive director of Environment 2004, a political action group. So what the policy really calls for -- but does not require -- is a mere 4 percent reduction in intensity. What's lost in the discussion about "emissions intensity," says Christensen, is that actual greenhouse gas emissions will increase 12 percent.
Compare that to the targets set by the Kyoto Protocol, which would have mandated that by 2012 the U.S. return to emission levels 7 percent below those of 1990, or the McCain/Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act, which asked that the U.S. return to year 2000 levels of emissions. Both those plans would result in actual reductions, not just intensity reductions. The Bush administration walked away from the first proposal on the international stage and opposed the second here at home.
"Clearly, if the White House took a different position, the McCain-Lieberman plan would have had a good shot," says Symons. "If President Bush put half as much energy into doing something about global warming as he does to opposing the efforts in Congress, we may actually have gotten something done."
While the U.S. rests on its voluntary plan for just slightly reducing the growth rate of its global warming emissions, it continues to account for more than 20 percent of the man-made greenhouse gases produced in the world. "It didn't take 9/11 and the war on Iraq to begin to make the United States the pariah in international circles," says Randy Hayes, founder of the Rainforest Action Network and director of sustainability for Oakland, Calif. "Bush's fight against the Kyoto Protocol, and the U.S. opposing setting firm targets and timelines for the reduction of greenhouse gases, did that."
Further evidence that the voluntary Bush program is not doing much of anything can be found in how few companies participate in its much ballyhooed Climate Leaders program. Fifty-six companies got involved, with fewer than half of those agreeing to set targets to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. "The bottom line is, in the absence of a mandatory program you're not going to have the kind of participation you need," says Vicki Arroyo, director of policy analysis for the PEW Center on Global Climate Change.
After all, why should companies participate if they don't have to? "With this voluntary framework, it just creates so little incentive for people to do anything, even if you have a good program in place to help them do the right thing," says Christensen.
And then there's Bush's Climate VISION program, which allows industry sectors to set their own voluntary emissions intensity reduction targets. Not surprisingly, the industry associations set very modest goals for themselves. For instance, the electric power industry pledged to reduce carbon intensity by 3 to 5 percent within the decade, while complaining that this would be "very difficult" to accomplish.
With his ideological opposition to forcing industry to do anything, Bush has focused on funding research initiatives into new technologies that could help CO2-intensive industries emit less carbon in the future -- the far future. For instance, he's trumpeting his investment in a demonstration power plant, which would capture and sequester the CO2 emissions under the ground. But concerns about catastrophic CO2 leaks and possible aquifer contamination have left some unconvinced. "Certainly, the verdict is not in on coal sequestration, and until it is, we're highly skeptical of that," says Dave Hamilton, director of global warming and energy programs for the Sierra Club. Gelbspan is more direct. "Carbon sequestration is a huge misuse of money that could be put into renewable energy," he says. "This would be a boondoggle for Halliburton and Bechtel. If you simply use that money to put up wind farms, you'd be doing the right thing."
Some environmental groups favor government investment in research to try to make carbon sequestration work -- but not without corresponding mandatory limits on C02 emissions. "We're not going to support them in a separate fashion because that's a way to get swindled," says David G. Hawkins, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council's climate center. So even if carbon sequestration does show promise, subsidizing its research and development without also forcing the coal industry to emit less C02 amounts to a giveaway to a polluting industry.
Bush has adopted the same new-technology-is-our-savior approach with the auto industry, funding research into hydrogen fuel-cell cars, while only marginally raising the CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards that regulate how many miles per gallon cars on the road must get. He's hyped the promise of hydrogen fuel-cell cars, which would emit nothing but water from the tailpipe.
But despite his campaign's claim that such cars would "emit no air pollutants or greenhouse gases," using hydrogen could actually end up creating a lot of CO2 emissions, according to Joseph Romm, the author of "The Hype About Hydrogen: Fact and Fiction in the Race to Save the Climate," who was in charge of clean energy in the Department of Energy in the Clinton administration. That's because the hydrogen has to be derived from somewhere and today 95 percent of hydrogen in the U.S. comes from natural gas -- a fossil fuel. And since hydrogen is such a diffuse gas it would take a lot of energy to compress or deliver it. Even those who continue to be more optimistic about getting hydrogen from renewable sources in the future don't see them on the road in large numbers for decades.
While Bush bets on new technologies saving us from global warming, the atmosphere continues to heat up. "Climate scientists are divided on whether or not there is global warming the same way that Americans are divided about whether or not Ralph Nader should be president," says Eban Goodstein, an economics professor at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., who is founder of the Green House Network, a nonprofit working to stop global warming. Which is to say, they're not divided at all. "And without presidential leadership and given the hold that anti-government Republicans have, especially in the House, nothing will happen."
With the topic largely off the table in the presidential reelection bid, the nation loses not only more time, but an important chance for the president to educate the public about the biggest environmental threat to the country today.
"Global climate change is going to require a global solution," says Nigel Purvis, an environmental scholar at the Brookings Institution. "The president is a very important player on the issue of climate change. The power of the office to educate the American people does matter." But apparently not in the office of this president.
