A Quick
Look at How Democrats Helped Bush Rape Mother Nature
By
JOSH FRANK
George
W. Bush’s environmental record can be dummied down to one simple
word: devastating.
Not
only has President Bush gutted numerous environmental laws--including
the Clean Air and Water Acts--he has also set a new precedence by disregarding
the world’s top scientists and the Pentagon, as their concerns
about the rate of Global Warming grow graver by the day.
As
Mark Townsend and Paul Harris reported for the Observer in the UK in
February of 2004, “[The Pentagon report] predicts that abrupt
climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries
develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water
and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses
that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.”
Indeed
one of Bush’s first actions in office was to forge the dirty “Energy
Policy Act of 2003”, which calls for a slash in renewable energy
funding and an increase in fossil fuel consumption. The bill, authored
by Vice President Cheney’s Energy Task Force, met with a reported
39 oil lobbyists and executives to form the outlandish legislation.
Portions of the bill are still hung up in Congress.
And
like his predecessor Bill Clinton, President Bush saw nothing wrong
with the disastrous practice of hill-top strip mining, and overturned
a federal ruling that had banned the practice during the Clinton years,
despite some top Democrats’, including Al Gore's, dismay.
Then
in another bold move, the Bush administration pandered to corporate
timber barons and authored a new radically bad forest plan, titled the
“Healthy Forests Initiative”, mirrored after Clinton’s
Salvage Rider bill and language Democratic Senator Tom Daschle slipped
into a bill in the summer of 2002. Daschle's legal jargon, backed by
the Sierra Club and other "green" titans, allowed logging
on First American’s land in South Dakota without having to abide
by environmental restraints or lawsuits. These very holy lands were
once visionary refuge for Lakota Sioux elders including Crazy Horse
and Black Elk.
As
environmental writer Jeffrey St. Clair wrote at the time, ”The
logging plan was consecrated in the name of fire prevention. The goal
of the bill, Daschle said, "is to reduce the risk of forest fire
by getting [logging] crews on the ground as quickly as possible to start
thinning." It's long been the self-serving contention of the timber
lobby that the only way to prevent forest fires is to log them first.”
The
ex-governor of Texas loved Daschle’s cunning style, and Bush’s
own forest plan--supported by the majority of Democrats in the Senate
(John Kerry forgot to vote that day)--authorized over $760 million dollars
in the hopes of preventing wild fires. The legislation however, accomplishes
no such thing, and instead sanctions the pillage of over 2.5 million
acres of federal forest land by 2012.
Following
the forest debacle, Bush began pushing his Clean Skies initiative which
calls for a reduction in the limit of harsh chemicals allowed to be
released by industrial polluters. The legislation currently aims to
cut the US’s “carbon intensity” by measuring the harsh
pollutants with an economic model, rather than a scientific analysis.
And now the proposed Republican budget for 2005, with the support of
many Democrats in the Senate, calls for almost $2 billion dollars in
cuts for environmental protection.
This
quick look back on Bush's environmental report card reveals grades far
worse then any on his Yale transcript. It is just too bad the blame
for nature’s continuous ruin isn’t Bush's alone.
Josh
Frank is the author of the forthcoming book, Left
Out: How Liberals Helped Bush to be published by Common Courage
Press late this year.
Weekend
Edition June 12 / 13, 2004
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