Bush Administration Adds To Poor Environmental Legacy
As President George W. Bush presides over a steady stream of environmentally unfriendly regulations meant to last into the Obama administration, he is now drawing more criticism than ever.
The House of Representatives global warming committee wrote just before the November 4 election: "While the first 100 days of the Bush administration initiated perhaps the worst period of environmental deregulation in American history, the last 100 days of a Bush presidency could be even worse."
Bush issued an order on his first day in office on January 20, 2001 that blocked regulations to reduce arsenic in drinking water, sulfur in diesel fuel and general raw sewage releases.
Throughout his term in office, Bush has rejected any mandatory, economy-wide limits on the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, which is emitted by coal-fired power plants and vehicles running on fossil fuels, as well as natural sources.
His decisions have caused problems between the United States and other major developed countries, which have joined the carbon-capping Kyoto Protocol and are working at a meeting in Poland on a successor to this international treaty to fight climate change.
The prospects for solid progress are slim as long as the Bush administration remains in office, as most of the attention is focused on the future Obama administration.
As his terms draws to an end, Bush’s team has assembled a long list of so-called environmental "midnight regulations" covering global warming, air pollution, endangered species and coal mining, among other issues.
But Bush’s environmental opponents say these last-minute rules overwhelmingly favor industry over human health and welfare. And they are moving through the federal bureaucracy at a pace that will ensure they are in effect when President-elect Barack Obama takes office on January 20, meaning new rules will be more difficult for the next administration and Congress to undo.
John Walke of the Natural Resources Defense Council said Bush administration officials have been relentlessly opposed to clean energy solutions, climate change responsibility and basic safeguards for air and water and land across all of their agencies over eight long years.
For Patti Goldman, of the environmental advocacy group Earthjustice, the Bush administration’s failings fall into three categories:
- Exploitation of public resources, especially oil and gas development on public land;
- A refusal to address climate change domestically or internationally;
- The reversal or delay of public health protections from environmental dangers.
Goldman, who has watched environmental policy since the Reagan administration in the early 1980s, said it’s the worst she’s ever seen.
The Bush administration has long been accused of letting politics trump science at the Interior Department on protecting polar bears as well as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding carbon emissions.
A landmark Supreme Court ruling in 2007 gave the EPA the ability to regulate carbon pollution under the Clean Air Act, but so far the agency has delayed doing anything, ensuring that the problem lands on Obama’s agenda. The president-elect supports mandatory limits on carbon emissions.
The Interior Department listed polar bears as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, pointing to climate change as the reason the animal’s icy habitat was melting away.
However, this new status offered no plans to address global warming or drilling in the Arctic for the fossil fuels that create the climate-warming greenhouse effect.
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