George Bush failed to support the Kyoto Accord and has generally supported radical pullbacks from the environmental progress this country made over the last 30 years in cleaning our water, cleaning our air and protecting endangered species habitat. The Bush Administration proposes cutting down forests in the name of saving them, building roads in wilderness, letting the Arctic melt away, and relying on automakers to reduce greenhouse emissions voluntarily.
But as with the rationale for war in Iraq and the fabricated connection between 9/11 and al Queda, Bush just can't seem to help prevarication to get his way. Or maybe he just cannot tell the difference between PR spin and scientific facts. The Washington Post editorializes, here, on the Bush Administration's attempt to claim, at a recent international climate conference, that the United States is actually cutting greenhouse emissions. When the Post first contested Bush Administration figures claiming a decline, James L. Connaughton of the White House Council on Environmental Quality defended the Bush record and claimed the numbers were indeed correct. But now figures put out by the Energy Information Agency show a "hefty" 2 percent increase for 2004--the biggest in five years. The U.S. is still at the top of the world in greenhouse emissions, producing one-fourth of the planet's burden.
Lord Rees, the president of Britain's elite scientific academy, responded to questions about the Energy Information Administration report with a clear critique of US policies.
"We should not underestimate the challenge of achieving economic growth whilst reducing emissions, and the United States is not the only country that is struggling to do this. ... But it seems unlikely that the present U.S. strategy of only setting emissions targets relative to eonomic growth, reducing so-called greenhouse gas intensity, will be enough." Gas Emissions Reached High in U.S. in '04, New York Times, Dec. 21, 2005, at A20, available here.
Connaughton has also claimed that the Bush Administration had created 60 programs for addressing greenhouse emissions. The Post notes that only 3 of those 60 are new programs--there rest are merely repackagings of existing programs. Given this record of misrepresenting progress on two fronts (actual declines in emission, programs to cut emissions), the Post poses a question that applies to almost everything the Bush Administration touches these days:
If it can't get its numbers right, why should we take seriously the White House's declared intention to forge a "constructive and effective approach" to climate change at all? Post editorial, supra.
Bush has avid support in his anti-environmentalism stance from Richard Pombo, a Republican with an ax to grind against all those who want to protect the environment. Pombo has proposed to "update" the Endangered Species Act by essentially gutting the most important provisions to protect critical habitat and then having the federal government pay landowners if they are not permitted to do whatever they want with their land. That policy is, quite simply, nutty. Being a landowner does not provide anyone with a license to commit mayhem, hold drug parties, set reckless fires, dig into the ground and break water mains or sewer lines. When they do those things, they aren't just taking care of private business; they're messing up public goods. The same is true when a landowner proposes to destroy a wetland or cut down a forest that is critical habitat to a species. It is entirely unreasonable to pass a law that requires taxpayers to compensate for one particular regulatory restriction. It is not demanded by the Constitution, and it should not be supported by Congress. The only purpose behind such a provision is to limit critical habitat requirements with a budgetary hammer.
Comments