The environment burns while Bush and Congress fiddle

The 2004 Republican Party platform revealed absolutely no concern for the environment, while stressing the protection of private property and the current economy. After five years, it's time to revisit the environment to see how it has fared under the current administration. If the Bush Administration's encounter with the environment could be summed up with a sports analogy, it would read Bush 24, environment zero.

Using presidential authority, Bush has weakened environmental protections by applying many tactics such as appointing industry lobbyists to head agencies, changing or ignoring rules and enforcement, and passing new laws to negate protections, such as the Healthy Forest Act, the Clean Skies bill and a massive new energy bill.

Industry and the Republican Party employed a number of schemes to help destroy laws protecting the environment. A third of Bush's appointments to federal courts worked as lobbyists for polluting industries, such as oil, gas, timber and mining, and by May 2004, Bush had appointed over 100 former lobbyists and company lawyers to head agencies that regulate industry and the environment. In case after case, former lobbyists redefined policies to shift the regulations to favor their former clients, most often polluting industries.

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

There are dozens of additional examples. Under Bush, civil penalties imposed by the EPA against polluters set a record 15-year low, and cases against refineries and coal-fired power plants 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 his administration continues to push for drilling off shore in the protected Alaskan wilderness and other environmentally fragile areas.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 exempted oil and gas drilling on public lands from following the Clean Water and Safe Drinking Water Acts and other environmental laws, and allowed 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' objections. Bush's 2007 budget proposes to sell off $1 billion worth of public land: 300,000 acres of national forest and 500,000 acres of BLM land.

Besides the backdoor approach to non-enforcement of laws, far-right Congressmen consider environmental protection bad for profits and seek 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 restrict private property and commercial development.

Overall, environmental records under the Bush Administration, a Republican Congress and Republican-appointed federal judges have fallen like bowling pins in a master's tournament. Scientists assume that no single weather effect can be blamed on a single cause because the earth's weather system is so complex, yet rising greenhouse gases and record temperatures are more than coincidental. Although some environmental records cannot be directly attributed to the current powers in Washington, they point out serious consequences resulting from inattention, a failure to provide leadership, and outright hostility toward environmental protection.

In February 2006, Karl Rove bragged that President Bush has transformed conservatism from "reactionary" to "forward looking" by incorporating liberal ideas into foreign policy. Rove claims Bush is "spreading human liberty and preserving human dignity" with his current environmental policies. The GOP highlights Bush's environmental efforts such as increasing mileage requirements for SUVs by .03 miles per gallon, and cutting taxes so people can buy new cars. Rove didn't say whether this is part of Bush's "compassionate conservative" stance, but environmental records reveal Bush's effectiveness.

In March 2006, the largest oil spill in Alaska's North Slope dumped 267,000 gallons of crude oil over two acres at the Prudhoe Bay oil production facilities run by BP, Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips. The spill was overlooked for five days and is among the worst in the pipeline's history. Resulting from a hole in a corroded 34-inch pipe, the oil spill was predicted a year earlier when inspectors discovered serious corrosion that the oil companies ignored. The Fairbanks Daily News reported that Federal officials "scolded" BP for insufficient pipeline maintenance. Meanwhile a May 2006 study by the National Marine Fisheries Service found that the Exxon Valdez oil spill in March 1989 is continuing to cause long-term damage to wildlife. Native Americans are still trying to collect $100 million in damages, and the US still hasn't collected $4.5 billion in punitive damages for the oil spill 17 years ago.

Many of the records set during Republican control involve global warming. 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. The US released a record 7.1 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere in 2004. 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, which has wide ranging effects such as reducing annual rainfall in east Africa and rising water temperatures in the Indian Ocean.

Another possible effect of global warming occurred this spring in Maine, Massachusetts and New Hampshire where those along the Merrimack, Spicket, and Shawsheen Rivers saw the worst flooding in 70 years. One has to go back to the floods of 1936, with 13 days of torrential rain and 200 deaths, to find an equally devastating storm. Eight of New Hampshire's ten counties were declared disaster areas, 600 roads were closed, and tons of sewage was washed into rivers.

European flooding is also setting records. In April 2006, the Danube rose to its highest level in 111 years, pushing people from their homes and flooding more than 12,000 acres of farmland. These floods come on the heels of devastating floods last year when heavy rains also caused flooding in Yemen, Colombia, Eastern Europe, northeastern Australia, Indonesia, and northern Argentina.

In 2005, a dramatic rise of 7 C in the ocean temperature led to the deaths of birds and fish from Central California to British Columbia. Populations of seabirds, such as cormorants, auklets and murres, and fish, such as salmon and rockfish, fell to record lows, with deaths of cormorants 80 times above normal. In the Pacific Northwest, fisheries declined for the first time in 50 years, and fishermen from San Diego to Mendocino reported the lowest fish catch in 23 years. In 2002, Bush caused the largest salmon die-off ever recorded in California when he diverted irrigation water to potato farmers. Similar die-offs of birds and fish occurred in the North Sea, caused by warming water and the disappearance of plankton, forewarning of an ecological collapse in the oceans as the world heats up.

The decline of fisheries worldwide also puts pressure on other species, such as the great white shark, whose population declined 70 percent in the past 15 years. In Newfoundland, researchers found populations of five species - roundnose grendadier, onion-eye grenadier, blue hake, spiny eel and spinytail skate - have declined 89 to 98 percent in the past 17 years. Coastal species are fished out and factory ships are trawling for these fish at depths of up to a mile in the open ocean.

Coral death also set a record in May 2006 when the first coral reefs were listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. Elkhorn and staghorn coral, the main reef-building species in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, declined 80 to 98 percent in the region, due to higher water temperatures, a result of global warming. Coral death was virtually unknown 25 years ago, but today dead coral is showing up as white dead rubble around the world. Extensive coral reef death was also found in the Seychelles and the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, which reported the worst coral die-off in the past 700 years. In 1998, 50 percent of the coral reefs in Seychelles and Australia were healthy, while today only 7.5 percent of the coral is alive. Half of the 134 fish species living in the region have disappeared from the damaged coral areas.

Under an administration that denies global warming is caused by carbon dioxide, the weather continues to break records. In May, the National Climatic Data Center announced that April in the U.S. was the hottest since record keeping began in 1895. Temperatures rose 4.5 F above the twentieth century average, while dry conditions and severe drought persisted across 31 percent of the country, from the western high plains to the Missouri Valley. Phoenix, for example, 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.

Along with drought come forest fires, which are also setting records. In March 2006, 1.8 million acres burned in Colorado, Oklahoma and Texas, the most at any time since record keeping began. The Southwest and the central and southern Plains are expecting a worse-than-usual fire season in 2006, compounded by a lack of water in Colorado, which had below average snow packs eight of the past nine seasons.

In the Great Lakes area, government scientists say they have never seen a winter without ice on the lakes. Ice normally forms in November, but this year ferries crossed Lake Erie for the first time in 100 years. A continent away in Brazil, the Amazon River basin, the world's largest rain forest, suffered a calamity with the worst drought since record keeping began 100 years ago. The number of forest fires in the area tripled to 1,500 last September. Scientists attribute the Amazon drought to the same rising water temperatures that produced Hurricane Katrina.

Climate researchers at Perdue and MIT find evidence that global warming causes increased hurricane activity, doubling intensity and frequency of storms with each one-quarter-degree increase in average global temperature. In keeping with these findings, last year's hurricane season broke many records. Katrina was the deadliest hurricane in the US since 1928, and the costliest ($80 billion) natural disaster ever to hit the US. Other records set include more tropical storms (28), the most hurricanes (15), the largest number of hurricanes hitting the US (4), the most powerful storm ever recorded, and the most Category 5 hurricanes (4). For the first time, forecasters exhausted the list of 21 proper names and resorted to the Greek alphabet for new names. Of the 20 most expensive hurricanes in history, 5 occurred in 2005 and 11 occurred since 2000.

The current administration refuses to take any steps to combat global warming but at least they report it. NASA reported that 2005 was the hottest year ever recorded, hotter than any time in the past 650,000 years, according to analysis of air bubbles trapped in Antarctic ice. The last time carbon dioxide levels were this high was 60 million years ago, during the Paleocene epoch, when a massive die-off occurred. The past ten years were the warmest ever recorded, apart from 1996, which was slightly cooler than 1990. The 2005 average global temperature was 58.3 F (14.6 C), the hottest since record keeping began in the late 1800s. Heat waves across Europe killed a record 31,000 people in 2003. When the Bush Administration isn't censoring them, these scientists continue to report that the warming is a result of higher concentrations of greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide.

Over the past 50 years, temperatures rose more in the high-latitudes of Alaska, Siberia, and the Antarctic Peninsula, which is why Arctic sea ice shrank to its smallest extent ever in 2005. Mount Kilimanjaro will lose its famous snow mantel and the glaciers in Glacier National Park will melt over the next 35 years. Satellite photos show the ice shelf in Antarctica, once thought to be stable for the next 100 years, breaking in only 35 days.

In June 2001, the National Academy of Sciences reported, "Greenhouse gases are accumulating in the earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise." Bush responded to the report, "We do not know how much our climate could, or will change in the future. We do not know how fast change will occur, or even how some of our actions could impact it," and devoted $25 million to research the subject. Since then, the White House proposed plans to reduce enforcement of pollution rules for US industry and energy companies in favor of a voluntarily curb on carbon dioxide emissions.

In April 2006, reports surfaced that the Bush Administration was making it difficult for climate research scientists to speak truthfully about global warming. Examples included a 2002 report of the Interior Department censuring a news release because it would cause "great problems in the department." In November 2005, Bush censors "purged key words from the (press) releases, including 'global warming,' 'warming climate,' and 'climate change.'" Officials also attempted to alter what scientists told the media and bar researchers from talking to the media about policy matters.

Government attacks on the environment, assisted by corporate-sponsored attacks, attempt to show global warming as a liberal hoax. In May 2006, Bush's business allies aired commercials in 13 cities attacking Al Gore's film, "An Inconvenient Truth," which reveals how pollution and greenhouse gases are affecting the environment. The attack ads against the film claim, "The fuels that produce carbon dioxide have freed us from a world of back-breaking labor and now some politicians want to label carbon dioxide a pollutant and what would our lives be like then?" The ads are sponsored by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, which promotes smoking "as a civil duty." Funded by ExxonMobil, Texaco, Ford Motor Company, Philip Morris and Pfizer, the Institute denies links between severe storms, melting ice caps, droughts and rising sea temperatures.

Despite attacks on the environment by the current rulers and their neo-conservative industry supporters, Americans want to preserve the environment. In March 2006, a TIME magazine/ABC News/Stanford University poll revealed that 88 percent believe global warming threatens future generations and 38 percent view global warming as a serious problem. Two-thirds say Bush's policies did little or nothing to help the environment last year, and 68 percent believe that the government should do more to address global warming. Sixty percent want the government to lower power plant emissions, and 87 percent support tax breaks to develop alternative energy sources.

Evidence from numerous sources reveals that Bush and the Republicans are out of step with most Americans and have been a complete disaster in preserving the environment. They actively encourage industry, land developers and polluters to wantonly extract the nation's natural resources and degrade the air, soil and water, while refusing to rein in oil usage and air pollution or enforce energy conservation. Their blind support of unregulated "free enterprise" to curb consumption and voluntary regulation to halt pollution will work only as long as easy credit and massive Chinese imports make life abundant, if pressured, for the average person. Unfortunately, the effects of the nation's gluttony for oil, automobiles, energy and an exorbitant standard of living have serious repercussions.

With only 5 percent of the world's population, the US consumes 30 percent of the world's resources. We also exert a powerful influence on trading partners and the world to emulate our wasteful, private-profit vision of "the good life." Collectively, humans have soiled their nest and face increased danger and dislocation 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 larger the climatic shifts and human dislocations will be and the more arbitrary and restrictive the changes will be necessary to curb the 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.

MS/DM

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MNA