George Bush and the environment?

The administration has abdicated the decades-old federal responsibility to protect native animals and plants from extinction, becoming the first not to voluntarily add a single species to the endangered species list. It has opened millions of acres of wilderness-including some of the nation’s most environmentally sensitive public lands-to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Under one plan, loggers could take 10 percent of the trees in California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument; many of the Monument’s old-growth sequoias, 200 years old and more, could be felled to make roof shingles. Other national treasures that have been opened for development include the million-acre Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, the 2,000-foot red-rock spires at Fisher Towers, Utah, and dozens of others.

And then, of course, the White House has all but denied the existence of what may be the most serious environmental problem of our time, global warming. After campaigning on a promise to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, Bush made an abrupt about-face once elected, calling his earlier pledge "a mistake" and announcing that he would not regulate CO2 emissions from power plants-even though the United States accounts for a fourth of the world’s total industrial CO2 emissions. Since then, the White House has censored scientific reports that mentioned the subject, walked away from the Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and even, at the behest of ExxonMobil, engineered the ouster of the scientist who chaired the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

So why aren’t more people aware that George W. Bush is compiling what is arguably the worst environmental record of any president in recent history? The easy explanations-that environmental issues are complex, that war and terrorism push most other concerns off the front pages-are only part of the story. The real reason may be far simpler: Few people know the magnitude of the administration’s attacks on the environment because the administration has been working very hard to keep it that way.

This entry was posted on Monday, April 19th, 2010 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.