From News Wire Services

Bush reputation on environment mixed

Conservationists cite 'worst' record; others see 'progress'

By CHARLES SEABROOK

To environmentalists, George W. Bush is the archenemy.

After three years in office, the president has few saving graces, as far as environmentalists are concerned. He seems bent, they say, on rolling back the nation's most important environmental rules, reversing years of progress against dirty air and water.

"It's the worst environmental record in American history," says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club. "The administration consistently favors polluting industries over health and safety."

That's why his group and other leading environmental organizations are making the defeat of Bush in November a top priority.

One group, the League of Conservation Voters, is breaking with the past to focus much of its $10 million to $12 million budget on ousting Bush rather than on trying to influence a handful of key congressional campaigns.

The league recently gave Bush its first-ever "F" on its Presidential Environmental Report Card. The reason: "For the past three years, he has taken nearly every opportunity to roll back safeguards to protect our air, water and public lands," says league President Deb Callahan.

Others admire positions

But legions of others in business, government and everyday life say Bush deserves an "A." He has brought common sense back into environmental decision-making, and the nation's economy is better for it, they say.

"The president's approach to environmental progress is predicated on the notion that economic growth is the solution, not the problem," says James Connaughton, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. "We have very good reason to be very optimistic about . . . our nation's future environmental progress."

Frank Maisano, spokesman for the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, a group of power companies that includes the Atlanta-based Southern Co., says that when Bush's environmental policies are implemented, the nation will have cleaner air, cleaner water and healthier forests.

"Dramatic progress is being made," he said. "Yet, if you talk to environmentalists, you'll get a different story because they're so stuck in their position that the Bush administration can do no good."

Some of the issues fueling the polarization include:

• Clean air. The administration's proposed rules to roll back a cornerstone of the Clean Air Act -- known as "New Source Review" -- would allow old coal-fired power plants to upgrade equipment without having to install pollution controls. The proposals came after intense lobbying by the electric utility industry.

The changes would have taken place on Dec. 26, but a federal appeals court in Washington, ruling last month on a case brought by a coalition of 14 states, the District of Columbia and numerous local governments, temporarily blocked the rules. "The ruling will help stop the Bush administration's ongoing effort to eviscerate the Clean Air Act," said New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.

Scott Segal, director of the Electric Reliability Coordinating Council, called the decision "a setback for energy efficiency and environmental protection."

• Mercury. The administration last month proposed the nation's first-ever rules to reduce mercury emissions -- by 70 percent, by 2018. The administration says that percentage can be achieved with technology currently under development.

But Jill Johnson of the Georgia Sierra Club echoes what a majority of environmentalists contend. "We prefer the best technology available be used to clean up mercury emissions," she said. "This technology is available."

• Public lands. New rules by the administration will soften existing restrictions on federal lands and open more areas to more mining, drilling and logging. The administration's Healthy Forests Initiative, for instance, permits everything from controlled burns to commercial logging to thinning national forests.

The administration contends that by making logging and thinning easier on public lands, the forests will be healthier and less susceptible to devastating fires and insect attacks. "True to its name, the Healthy Forest Initiative is one of the largest ecological restoration programs enacted in years," says Connaughton.

But environmentalists like David Carr of the Southern Environmental Law Institute based in Charlottesville, Va., see the Bush initiative as a backdoor way of "letting timber companies run rampant in our national forests."

Just as upsetting to the environmentalists was the White House's announcement just before Christmas that it was opening Alaska's Tongass National Forest -- at 16.8 million acres, the nation's largest public forest, slightly larger than the state of West Virginia -- to logging and mining interests, despite more than 2 million public comments opposing the decision. The administration contends that logging will only occur in 3 percent of the Tongass.

Environmentalists, though, are not the only ones unhappy with Bush's land-use policies. Last week, a group of former National Park Service executives and rangers scolded him for allegedly failing to care for America's natural treasures.

The group, called the Coalition of Concerned National Park Service Retirees, sent Bush a letter saying the U.S. Department of Interior, headed by Bush appointee Gale Norton, ignored the president's 2000 campaign promises to improve the natural health of the national parks, which many experts say have been deteriorating for decades.

Interior and the National Park Service, the coalition says, continue to "manage our national parks as if they were arbitrary parcels of public land available to be exploited for any purposes favored by corporate interests."

• Global warming. The administration urged the Senate to reject the 1997 Kyoto Treaty, in which 38 countries agreed to limit green house gas emissions, such as carbon dioxide, to control global warming.

The preponderance of scientific evidence shows that the planet faces dire consequences -- from rising sea levels to die-offs of hundreds of species -- because of climate change from global warming, most of which is due to man-made causes such as burning fossil fuels.

Former Vice President Al Gore last week called Bush a "moral coward" in part, he said, because Bush is caving in to industry on global warming.

"The problem is that our world is now confronting a five-alarm fire that calls for bold moral and political leadership from the United States," Gore said.

Connaughton, the White House Council on Environmental Quality chairman, explained last week why the Senate voted 95-0 against the Kyoto framework. The green house emission reduction targets set for the United States, he said, would have caused "significant economic harm and a loss of million of jobs. Second, the treaty did not require meaningful participation by the world's developing countries, a number of which will experience rapid growth in coming decades."

He said the Bush administration is implementing a climate change strategy based on sound "science and advancing technologies."

Grudging praise

Despite their castigation of Bush's environmental record, environmentalists faintly praise a handful of his decisions: for backing tougher standards for diesel engines, for a plan to clean up PCBs in the Hudson River in New York; and for killing a proposal that would have weakened protection for millions of acres of wetlands.

Still, when stacked against Bush's actions to weaken environmental laws, he still deserves an "F," says the League of Conservation Voters' Callahan.

The league has endorsed Democrat John Kerry for president, the earliest presidential endorsement in the organization's 34-year history.

Environmentalists also are vilifying Bush for what he didn't say last week. During his 5,200-word State of the Union address, the word "environment" never crossed his lips.

"The president's views [on the environment] were made plain by the conspicuous absence of this issue from his speech," said Peter Cannavo, a professor of government at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. "Perhaps he considers the use of performance-enhancing drugs by professional athletes, to which he devoted a good chunk of his time, to be a more important issue than the state of the planet we inhabit."

Some see another omen.

Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director, pointed out that the leading Democratic presidential candidates have not mounted a sharp attack thus far on Bush's environmental record.

Says Pope: "Bush apparently felt no need to defend himself, and he gave not a word to the subject."

I don't have a great many 'absolutes.' The natural environment is one of them. I do not know enough about the environment - I'm a silicon gate-oxide process engineer, not an ecologist, climatologist, nor any manner of environmental scientist. Therefore, I like most others have to rely on the work of others to form opinions. I have read the literature extensively, but am strictly an amateur at best. I am far more widely read than most concerning environmental issues, but a layperson I shall always remain.

I look at the environment this way. I am looking for a grant. I go to the NAS, and propose an experiment. (I'll keep it simple for brevity) My experiment is this: I would like funding to add 7 billion tons of carbon, in the form of CO₂ into the atmosphere per year for a one hundred year period.

Now, I am quite certain that I would not receive my funding, and that my proposed research would be ridiculed as both foolhardy, and potentially life threatening to many, if not most species on this planet.

Yet, this is precisely what we are doing with every moment of every day. We are in fact conducting my thought experiment - or a very close approximation of it.

I would expect to be subject to ridicule and possibly ostracized by my peers for proposing such a crazed experiment.

I do not know how much CO₂ the Earth's carbon sinks can process over an annual period. Putting additional loads on a system that appears balanced is absurd.

It is for this reason alone that I shall always put the environment at the very head of issues which face humanity. Wars end, recessions wane, but the environment is the home for us all. It is therefore, the issue of and for the ages.

We need to stress to our elected officials that all other issues, no matter how seemingly vexing, are of a fleeting nature, and that it is nature, that is our most urgent issue. Now, and for the foreseeable future.