Critics bash Bush on Earth Day

By J.R. PEGG

WASHINGTON, DC - (ENS) - The Bush administration is orchestrating an unprecedented assault on the nation's environmental laws and is allowing corporate interests to plunder America's natural resources, leaders of a dozen major environmental organisations told reporters yesterday at an Earth Day press conference in Washington, DC.

The nation's biodiversity, wild lands, clean air, clean water and protection from harmful toxic waste are all threatened by the administration's policies, the environmentalists say, and the consequences could be severe.

"Our message for this Earth Day is clear - behind closed doors and out of public view, the Bush administration is letting big corporations rewrite and weaken our environmental laws so they can pollute our air and poison our water, cut down our national forests and make taxpayers, rather than polluters, pay to clean up toxic wastes," said Gene Karpinski, executive director of US Public Interest Research Group (PIRG).

The organisations say the Bush administration is pushing through radical reforms of key environmental protections, even as it celebrates what these laws have accomplished. It is starving federal agencies of adequate funding to enforce existing laws, they say, and shifting the burden of environmental protection and conservation onto financially strapped state and local governments.

"We can ensure clean water, healthy air, safe communities and splendid natural resources," said Brent Blackwelder, president of Friends of the Earth. "But unfortunately, the programs that meet these goals are dying a slow death under a Bush administration that has starved them of the funding they need."

Administration officials strongly reject the criticism of environmentalists. The President is intent on balancing the need for economic growth and development with environmental protection and conservation, they say, and that is what his policies are designed to do.

"Three decades after the first Earth Day, our air is cleaner, our water is purer, and our lands and natural resources are better protected," President George W. Bush said yesterday in a prepared statement.

"My administration is building on these accomplishments through new and innovative policies."

Environmentalists agree with the comment that the environment is better now than it was some 30 years ago, but believe the administration's new policies are thinly veiled measures that weaken, rather than enforce or strengthen the laws and policies that are largely responsible for the nation's cleaner air and cleaner water.

They cite administrative rulemaking efforts to remove protection for wetlands, streams and tributaries from the Clean Water Act and to weaken oversight of industrial polluters under the Clean Air Act.

The President's advisers are good at spinning administration policies, League of Conservation Voters President Deb Callahan told reporters, but the rhetoric does not match the reality.

The administration has proposed to "allow big power plants to put more toxic pollution in the air we breathe and called it 'Clear Skies',"Callahan said.

"President Bush wants to turn the management of our natural heritage over to the timber industry and call it 'Healthy Forests'."

Rather than take decisive action, the environmentalists say, the administration announces big initiatives that have little or no funding to back them up or that depend entirely on volunteerism. They contend the administration has turned its back on proposals that would reduce the nation's dependence on oil by either encouraging more renewable energy or embracing tighter fuel economy standards.

"Even worse than doing nothing, the administration has opposed those who seek to do something," said Alden Meyer, director of government relations for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The administration has "abdicated leadership" on international environmental issues, Meyer said, in particular on global warming.

"The United States represents 25 per cent of the [global warming] problem, but under the Bush administration we represent zero per cent of the solution," Meyer said.

Meyer blasted the administration's climate change initiative that proposes using voluntary industry commitments to reduce the nation's greenhouse gas emissions intensity - the ratio of emissions to economic output - by 18 per cent within the next decade.

The administration's own projections show that under the President's plan emissions of heat trapping gases would increase 14 per cent over the next decade, Meyer explained.

"For the world's largest emitter of global warming pollution, this proposal is an embarrassment," Meyer said.

The administration's proposal to exempt the Department of Defence from five major environmental laws was singled out for sharp criticism at yesterday's Earth Day briefing. Bush officials say the military's readiness and training is compromised by federal laws governing hazardous waste, clean air, marine mammal protection and endangered species.

Environmentalists argue the military can already get case by case exemptions from these laws, and say blanket exemptions are unnecessary and unwise.

"These laws have kept our children and communities safe from hazardous waste and from pollutants in our air and have protected rare and sensitive creatures," said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife. "No federal agency should be above the law."

Public health is being compromised by the Bush administration's environmental policies, added Phil Clapp, president of National Environmental Trust.

One in six Americans live within a mile (1.6km) of a toxic waste site, he said, but the Bush administration is relaxing efforts to clean up these sites. Cleanup of toxic wastes last year was down 41 per cent from the average of the previous eight years, and the number of new cleanups dropped to its lowest level since 1988, Clapp said.

The administration opposed the continuation of a program that forced polluters to pay for cleanup, according to Clapp, transferring a large portion of the cleanup responsibility from industry to taxpayers.

"There is no greater evidence that this President puts the interests of big corporations ahead of the welfare of average Americans," Clapp said.

And this cuts to the heart of many of the complaints about the administration by environmentalists - that its policies and officials aim to favour corporate interests.

According to Marty Hayden, legislative director of Earthjustice, the administration has relaxed environmental regulations and granted financial incentives to oil, gas, and timber industries to literally take the nation's natural resources.

Hayden pointed to the administration's forest management policies, which he says allow timber companies to clearcut public lands under the guise of forest management, waive environmental protections for logging projects and seek to eliminate the public's right to comment on or question federal agency decisions.

"When it comes to our National Forests, the Bush administration has adopted a policy of leave no tree behind," Hayden said. "Never in modern times has there been an administration so singly focused on getting fish, wildlife, the public and the law out of the way of commercial timber interests and other extractive industries."

The nation's biodiversity is suffering, added Schlickeisen, because Bush administration officials within the Department of Interior are unwilling to carry out management efforts needed to protect threatened and endangered species.

Over the adminstration's first two and a half years, Interior Department Secretary Gale Norton has not listed a single species on the Endangered Species list and is "a fraud when it comes to protecting the environment and our natural heritage," Schlickeisen said.

It is not just the policies of the administration that have environmentalists worried, many believe some the President's judicial nominees pose a serious, longterm threat to the environment. The legality and enforcement of environmental laws is increasingly being determined by federal courts and several of the Bush nominees are on record with what many believe are extreme views on private property and federal jurisdiction that could contradict with fundamental environmental protections.

"The courts have played an extremely important role in environmental protection," said Greg Wetstone, advocacy director for the Natural Resources Defence Council. "Impartial nominees are all we ask for - there is too much at stake."

The one administration policy the environmentalists at yesterday's briefing singled out for praise was the recently announced proposal by the administration to reduce harmful emissions from nonroad diesel engines.

But this one positive, Wetstone said, is "but a solitary star in a very dark sky."
"The record of the Bush administration on clean air issues is dismal," he said.

With several declared Presidential candidates also using Earth Day to criticise the administration's environmentalism, many of the organisations at today's briefing hope these issues could become a major factor in the 2004 Presidential election.

"In 2004, Election Day might just be the most important Earth Day ever," Callahan told reporters.

Callahan and others believe the broad scope of what they label "an assault on the environment" will ultimately leave President Bush vulnerable in the 2004 election.

"The Bush administration has allowed polluters to water down or completely gut the cornerstone laws designed to protect America's environment and public health," said PIRG's Karpinski.

"On Earth Day, we are asking the American public to send a loud and clear message: The Bush administration should listen to the public, not the polluters, and uphold, not uproot, America's environmental laws."