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Bush Wrecking Environmental Gains

by Tom Teepen
Cox Newspapers
April 4, 2001

President's backsliding concerns governments, church leaders

THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION'S decision not to sweat global warming has flabbergasted U.S. allies, rattled a coalition of religious leaders and stranded the president's own head of the Environmental Protection Agency.

EPA Director Christine Todd Whitman, taking her boss at his earlier word, had no sooner reasserted President George W. Bush's concern about global climate change and his commitment to retard it by controlling carbon dioxide emissions than the White House cut her off at the knees.

It first switched to a burn, baby, burn policy toward the fossil fuels whose incineration creates carbon dioxide, then it disavowed the 1997 Kyoto Treaty in which the industrialized nations undertook to reduce the greenhouses gases implicated in global warming.

The treaty clearly needed clarifying and fine-tuning before it could be broadly ratified, but instead of perfecting it, the new administration is simply chucking it - typically, as in a rapidly growing list of environmental matters, pooh-poohing years of carefully collected and closely analyzed scientific data and casually wrecking years of often difficult political and international negotiation.

The blunt fact is that Kyoto - even the prospect of a refined Kyoto - didn't suit the immediate interests of the power, coal and oil industries that pull Bush's strings and offended conservative ideologues who have it that global warming is just a scam invented by crazed environmentalists whose real agenda is the destruction of capitalism and free markets.

The governments of Europe, Canada and Japan and others judge otherwise, and the overwhelming, in fact close to universal, weight of scientific conclusion finds global warming quite real and its possible consequences alarming.

The European Union, saying a meeting is `urgently needed' to address American environmental backsliding, has sent a delegation to Washington in hopes of reasoning with the administration.

And in a joint statement, the leaders of several U.S. religious organizations - the National Council of Churches of Christ, the Disciples of Christ, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Metropolitan Orthodox Church and the Jewish Theological Seminary - cited Bush's repudiation of Kyoto as a `source of paramount concern.' They fear the `present course could threaten the quality of God's creation.'

But America's right-wing think tanks, foundations and radio talk- show hustlers say otherwise, the White House hears them and that's that.

Bush has scrapped a regulation holding arsenic in drinking water to a level Europe has comfortably met for years. He wants to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, when requiring SUVs to get just two or three more miles per gallon would save as much oil as the drilling could lift. And he apparently is on the verge of ordering new roads bulldozed into national forests so timber companies can cut more from them.

When he was running for the presidency, Bush said that if he were to be elected, the environment would be one of his major concerns. This is turning out to be true.

Tom Teepen is a columnist for Cox Newspapers. He writes from Atlanta. Address: c/o The Atlanta Constitution, P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, Ga. 30303.
E-mail address: teepencolumn@coxnews.com


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