Environment in a world of hurt

With so much attention focused on George Bush's war on logic, I mean Iraq, and his record-setting, defecit-spending, tax-cuts-for-the-rich, $2.2 trillion federal budget, it's easy to overlook the quiet and comprehensive dismantling of environmental protections by his administration. From revived plans to open the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve to oil drilling to Bush's proposal to exempt the US military from key environmental regulations like the Clean Water and Endangered Species acts, the earth is in a world of hurt. And a little cash for hydrogen-cell research won't be enough to undo the damage.

Mark Hertsgaard, author of Earth Odyssey: Around the World in Search of Our Environmental Future and a recent guest on NOW with Bill Moyers (transcript here), writes in the Santa Fe New Mexican that the Bush administration has no environmental policy. It's not even an afterthought. But the real damage the president has done to the environment has come through his "bold" changes to economic, military, and energy policy, and through the interests of his friends:

It's easy enough to say that Bush's approach reflects his and his top aides' pasts in the oil, mining, timber, chemical and electric utility industries. It's likewise easy to understand Bush's actions as thanks for the $44 million in contributions those industries showered on him and the Republican National Committee in 2000.

The question for environmentalists is how to defeat Bush in 2004:

So, will Bush end up paying a price in 2004 for his betrayal of environmental values? His supporters within corporate America and the far right are apparently so blinded by their ideological biases that they perceive little political risk. Paul Weyrich, the president of the Free Congress Foundation, told the Washington Post in March 2001 that things would be fine as long as the body count didn't get too high: "There's a risk with some of the swing voters, but unless something happens where lots of people turn up dead before the election, these issues are not going to resonate with lots of voters." An unnamed senior Republican agreed, asserting that "unless there's a catastrophe, these decisions aren't going to affect a mom in Fairfax."

Read Hertsgaard's article.