[sustran] Bush - the Oil Baron - at work!

Debi Goenka debi at beag.net
Tue Nov 20 10:46:48 JST 2001


The New York Times


November 18, 2001

Bush Team Is Reversing Environmental Policies
By KATHARINE Q. SEELYE


  In Depth
White House





WASHINGTON, Nov. 17 - In the last two months, the Bush administration has
proceeded with several regulations, legal settlements and legislative
measures intended to reverse Clinton-era environmental policies.

These include moves to allow road- building in national forests, reverse the
phaseout of snowmobiles in national parks, make it easier for mining
companies to dig for gold, copper and zinc on public lands, ease
energy-saving standards for air-conditioners, bar the reintroduction of
grizzly bears in the Northwest and, environmentalists say, make it easier
for developers to eliminate wetlands.

Environmentalists are angered that in some cases the administration, in the
name of national security, is taking steps that they say promote the
interests of timber, mining, oil, gas and pipeline companies, at the expense
of the environment.

"They've used the smoke screen of the last two months to make key decisions
out of public view," said Philip E. Clapp, president of the National
Environmental Trust. "The most difficult situation we face is that the
attention of the media is almost exclusively on Afghanistan and anthrax."

Most notable, critics say, is the administration's renewed advocacy of
drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. As
President Bush said last month, "The less dependent we are on foreign
sources of crude oil, the more secure we are at home."

Senator John Kerry, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the administration's
view that oil drilling in Alaska was a matter of national security
represented a "false patriotism."

"I certainly think that the re- emergence of the Arctic drilling is a direct
effort to capitalize on events," Mr. Kerry said. "And it's a misplaced
definition of patriotism to use Sept. 11 as a rationale for doing something
that has no impact on price or dependency or immediate supply."

Administration officials say that while national security is a paramount
concern, it is not their only argument for reversing many policies enacted
by President Bill Clinton. They defend the changes as a way to balance what
they said was an extreme tilt in favor of the environmentalists during the
eight years of the Clinton presidency.

"Many of the things we have done are to put in place common-sense approaches
that we feel are a better balance," Gale A. Norton, the secretary of the
interior, said in an interview on Friday. "They better involve local people
in decision making; they are based on cooperation rather than conflict. Our
push for involving state governments in the decision-making process, our
push for negotiated solutions, our push for tailoring decisions to
particular areas of land are all based on philosophy, not on a wartime
situation."

But both sides in the environmental debates say that the political balance
changed after Sept. 11.

"In the past, you had to make an environmental argument to deflect an
environmental criticism," said Scott Segal, a lawyer and lobbyist in
Washington for several industrial concerns. "Since Sept. 11, it is possible
to articulate an energy-security rationale that can offset environmental
criticism. In comparison to security issues, criticism premised on
environmental protection begins to sound parochial and not selfless."

Before the attacks, environmentalists seemed to have political momentum in
casting President Bush as unfriendly to the environment and his
administration as beholden to the extractive industries. But in the last two
months, environmentalists have been stymied for fear of appearing
unpatriotic or even petty in the face of a national crisis.

For example, the administration has ordered the United States Coast Guard to
fortify its patrol of coastal waters, a duty that makes it less able to
enforce antipoaching rules, leaving species like rockfish, Atlantic salmon
and red snapper vulnerable. Environmentalists have remained silent, though
before Sept. 11 they might have complained loudly.

Administration officials insist they are still protecting the environment.
Ms. Norton said her department was starting a program to help individual
property owners protect endangered species. Mr. Bush's Environmental
Protection Agency is battling his Energy Department's plan to weaken
standards for air-conditioners. And while this administration has been more
responsive to governors of Western States than the Clinton administration
was, it has not always pleased them.

Just this week, Dirk Kempthorne, the Republican governor of Idaho, said at a
public hearing that he was so frustrated over federal cleanup plans on a
toxic Superfund site that he was "on the verge of inviting the E.P.A. to
leave Idaho."

The Bush administration has also decided to adhere to the Clinton
administration proposals for limiting arsenic in drinking water. Some
environmentalists thought the Bush administration should have called for
lower levels, but by setting the same amount as proposed by Mr. Clinton, it
defused the issue.

But the administration has let slide other matters that environmentalists
argue are vital to protecting air and water quality. These include a global
pact on climate change and a plan to reduce power plant emissions.

Senator James M. Jeffords, the Vermont independent who is chairman of the
Environment and Public Works Committee, is advancing his own plan to require
power plants to reduce four major pollutants. The administration opposes it,
in part on national security grounds, saying the changes could disrupt power
supplies because they might force the closing of coal-burning plants.







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--------------------------------------------------------
Debi Goenka
Bombay Environmental Action Group

e-mail: debi at beag.net /&\ debi.beag at softhome.net


Environmental Education Office

Kalbadevi Municipal School
# 54, 2nd floor, Mumbai 400002

Tel:91-22-2423126    Tfax:91-22-2426385


Residence

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Tel:91-22-5700638   Tfax:91-22-5701459
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