Photo Credit: TCSDailyThere is a vast perception in the environmental community and the population at large that George Bush is a slash and burn industrialist who destroys the environment for pleasure. Nothing could be further from the truth. Bush’s environmental record, though highly criticized, is reasonable and right; and is contributing greatly to the well being of Mother Earth.

Much of Bush’s criticism comes from undoing many of the things Clinton/Gore never really did in the first place.

Do you believe Clinton removed the arsenic from the water? Not only did he NOT do that, not only did he make us drink arsenic-laced water for the last 8 years, this order he signed stipulated that the arsenic was not to be removed from the water "until 2004." That's right. Look it up. Clinton's big environmental do-good act in the last minutes of his term guaranteed that we would be drinking the same levels of arsenic we've been drinking since 1942 — the last time a REAL Democrat had the guts to stand up to the mining interests and reduce the levels of this poison. The Canadians and Europeans did it long ago. Clinton made it official that we would all be drinking arsenic during the entire Bush administration. Maybe he was doing us a favor.

And how about those COO emission regulations that Bush II overturned? Did I say "overturn?" Overturn what? All Bush did was maintain the Clinton status quo. He said, in essence, that "I'm going to pollute the air at the very same levels Clinton did during his entire eight years, just as you are going to drink the same arsenic in the water under my watch as you did under Clinton's." And, like the built-in three-year delay in his arsenic reductions, Clinton's orders on the toxic emissions in his last days specified that they were not to be totally reduced '"until 2008, per the Kyoto agreement."

So, after violating the Kyoto accords he had signed by doing NOTHING about CO2 in the past few years, he then tries to look good by doing NOTHING about CO2 for another seven years! So the air that was dirty is still dirty and will remain dirty, just as Clinton had ordered.

 

I don’t share the writer’s contempt for Clinton. I just think that the standards were reasonable and that staying with earlier standards and working toward gradual improvement is a smarter tack. Sandbagging Bush with these unreasonable last minute executive orders was a pretty dirty political trick though and the media played along as anyone could have predicted.

Another misnomer is that Bush has not acknowledged global climate change and is deaf to the issue. This letter from March of 2001 would indicate otherwise:

Consistent with these concerns, we will continue to fully examine global climate change issues — including the science, technologies, market-based systems, and innovative options for addressing concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. I am very optimistic that, with the proper focus and working with our friends and allies, we will be able to develop technologies, market incentives, and other creative ways to address global climate change.

The U.S. has made vast improvements toward CO2 mitigation and is on track to lead the world with policies refined by this administration.

Also there is a difference between talking the talk and walking the walk on energy and the environment. It seems World Conservation Superstar Al Gore has a little problem with energy consumption in his 10,000 square foot mansion. Bill Hobbs over at Ecotality.com notes a Tennessee Center for Policy Research article:

The average household in America consumes 10,656 kilowatt-hours (kWh) per year, according to the Department of Energy. In 2006, Gore devoured nearly 221,000 kWh - more than 20 times the national average. Last August alone, Gore burned through 22,619 kWh - guzzling more than twice the electricity in one month than an average American family uses in an entire year.

Evidently his Crawford Winter White House has 25,000 gallons of rainwater storage, gray water collection from sinks and showers for irrigation, passive solar, geothermal heating and cooling. “By marketplace standards, the house is startlingly small,” says David Heymann, the architect of the 4,000-square-foot home. “Clients of similar ilk are building 16-to-20,000-square-foot houses.”

George Bush also gets demerits from the environmental community for his general Fiscal Conservatism. For some reason fiscal conservatism is unhitched these days from environmental conservatism as if only running money through an inefficient, often corrupt and politically motivated bureaucracy will save the world. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Take Venezuela for example. Hugo Chavez is conducting the ultimate fiscal liberalism experiment by nationalizing all the oil, telecommunication and other private infrastructure. In doing so he is developing a new populist socialistic economy… with predictable results:

At this moment there are serious food shortages in Venezuela as he has increased government control over production and established unrealistic price controls for foodstuffs. Inflation in the food sector is running at 36% for the year. At the same time, unemployment and inflation rates are the largest in Latin America.

I predict Venezuela will continue to decline economically and the inevitable environmental rape will follow as they will have the economic means for nothing else. It’s a melodramatic melt-down of Ayn Rand proportions and it’s as predictable as the sun rising in the east.

In summary, a Google search of Bush + Environment will result in a legion of articles and commentary assailing the president on his environmental policy. In every article they take one small fragment issue to try to discredit the whole of a complex and effective environmental policy. The truth of the record shows that Bush has made steady progress on the environment while at the same time balancing reasonable economic concerns against environmental hysteria. He is a true Rational Environmentalist.

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