For the week of June 5 - 11, 2002

Bush deliberately 
dooms environment

---

President George W. Bush finally confirms what many have assumed all along.

He’s not really interested in the consequences of global warming, and especially not interested in acting to stem the relentless onset of this debilitating environmental scourge.

Remember when he refused to sign the Kyoto Treaty, insisting he needed "good science" as proof of the reality of global warming?

And recall when he said his administration would produce its own strategy for dealing with global warming—if it exists?

Well, the president’s own administration has produced a report for the United Nations, "U.S. Climate Action Report 2002," that not only confirms the spread of global warming, but fixes the blame on fossil fuel fumes that create greenhouse gases.

So, he has "good science" in hand from his own administration. But the White House says Bush’s strategy will be to have the nation simply adjust to the inevitable.

Don’t resist or fight global warming. Learn to live with it.

What a dramatic contrast to the swaggering president’s chest-pounding threats to go to war against tyrants and terrorists all over the world.

But, no, attacking global warming is out of the question for Bush.

The reason should be obvious. To attack global warming at its source, President Bush would need to take on culprits who’re his political cronies—electric utilities, energy corporations and automakers.

So, rather than sign the Kyoto Treaty as have other major western powers, and impose stiff new emission rules on industry, Bush is prepared to doom the environment to withering and writhing and gasping.

His own administration’s global warming report predicts that snow-fed water supplies will be disrupted; Rocky Mountain meadows and marshes will vanish, and "some goods and services lost through the disappearance of fragmentation of natural ecosystems are likely to be costly or impossible to replace."

This is culpable malfeasance on a grand and arrogant scale—a deliberate, conscious decision by the President of the United States to ignore the ruin of a nation’s environmental assets rather than inconvenience industries that pay handsome political tribute to buy their way out of social responsibility.

Bill Clinton was impeached for lying about a seedy sexual tryst.

George W. Bush’s crime is far worse. He invites polluters to continue poisoning a nation’s environment as simply a way of doing business, while suggesting that the rest of us haplessly accept the slow death of an ecosystem as the inevitable consequence of profiteering.

 

The Idaho Mountain Express is distributed free to residents and guests throughout the Sun Valley, Idaho resort area community. Subscribers to the Idaho Mountain Express will read these stories and others in this week's issue.