For the week of June 25 - July 1, 2003

Bush’s ‘good science’ boomerangs

Commentary by PAT MURPHY

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In Mack Sennett’s slapstick silent flicks, the practical joker got his due in the last reel: one of his victims would hand him a cigar that blows up in his face, to the guffaws of others who endured the indignities of pranks.

That brings us to President George Bush’s coy acrobatics with semantics and his use of "good science" for political purposes, only to learn that "good science" can boomerang.

A "what-goes-around-comes-around" sequence began with the president refusing to accept global warming as fact. He’s waiting for "good science" to convince him. It’ll be a long wait: Bush opposes requiring new restraints on industrial emissions into the air because, put bluntly, his cash-in-hand campaign supporters in industry are opposed.

Now, for the second time in his two years in office, Bush has ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to delete the passage dealing with global warming in EPA’s annual report. In business, withholding information is called "cooking the books," the tactic that has led to so many indictments of corporate executives and auditors.

There’s more: the deleted segment was replaced with data disputing global warming trends, provided conveniently by the American Petroleum Institute, the president’s devoted oil industry supporters.

As if repeal of air quality regulations isn’t moving fast enough, the White House works another angle: it’s pushing congressional Republicans for a waiver to the Clean Air Act to allow states leeway in how they conform to air pollution standards.

Back to President Bush’s insistence on "good science," which cuts two ways.

The European Union stunned Bush by refusing to open Europe to billions of dollars worth of America’s genetically modified agricultural products out of fears that U.S. biotech foods are scientifically unproven.

The White House icily rejects the European claims as poppycock, insisting (get this!) that sound scientific studies show the products are unquestionably safe.

Could Europeans be engaging in cynical tit-for-tat revenge by banning biotech foods because President Bush withdrew support for the Kyoto Treaty on global warming that Europe earnestly wanted? Perhaps.

Unhappily, if not ironically, Bush’s global warming politics has a parallel in the pseudo-science politics of another well-known ultra-conservative Republican.

For years, U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina blocked major U.S. appropriations for the global war on AIDS. Helms ranted that AIDS was merely a homosexual disease.

Years later, a disconsolate Helms would remorsefully apologize for holding up funds, then conceded AIDS was a scourge demanding the best U.S. and world efforts to cure.

So, what will be the eventual costs of George W. Bush’s tomfoolery ignoring global warming trends until satisfied by "good science"?

Bank on this: today’s polluting industries either pay now or pay even more later because they and their chum in the White House delayed the inevitable.

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