These are not happy times for George W. Bush during the twilight months of his embattled, unpopular presidency. The public and Congress have turned against his Iraq war policies and strategies and they've turned against his attorney general.
Now the courts are turning against his environmental policies as well.
Three times in less than a week, federal courts have ruled decisively against Bush attempts to cater to the wishes of industry by ignoring or fiddling with the wording of laws he was sworn to uphold.
The most crippling hit came from the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled that, yes, carbon dioxide is an air pollutant and, yes, the Environmental Protection Agency has authority to regulate it. EPA has insisted, with disingenuous mocking of science, that carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant and can't therefore regulate emissions.
Then, in the West, two federal district jurists—Judge Phyllis Hamilton, of the District Court of Northern California, and Judge Ricardo Martinez, of the District Court of Western Washington—put brakes on attempts of the Forest Service to ignore or rewrite rules for managing upwards of 200 million acres of federally owned forests.
In separate rulings, the federal judges chastised the Bush administration for ignoring requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Administrative Procedures Act, an indication of how far the Bush White House will go in submitting to wishes of the timber and mining interests to open up precious public lands to bulldozers, chainsaws and drilling rigs.
Of the three court decisions, the Supreme Court's ruling has the widest possible implications—by supporting lawsuits of 12 states trying to force EPA to regulate auto emissions, the high court opened the way for tougher regulations on smokestack industries that also are blamed for greenhouse gases and global warming.
Because President Bush renounced a 2000 campaign pledge to regulate greenhouse gases, and because Vice President Cheney is a virtual mole in the White House for energy and automotive industries, the job of cleaning up the air will fall to Congress to write tough, mandatory laws that are veto bullet proof.
Metaphorically, the Bush administration resembles the fabled Nero fiddling as Rome burned. While Bush and Cheney dance to the tune of polluting industries, and avoid pursuing remedies by arguing global warming is open to question, U.S. and world air quality and deterioration of the environment worsens, confirmed by hundreds of internationally respected scientists and scores of independent studies as well as graphic examples of changes caught in photos.
The debate is over.
