Posted on 05/07/2003 4:29:05 PM PDT by StarfireIV
Jubilant Republicans may imagine that the most significant harbinger for America’s future was the banging of a gavel on January 6, opening the 108th Congress. Finally, GOP partisans may conclude, they call the shots.
But it may be that the Earth itself is in charge. In 2002, the second hottest year on record, scientists saw Arctic Ocean ice coverage shrink by more than at any time since satellite measurements were first made a quarter century ago. And, they say, continued melting could leave the Arctic nearly ice-free by summer 2050.
Americans need to pay attention to the winds of change blowing in from the Arctic, then decide just how much Republican environmental policies contradict clear messages relayed by our planet. Our leaders could be viewing the world through a distorted lens, with their corporate worldview and sometimes their fundamentalist Christian faith guiding them to an interpretation of reality based not on scientific fact, but on dogma.
The federal government—with Republicans in control of the White House, Congress and the judiciary—has launched the largest rollback of environmental laws and regulations ever. The Bush administration seems determined to undo much of the good done since Earth Day 1970, when 20 million Americans defended the planet in the biggest mass demonstration of U.S. history.
The New Leadership
Republican Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma is poised to become Bush’s lieutenant in the assault. As new chair of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, he unseated Independent Jim Jeffords—an environmental champion who advanced legislation to curb global warming.
Inhofe, by contrast, is a Big Oil backer who once characterized the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as “the Gestapo bureaucracy,” and has earned a zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters (LCV) three years running.
Under Inhofe, hearings to oppose Bush’s anti-environmental agenda are improbable, as are subpoenas for administration documents divulging shoddy science or corporate complicity. “Teddy Roosevelt is rolling over in his grave,” Alys Campaigne, legislative director of the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said in the Bureau of National Affairs “Environmental Report.”
Bush and Inhofe will likely move to modify or overturn the National Environmental Policy Act. This Magna Carta of environmental law demands study, disclosure and public comment on the environmental impacts of federal projects. Bush has already demanded “excessive red tape” be hacked from the law, fast-tracking road and airport construction and cutting the public out of the democratic process.
The President is also attacking the Clean Air Act of 1970, another cornerstone of environmental law. Late last year, Bush proposed rules to weaken the Act’s New Source Review, which requires the installation of state-of-the-art pollution control equipment in the modernizing of factories. The new rules allow industrial air pollution to continue at levels that, according to the American Lung Association, now kill 10,000 Americans annually.
Bush’s proposed “Clear Skies” Initiative also undermines air quality. “Clear Skies” won’t enhance the air at all, but will further pollute it, says NRDC. Bush’s “Healthy Forests” initiative likewise suffers from Orwellian doublespeak, felling Western forests to save them. Disguised as a measure for curbing wildfires, the plan invites logging companies to cut healthy trees in national forests while reducing public oversight. Ironically, the probable cause of recent catastrophic fires is global warming, a problem that many Republican lawmakers deny.
California last year passed the nation’s first law to control greenhouse gas emissions from motor vehicles. But the Bush administration has virtually gone to war against the state’s environmental initiatives, seeking to extend oil-drilling rights off the California coast and to overturn regulations requiring automakers to sell zero-emissions vehicles.
This Congress will likely discontinue the requirement that corporate polluters contribute to Superfund, leaving taxpayers to pay for toxic waste cleanup. Both Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr. supported Superfund; the younger Bush is the first Republican President not to back reauthorization.
Congressional Republicans blocked many of President Clinton’s judicial appointments, leaving over 100 federal judgeships open. With the Senate Judiciary Committee now in GOP hands, the courts could take a hard swing to the right, putting the environment further at risk. The U.S. District Court of Appeals for Washington, D.C. holds almost exclusive jurisdiction over environmental law, hearing cases concerning federal authority, involving the powers of the EPA, for example. Senate Republicans blocked two Clinton appointments to the court, setting the stage for a bench packed with conservative judges who, appointed now, could shape environmental law for decades.
The GOP’s War on the Environment
The reasons behind Republican anti-environmentalism have often been stated but deserve review: George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are former oil men who believe in the efficiency of the marketplace. Market conservatives tend to see environmentalists as either frivolous tree-huggers or dangerous monkey-wrenching eco-terrorists. They dismiss good environmental science as the doomsaying of the loony left.
Almost by definition, they lack an understanding of such concepts as sustainability, carrying capacity, biodiversity or webs of interdependence. And of course, promoting any policies that go against immediate economic goals would put the administration up against strong corporate interests. The American auto industry, for example, remains a powerful economic engine in many states; if SUV sales are keeping domestic automakers afloat, the automakers will resist spending millions to impose tough new fuel efficiency standards on the vehicles.
Hence, the power of corporate campaign contributions. Earthjustice, a nonprofit public interest law group, reports that in the 2000 campaign, Bush-Cheney and the Republican National Committee received $44 million in contributions from the fossil fuel, chemical, timber and mining industries—far more than was offered by these interests to all federal Democratic candidates and party committees combined.
A Higher Power
Nevertheless, beyond all these more obvious anti-environmental motivations there lies a more deep-seated inspiration. Difficult as it may be to believe, many of the conservatives who have great influence in the Bush administration and now in Congress are governed by a Higher Power.
In his book The Carbon Wars, Greenpeace activist Jeremy Leggett tells how he stumbled upon this otherworldly agenda. During the Kyoto climate change negotiations, Leggett candidly asked Ford Motor Company executive John Schiller how opponents of the pact could believe there is no problem with “a world of a billion cars intent on burning all the oil and gas available on the planet?” The executive asserted first that scientists get it wrong when they say fossil fuels have been sequestered underground for eons. The Earth, he said, is just 10,000, not 4.5 billion years old, the age widely accepted by scientists.
Then Schiller confidently declared, “You know, the more I look, the more it is just as it says in the Bible.” The Book of Daniel, he told Leggett, predicts that increased earthly devastation will mark the “End Time” and return of Christ. Paradoxically, Leggett notes, many fundamentalists see dying coral reefs, melting ice caps and other environmental destruction not as an urgent call to action, but as God’s will. Within the religious right worldview, the wreck of the Earth can be seen as Good News!
Some true believers, interpreting biblical prophecy, are sure they will be saved from the horrific destruction brought by ecosystem collapse. They’ll be raptured: rescued from Earth by God, who will then rain down seven ghastly years of misery on unbelieving humanity. Jesus’ return will mark the Millennium, when the Lord restores the Earth to its green pristine condition, and the faithful enjoy a thousand years of peace and prosperity.
American fundamentalists number in the tens of millions, but not all of them believe literally in this apocalyptic vision, cautions Joan Bokaer, an expert on the religious right and formerly of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Social Policy at Cornell University. Some, no doubt, don’t dwell on environmental issues, but many do hold views antithetical to environmental protection.
(Excerpt) Read more at emagazine.com ...
Isa 65
17 For, behold, I create new heavens and a new earth: and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.
18 But be ye glad and rejoice for ever in that which I create: for, behold, I create Jerusalem a rejoicing, and her people a joy.
19 And I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and joy in my people: and the voice of weeping shall be no more heard in her, nor the voice of crying.
20 There shall be no more thence an infant of days, nor an old man that hath not filled his days: for the child shall die an hundred years old; but the sinner being an hundred years old shall be accursed.
21 And they shall build houses, and inhabit them; and they shall plant vineyards, and eat the fruit of them.
22 They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat: for as the days of a tree are the days of my people, and mine elect shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
23 They shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble; for they are the seed of the blessed of the LORD, and their offspring with them.
24 And it shall come to pass, that before they call, I will answer; and while they are yet speaking, I will hear.
25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, and the lion shall eat straw like the bullock: and dust shall be the serpent's meat. They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain, saith the LORD.
Claims that man-made pollution is causing "unprecedented" global warming have been seriously undermined by new research which shows that the Earth was warmer during the Middle Ages.
From the outset of the global warming debate in the late 1980s, environmentalists have said that temperatures are rising higher and faster than ever before, leading some scientists to conclude that greenhouse gases from cars and power stations are causing these "record-breaking" global temperatures.
Last year, scientists working for the UK Climate Impacts Programme said that global temperatures were "the hottest since records began" and added: "We are pretty sure that climate change due to human activity is here and it's accelerating."
This announcement followed research published in 1998, when scientists at the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia declared that the 1990s had been hotter than any other period for 1,000 years.
Such claims have now been sharply contradicted by the most comprehensive study yet of global temperature over the past 1,000 years. A review of more than 240 scientific studies has shown that today's temperatures are neither the warmest over the past millennium, nor are they producing the most extreme weather - in stark contrast to the claims of the environmentalists.
Posted on 05/06/2003 11:36 AM PDT by bruinbirdman
POLITICS STALLS GLOBAL WARMING RESEARCH
As much as half of any artificial global warming that may be due to human activity is caused by the long-distance travel of airborne soot and similar pollutants, says meteorologist James R. Mahoney, assistant secretary of commerce and coordinator of climate change research for the Bush administration.
But research into the phenomenon is being stalled by the politics of global warming, as India in February 2003 persuaded the United Nations Environment Program to drop research efforts. The United States objected to the proposed 1997 Kyoto climate change protocols because they did not require mandatory reductions in emissions of so-called greenhouse gases by developing countries. Indian officials are reported to be concerned that such research bolsters the U.S. case.
The two-mile thick, continent-size cloud over the Indian Ocean -- dubbed the "Asian Brown Cloud" -- was discovered in 1999 by Indian scientist Veerabhadran Ramanathan.
o The reigning theory of "aerosols" -- airborne particles such as soot -- was that they soon drop from the sky, leaving the earth's atmosphere relatively pristine.
o Scientists previously believed only greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide could be carried by prevailing winds for thousands of miles from their source.
o But Ramanathan's six-week, $25 million experiment discovered the cloud -- at some points more than 1,000 miles from the source.
o The research suggests that the cloud could reduce sunlight hitting the earth in that area by as much as 15 percent and cut rainfall over much of Asia by up to 40 percent.
Asian pollution contains dark soot from hundreds of millions of dung-fueled cooking fires and inefficient coal furnaces. Soot warms the upper air by absorbing sunlight and artificially cools the earth's surface. This can cause regional droughts due to less evaporation from the cooler ocean.
Source: John J. Fialka, "Discovery of 'Asian Brown Cloud' Over Indian Ocean Sets Off Fight," Wall Street Journal, May 6, 2003.
Global warming was a good thing for Erik the Red. Without it, the Viking, exiled from Iceland for murder in AD982, might never have founded a settlement in Greenland. And without that home base, his son Lief Eriksson might never have ventured even further west 15 years later to winter in modern-day Maine, laying claim to being the first European to set foot on North America.
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