Posted on 07/04/2002 8:28:18 PM PDT by Benherszen
Do you remember the character Pig-Pen in the "Peanuts" cartoons? He was always covered with dirt and grime. He was cute, but he was a walking sludge heap, filthy and proud of it. He once told Charlie Brown, "I have affixed to me the dirt and dust of countless ages. Who am I to disturb history?"
For me, Pig-Pen's attitude embodies President Bush's approach to the environment. We've been trashing, soiling, even destroying the wonders of nature for countless ages. Why stop now? Who is Mr. Bush to step in and curb this venerable orgy of pollution, this grand tradition of fouling our own nest?
Oh, the skies may once have been clear and the waters sparkling and clean. But you can't have that and progress, too. Can you?
This week we learned that the Bush administration plans to cut funding for the cleanup of 33 toxic waste sites in 18 states. As The Times's Katharine Seelye reported, this means "that work is likely to grind to a halt on some of the most seriously polluted sites in the country."
The cuts were ordered because the Superfund toxic waste cleanup program is running out of money. Rather than showing the leadership necessary to replenish the fund, the president plans to reduce its payouts by cleaning up fewer sites. Pig-Pen would have been proud.
This is not a minor matter. The sites targeted by the Superfund program are horribly polluted, in many cases with cancer-causing substances. Millions of Americans live within a few miles of these sites.
The Superfund decision is the kind of environmental move we've come to expect from the Bush administration. Mother Nature has been known to tremble at the sound of the president's approaching footsteps. He's an environmental disaster zone.
In February a top enforcement official at the Environmental Protection Agency, Eric Schaeffer, quit because of Bush administration policies that he said undermined the agency's efforts to crack down on industrial polluters. Mr. Schaeffer said he felt he was "fighting a White House that seems determined to weaken the rules we are trying to enforce."
That, of course, is exactly what this White House is doing. Within weeks of Mr. Schaeffer's resignation came official word that the administration was relaxing the air quality regulations that applied to older coal-fired power plants, a step backward that delighted the administration's industrial pals.
During this same period, the president broke his campaign promise to regulate the industrial emissions of carbon dioxide, a move that, among other things, would have helped in the fight to slow the increase in global warming. Mr. Bush has also turned his back on the Kyoto Protocol, which would require industrial nations to reduce their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
The president was even disdainful of his own administration's report on global warming, which acknowledged that the U.S. would experience far-reaching and, in some cases, devastating environmental consequences as a result of the climate change.
The president's views on global warming seem aligned with those of the muddle-headed conservative groups in Texas that have been forcing rewrites in textbooks to fit their political and spiritual agendas. In one environmental science textbook, the following was added:
"In the past, the earth has been much warmer than it is now, and fossils of sea creatures show us that the sea level was much higher than it is today. So does it really matter if the world gets warmer?"
Senator Joseph Lieberman, not exactly a left-winger on the environment or anything else, gave a speech in California in February in which he assailed the president's lack of leadership on global warming and other environmental issues. He characterized the president's energy policy as "mired in crude oil" and said Mr. Bush had been "AWOL in the war against environmental pollution."
Several states, fed up with Mr. Bush's capitulation to industry on these matters, have moved on their own to protect the environment and develop more progressive energy policies.
Simply stated, the president has behaved irresponsibly toward the environment and shows no sign of changing his ways. You could laugh at Pig-Pen. He was just a comic strip character. But Mr. Bush is no joke. His trashing of the environment is a deadly serious matter.
Frankly, I'm beginning to think they are a dangerous to this country as the terrorists. After all, look at the wreck and ruin they accomplished with their phony enviro theories in the west. Here in Arizona we've experienced the "benefits of their wisdom" first hand with hundreds of thousands of wrecked and ruined forests, hundreds of homes burnt, countless lives destroyed. Now, these same sanctimoneous elitests have the NERVE to stand before us once again and arrogantly denounce our president and claim that we should, even in the face of all the evidence, believe them.
No thanks, we've been burnt once already.
"The most deadly weapon of mass destruction in history is a leftist with a word processor."--Boris
You're in good company. See Coulters column at WND, Liberalism and terrorism: Different stages of same disease.
Senator Joseph Lieberman, not exactly a left-winger on the environment or anything else,
LOL!
Enjoy your Senator, Bob. She's all ya get. |
Adequate, common sense "brownfields" legislation that cleans these sites and puts them back in service has proven to be the answer.
Side bar question for the extreme greens: How many SUV emissions does it take to match the pollution caused by any one of the major forest fires now burning out of control in the West?
Regards,
Repeat this as often as needed to restore sanity...
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Hey, this is fun! Ol' Bob Herbert is having one of those purple-leptic fits that liberals have when they aren't getting their way. Not only did Bush steal the election from the rightful heir of Bill Clinton, he's pollutin' and shootin' and eatin' with Putin! What's a poor liberal to do?