[Zimphire]

http://www.accessatlanta.com/ajc/met...14refuges.html

Today, the 539 other refuges established since Pelican Island's creation encompass 95 million acres in all 50 states, Guam, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. From bison to butterflies, salmon to woodstorks, the refuges conserve land for thousands of species of fish and wildlife.

They also provide hunting, fishing and wildlife observation, and attract more than 35 million people each year.

Georgia has 10 national refuges, ranging from the 100-acre Tybee sanctuary near Savannah to the 396,000-acre Okefenokee refuge in southwest Georgia.

The Bush administration is proposing $402 million for the system in 2004 -- a $25.6 million increase over this year.

[voodoo]

[Logic]

Good for him/us.

But what about the oil drilling in reservates(sp/word?) in Alaska? I can't remember exactly but it was something like that. That outweighs this particular 6.8% increase in funding in effect on the environment.

[olePigeon]

Originally posted by Logic:
Good for him/us.

But what about the oil drilling in reservates(sp/word?) in Alaska? I can't remember exactly but it was something like that. That outweighs this particular 6.8% increase in funding in effect on the environment.

They would'nt be very attracitve places to drill if they just let everything die, now would it?

[Logic]

Originally posted by olePigeon:
They would'nt be very attracitve places to drill if they just let everything die, now would it?

Your point being?

[beb]

I still say Bush is a ****up.

[::maroma::]

Originally posted by beb:
I still say Bush is a ****up.

[Spliffdaddy]

Originally posted by beb:
I still say Bush is a ****up.

Still not as bad as being French..

[Zimphire]

Yes, no matter what good he does, it all comes down to "I just don't like him. "

[AlbertWu]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Yes, no matter what good he does, it all comes down to "I just don't like him. "

if he did everything i wanted, it wouldn't matter whether i liked him or not.

[roger_ramjet]

This is from The New Republic. (I got this from Google's cache. The article is no longer available directly from TNR without a subsription.)

W. THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
Health Nut
by Gregg Easterbrook

Post date 04.19.01 | Issue date 04.30.01

Here's a front-page story from the Alternate Universe Tribune : " BUSH ADMINISTRATION MAKES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION EARLY THEME." Ridiculous, right? We all know the new administration is engaged in "the most alarming rollbacks in environmental efforts that we have ever seen" (Richard Gephardt). Or, as Hearst newspaper columnist Helen Thomas "asked" at Bush's most recent press conference: "[Y]ou have rolled back health and safety and environmental measures. This has been widely interpreted as a payback time to your corporate donors. Are they more important than the American people's health and safety?"

Yet the Alternate Universe Tribune has it right. On almost every environmental issue, Bush has upheld the Clinton-Gore position. The new president is guilty of a few missteps, which are getting reams of attention, and has accomplished important advances, which are being ignored. Journalists and liberal commentators have had so much success in recent years pillorying conservatives as foes of the environment that it's become a kind of reflex. But this time the evidence isn't there.

First, take Bush's much-mocked decision to postpone a reduction in the maximum allowable arsenic in drinking water. This was indeed a mistake, as the scientific case for tighter rules is strong. But Bush has not acted to "allow more arsenic in drinking water," as commentary has erroneously asserted, nor to force Americans to consume "poisoned drinking water," as a New York Times editorial claimed. All he's done is delay the date on which trace levels of arsenic are cut. This is precisely what Bill Clinton and Al Gore did for almost eight years - postponing any tightening of the standard until just before leaving the White House, because new rules are stridently opposed by a few localities where arsenic naturally occurs in water, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the mayor is a Democrat. Clinton's delay was unfortunate, as was Bush's, but not catastrophic, since arsenic is not one of America's leading environmental problems. It occurs in drinking water at worrisome levels in only a few areas of the country, and public health estimates show at worst a 1 percent increase in the odds of late-life cancer for someone who consumes such water for decades.

Contrast the media furor over Bush's arsenic decision with the near silence regarding his action on diesel-fuel reformulation. One of the president's first actions was to uphold a sweeping, expensive regulation that requires petroleum companies to remove most pollutants from diesel fuel. Unlike the arsenic standards, which would have benefited a tiny percentage of the population, the diesel-fuel rule has broad environmental and public-health consequences. Recent research has shown that the "particulates" in diesel exhaust lead to 20,000 or more premature deaths per year and contribute to the rise of asthma in cities. Bush's strict new diesel rules will spare many lives and reduce urban haze; in fact, they represent the most important anti-air-pollution advance in a decade. The reform will also cost billions of dollars, and it came over the howls of the petroleum industry, whose pocket Bush supposedly is in. Yet W.'s move has received virtually no recognition - after all, the diesel-fuel decision interrupts the doomsday script.

Consider another act for which Bush has been damned: his request that Congress suspend for one year the filing of lawsuits demanding that more plants and animals be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). On its front page, The New York Times portrayed this as a horrifying step backward. Yet the Clinton administration did almost exactly the same thing: Last year Clinton suspended the classification of plants and animals as endangered, saying the Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the ESA, was so snowed under by frivolous or dilatory lawsuits that it couldn't get its work done. The Times account was craftily written to depict the Bush decision as an unprecedented departure, not mentioning Clinton's similar policy until the fourteenth paragraph, and then only obliquely.

Bush has also been attacked for merely considering overturning regulations requiring big increases in the energy efficiency of air conditioners, washers, dryers, and other appliances. But when he announced that the appliance standard would be upheld and the air-conditioner standard only mildly loosened, less attention was paid. He's been similarly scolded in the Times and other papers for considering reversing Clinton's eleventh-hour decision to reduce logging in national forests; but when Bush then appointed, as head of the Forest Service, a man instrumental in drawing up the less-logging policy, the Times buried the article on page A15. Bush also won little praise for upholding most of Clinton's eleventh-hour designations of new national wilderness areas, set-asides that were highly unpopular in much of the West. Bush decided this week to keep strict new limits on construction in wetlands - angering developers, another natural Bush constituency, who hate wetlands rules with a white passion - and also to impose strict standards regarding lead emissions. These moves were widely depicted as puzzling departures from form. But it only seemed that way because the media had misconstrued so many of Bush's other decisions.

Then there is Bush's abandonment of the Kyoto global-warming treaty, for which he's been hammered as an antediluvian. Yet the president might plausibly have said, "I have decided to continue the Clinton-Gore approach to global warming," since the previous administration took no binding action on Kyoto either. Clinton never submitted the Kyoto agreement to the Senate because he knew it stood no chance of ratification. In a 1997 test ballot, the Senate went on record 95 to zero against a Kyoto resolution; it didn't get a single Democratic vote.

In other words, the deal was history well before Bush took office. Any lingering hope ended last fall, when the European Union essentially rejected America's attempt to add to the agreement an international "carbon trading" system, which economists almost unanimously view as the best hope for near-term, affordable greenhouse-gas reduction. Canada's environment minister, David Anderson, has said the European Union rejected carbon trading specifically to make Kyoto fail: "Europe adopted a position they knew would force the United States to pull out." Why? Because Europe didn't want to do anything about the greenhouse effect but wanted the United States to take the blame. American commentators have happily parroted Europe's line.

Bush's father harmed himself when he turned from pro-environmental (backer of the 1990 Clean Air Act) to anti-environmental (snarling about spotted owls) as the 1992 campaign began; Newt Gingrich and the 1995 House Republicans saw their popularity sink in part because of their efforts to repeal environmental laws. From these episodes, Democrats, enviros, and reporters seeking an instant-doomsday slant have grown adept at bashing Republicans with preposterous overstatements and phony claims of ecological crises. The White House's inability to see this coming is bad politics. For example, the current legal maximum for arsenic in drinking water is 50 parts per billion; the proposed rule Bush delayed would have made it ten parts per billion, a level some studies suggest is regulatory overkill. Bush could have split the difference and announced a new standard of 25 parts per billion, saying he was making the rule twice as strict.

But bad p.r. and bad policy aren't the same thing. With the exception of oil exploration in Alaska, so far there are no meaningful differences between Bush's environmental goals and those of Clinton and Gore. This is surprising and to Bush's credit. It's time the press started giving him some.

[MPC]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
Yes, no matter what good he does, it all comes down to "I just don't like him. "

Why do you like him? Is it because he is born again? Is your fondness for Bush a result of his policy or religion?

[Zimphire]

Originally posted by MPC:
Why do you like him? Is it because he is born again? Is your fondness for Bush a result of his policy or religion?

It's a lot of things. Hey don't get me wrong, I don't agree with everything he stands for. Giving the choice I had at the time, he was the better one. And I'll take 4 Bush's over one Clinton any day. I don't dislike someone just because of the party they are in.

[hELLO wORLD]

Then, he should first ratify the Kyoto Agreements...

[roger_ramjet]

Originally posted by hELLO wORLD:
Then, he should first ratify the Kyoto Agreements...

The President doesn't ratify anything. The Senate does. Even if Bush believed Kyoto was the best thing since sliced bread, the Senate still wouldn't ratify it. Two years before Bush was even elected, the treaty was put to a test vote. It failed to get a single vote.

Kyoto is deeply flawed and doesn't deserve to be ratified.

[MacGorilla]

To me, its all talk. He says he wants to do good for the enviroment then out of the public eye works to weaken the clean water act, air pollution standards and forest rights. Never mind drilling in Alaska. Its hyprocrisy.

If we upped the MPG requirement for all vehicles to 30, we would save 5 times more barrels of oil than the most optimist estimates of what we'd get by drilling in ANWR. It defies logic and common sense.

[wdlove]

Originally posted by hELLO wORLD:
Then, he should first ratify the Kyoto Agreements...

It's the USA that would suffer economically. China, etc can go on polutting that is why that were anxious to signup. It's the old bash America at every opportunity. We need to be more self sufficient for our energy. Drilling in Alaska would help, techniques are so advanced that the environment would not suffer. Oil as a short term solution. I think we need to move full steam ahead on the hydrogen fuel cell, Apollo Project. That would be a long term solution.

[Zimphire]

Originally posted by MacGorilla:
To me, its all talk. He says he wants to do good for the enviroment then out of the public eye works to weaken the clean water act,

That right there was a load of crap. The Clintin administration raised the level water was supposed to be at a UNREASONABLE amount at the end of Clinton's term, knowing Bush would have to lower it, and all the "He isn't for the people!" FUD would pour in. This has been hashed and rehased time and time again. What you had there was political games being played by the Democrats.

Another reason I disrespect Clinton.

[Ver de Terre]

Originally posted by roger_ramjet:
This is from The New Republic. (I got this from Google's cache. The article is no longer available directly from TNR without a subsription.)

W. THE ENVIRONMENTALIST
Health Nut
by Gregg Easterbrook

Post date 04.19.01 | Issue date 04.30.01

Can you chide both Bush and Clinton on the same issue in the same piece? Yes, I think you can:

April 24, 2001

Among concerns on the left as George W. Bush took office was the fear that the next four years would spell environmental disaster as regulations were relaxed and industry was given the green light to dump, destroy and poison. Now that the Bush Administration is some one hundred days old and we are not yet breathing through gas masks, some observers are stepping back to reassess the situation. These commentators include Gregg Easterbrook, a senior editor at The New Republic. Not only does he shy away from the doomsday hypothesis, he goes so far as to imply Bush has made environmental protection a tenet of his administration. Clearly, Easterbrook understands the bizarreness of his assertion, coming, as it does, from a bastion of the left--he finds himself compelled to quote the Alternate Universe Tribune to reflect the lunacy of his position.

Easterbrook gives no indication as to why he chooses to defer to the Dark Side--his defection certainly is not on account of logic, it would seem. His main argument in favor of Bush's environmentalism is so laughable and simplistic as to cause the reader to feel embarrassed for the author. Easterbrook notes, "On almsot every environmental issue, Bush has upheld the Clinton-Gore position," and uses that premise in an attempt to convince us that Bush is greatest thing for the environment since smokestack scrubbers. Perhaps we should as well give el presidente props for not deciding to abolish the Environmental Protection Agency. We obviously have a foreward-looking individual over at 1600 Penn.

The article presents as a first example that W is pro-environmental the president's decision to delay a mandated reduction of the maximum arsenic level in drinking water. Naturally, an anti-health-and-environment decision proves the president to be environmentally inclined. With this postponement, Easterbrook explains, Bush continues the tradition of the previous administration--which did not try to tighten standards until just before leaving office, a choice based on political calculus (opposition to new regulations is great where arsenic occurs naturally at high levels). Granted, the author calls Bush's failure to implement the new standards a "mistake," but because Clinton employed the same cynical political reckoning, Bush is declared no worse. Somehow (perhaps owing to lower expectations), this is supposed to make Bush an environmentalist. Go figure.

Easterbrook goes on to cite the silence surrounding Bush's upholding of new diesel-fuel regulation. The new standards require petroleum companies to remove pollutants from the fuel. Not only do these rules become Bush's personal "strict new diesel rules," they also demonstrate to Easterbrook that Bush is not beholden to the petroleum industry as widely assumed. What can we say? Breathe easy, America, W's minding your air. Oh, and don't forget--with unchecked rises in carbon dioxide emissions, plants should have a field day, producing all the more oxygen for us.

One could assume it is not very difficult to impress Easterbrook. We might expect him to extol the virtues of an olympic athlete who could successfully compete in a high jump contest set up for grade school students. Clinton could pass muster, and so could Bush. How can we question their dedication and prowess? Heaven forbid we should ask if the bar is perhaps too low! Clinton is held as the standard of environmentalism, and where Bush can meet his performance, he, too, becomes a tree-hugger. Unfortunately for Easterbrook, Clinton has not exactly been a hero of the environmental community. Although he tried to leave something of an environmental legacy by setting aside vast tracts of land during his administration, Clinton focused much more intently on social issues. He may have paid lip service environmentalists, a constituency of the left, but he was no environmentalist himself. To use him as the standard for environmentalism is akin to making a concert pianist the spokesman for an association of veterenarians. Environmentalism is rather meaningless in relativistic reckoning, especially when the status quo is inclined towards degradation of the natural world.

And yet, Easterbrook never lets up in his comparisons between Clinton and Bush. Clinton never sent the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate for ratification; Bush abandoned the treaty--that makes them even, environmentalists both. Clinton last year suspended an expansion of listings in the Endangered Species Act; Bush made a similar move this year. Once again, the new president is a chip off the old block. And for good measure, one might as well toss out the fact that most of Clinton's late directives have not been overturned by the Bush Administration. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

The environment could use a champion. It did not find one in Clinton, and barring a miraculous enlightenment, Bush will prove no friendlier to friends of green. Even assuming that "With the exception of oil exploration in Alaska, so far there are no meaningful differences between Bush's environmental goals and those of Clinton and Gore," we can conclude that we are no better off than before. In a more likely scenario, we are indeed worse off than during the previous adminstration. And have no fear�one hundred days may be up, but W has plenty of time to turn our forests into parking lots, our waterways into industrial sewers and our air into some sort of toxic cocktail. If Easterbrook is convinced Bush is good for the environment, he should probably look for a job at the Alternate Universe Tribune he so dearly admires.

[Ver de Terre]

Originally posted by wdlove:
I think we need to move full steam ahead on the hydrogen fuel cell, Apollo Project. That would be a long term solution.

I agree, but as has been noted many times before, hydrogen is not a replacement for oil. Fuel cells are essentially advanced rechargeable batteries. To get energy out, you have to put (more) energy in, to begin with. That means that if all cars were to run on hydrogen, we would have to build sufficient power plants to cover the energy used by the entire fleet of automobiles. There's no certainty those new plants would use environmentally "neutral" sources of energy like geothermal, wind or solar. More likely, coal would be the source of choice. The U.S. is lucky to have relatively clean coal, but coal is even dirtier than oil. So, without serious concurrent investment in clean energy, the impact of switching to a hydrogen economy could actually place more burden on the environment.

[zigzag]

I think it's useful to point out that Bush's record so far is not that different from Clinton's. However, as the second article points out, this does not make him "environmentally friendly", much less an "environmentalist." Among other things, someone who promotes logging as a way to remedy forest fires would not fit my idea of an "environmentalist."

The overly gushy tone of Easterbrook's column makes me take it with a grain of salt, but if it demonstrates that Bush is no worse than Clinton, that's useful.

[zigzag]

Originally posted by Zimphire:
And I'll take 4 Bush's over one Clinton any day.

I suspect that Clinton would take 4 bushes as well, any day of the week.

[Ver de Terre]

Originally posted by zigzag:
I think it's useful to point out that Bush's record so far is not that different from Clinton's. However, as the second article points out, this does not make him "environmentally friendly", much less an "environmentalist." Among other things, someone who promotes logging as a way to remedy forest fires would not fit my idea of an "environmentalist."

To be fair, I think Bush really believes logging could be the solution to forest fires. As I see it, the problem is that he takes some little fact or premise from a complex issue, and turns it into overarching policy. He has a natural tendency towards single, simple answers, which unfortunately don't always reflect the nuance of the real world.

There's a certain amount of agreement over the idea that the national forests are overmanaged, with overzealous fire suppression. That has led to a build-up of combustible brush, and clearing it could reduce the danger of catastrophic fires. Well, it's not hard to imagine how this could evolve in Bush's mind (which I'm not claiming to be able to read). Remove the fuel, reduce the danger...remove the wood, eliminate the danger. Of course, there are other, better solutions, but from his vantage (with a relative lack of understanding), he sees a win-win situation: economic benefits and safer forests.

[zigzag]

Originally posted by Ver de Terre:
To be fair, I think Bush really believes logging could be the solution to forest fires. As I see it, the problem is that he takes some little fact or premise from a complex issue, and turns it into overarching policy. He has a natural tendency towards single, simple answers, which unfortunately don't always reflect the nuance of the real world.

There's a certain amount of agreement over the idea that the national forests are overmanaged, with overzealous fire suppression. That has led to a build-up of combustible brush, and clearing it could reduce the danger of catastrophic fires. Well, it's not hard to imagine how this could evolve in Bush's mind (which I'm not claiming to be able to read). Remove the fuel, reduce the danger...remove the wood, eliminate the danger. Of course, there are other, better solutions, but from his vantage (with a relative lack of understanding), he sees a win-win situation: economic benefits and safer forests.

Yes, I agree with all that. The problem is that he would entrust the solution to loggers, who would most likely remove the fire hazard by, well, removing the forests. This would be akin to solving a pest problem by bulldozing your house. As you say, it would be effective, but not necessarily desirable.

I'm not opposed to a balance of uses, but I'm not quite prepared to call Dubya an environmentalist.