Bush's Record on the Environment

The Bush administration has been rolling back environmental protections quicker than the press can keep up with and not just those signed by Bill Clinton. He has gutted and abandoned key sections of environmental protections brought on by every president since Kennedy. He has gutted key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, which have done more to reduce health problems in America than any piece of environmental legislation in this country. He has eliminated the Superfund program, which is charged with cleaning up millions of pounds of toxic industrial wastes such as lead, arsenic, mercury, and vinyl chloride. Here are just a few examples of the atrocities he and his administration have committed on our environment:

Global Warming:
Despite promising to reduce carbon dioxide emissions during the campaign of 2000, George Bush backed out of the Kyoto Protocol, which reduces heat-trapping gas emissions. He loosened the restrictions on CO2 emissions from power plants-even though the United States accounts for a quarter of global CO2 emissions.

He wants YOU to pay: Since the Superfund law passed in 1980, corporate polluters were principally responsible for paying for the cleanup of the most environmentally damaged areas, called superfund sites. Bush ended that era of responsibility and has shifted the burden of responsibility to the tax-paying public.

Bush dismisses Roadless Area Conservation Rule: Bush's reversal of the Clinton-era Roadless Rule will make most pristine wilderness areas vulnerable to new road construction for the purposes of logging, energy development, and other commercial uses.

Bush supports increased logging: Bush's Healthy Forests Initiative is an inaccurately named program that exploits the fear of wildfires in order to eliminate environmental protections and boost commercial logging. Specifically, the Healthy Forests Initiative will:

• Open more than 20 million acres of forest to logging and thinning in our national parks.
• Waive environmental laws, public comment procedures, administrative appeals and judicial review.
• Allow timber companies to log large, fire resistant trees, rather than just the smaller trees and underbrush that constitute the major fire danger.

Bush promotes dirty air:

• Bush eviscerated a key portion of the Clean Air Act's Clean Air Act's New Source Review Program and has begun allowing over 17,000 industrial plants to increase harmful emissions with no requirements to improve their pollution controls.
• Bush instructed EPA staff to halt ongoing investigations into 50 power plants for past violations of New Source Review requirements.
• Bush's so-called Clear Skies Act would:
  • Allow more than twice as much soot-forming sulfur dioxide (SO2) pollution from power plants for nearly a decade longer (2012 - 2018) than the Clean Air Act currently allows.
  • Allow more than one and a half times as much smog-forming nitrogen oxide (NOx) pollution from power plants for nearly a decade longer (2010 - 2018) than the Clean Air Act currently allows.
  • Allow power plants to emit more than five times as much mercury pollution for a decade longer (2008 - 2018) than the Clean Air Act currently allows.
  • Repeal the Clean Air Act's special protections for park visibility, allowing power plants to avoid installing the modern pollution control equipment needed to curb the haze they cause in national parks and wilderness areas.

Bush is allowing sewage in your water:

• Bush proposed allowing water treatment facilities to "blend" wastewater, diverting raw sewage and other pollutants directly into streams, rivers, and lakes during rain storms.
• Bush eliminated proposed EPA rules for controlling discharges of raw sewage from sewage collection systems.
• Bush reversed a Clinton-era rule forcing states to speed up their efforts to clean up "non-point" sources of pollution (pesticides and fertilizers, oil, sediments, debris, and other harmful effluents).