Environmental Whopper

During the three presidential debates, only one question was asked about the environment, but the answers still led to one of the biggest whoppers told by an American president since Bill Clinton claimed he had not had sexual relations with a certain intern.

President Bush said he was a “good steward” of the land, but in reality Bush has blocked California’s efforts to clean its own air, attempted to open more public land to extraction industries and destroyed the morale of National Park Service employees. The League of Conservation Voters, hardly a radical environmental group, awarded Bush its first F grade.

The administration has quietly rolled back protection of 60 million acres of forests from road building and stymied the phaseout of snowmobiles in Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. An environmental group reported Tuesday that federal civil lawsuits against polluters have dropped precipitously.

Fortunately, Bush’s Clear Skies initiative, really an effort to erode the requirements of the Clean Air Act, has been rejected by Congress. The administration also has failed so far to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling.

More pernicious, and effective have been quieter actions, such as failure to enforce regulations by the Environmental Protection Agency.

So what’s in store for the next four years if Bush is reelected? His campaign essentially proposes to continue the initiatives of the last four years, including another bid to pass Clear Skies and an effort to carry out the Healthy Forests initiative, another program with an Orwellian name, which opens up more national forest land to loggers.

Environmental groups all but universally support Democratic candidate John F. Kerry, who has long backed their causes in the Senate. Among other things, he worked to defeat administration efforts to exploit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Kerry says that if elected, he will rescind actions that granted miners, oil and gas industries and timber companies broad access to wild lands that previously were off-limits.

As with most of Kerry’s campaign promises, his environmental initiatives are long on big, expensive ideas and short on methods to pay for them. He vows to rid communities of toxic wastes, fight traffic congestion and sprawl, restore the national parks, cut air pollution and join other nations in fighting emissions that are believed to cause global warming.

Appealing promises all, but getting Congress to agree to them and finding a funding source will prove deeply challenging.

Some of Kerry’s ideas for the environment sound like pie in the sky, but as conservationists see it, there’s really no contest in this election.