Is Bush Another ‘Killer Trees’ President?

At last week’s NATO summit George Bush vanquished an old Ronald Reagan enemy--the “evil empire.” But within the next few days, he is scheduled to confront a more menacing Reagan adversary: killer trees.

Reagan, who not entirely in jest blamed air pollution on trees, established what is probably the worst environmental record of any President in history. Bush, by contrast, ran for President as a self-proclaimed “environmentalist.” But he’s done so poorly that a senior civil servant despaired to me last week that “It’s not as bad as when Ronald Reagan was the President. It’s worse.”

To survive the test of Brussels, Bush had to rescue himself from his staff of Reagan holdovers and strike out as his own man. He may be forced to do the same again to survive the coming environmental test.

Bush’s long-promised plan to clean up the nation’s air is scheduled to be unveiled within the next few days. Based on documents circulating in Washington, if Bush adopted the most stringent option presented to him in every case, the bulk of industrialized America would still suffer from poisonous air in 2005--30 years later than the law’s original deadline of 1975. Worse, this staff-proposed program would add to global warming by indirectly forcing increases in “greenhouse” pollutants.

Air pollution is so bad that some experts believe it kills more people than auto accidents. Los Angeles smog is literally equivalent to breathing a diluted solution of bleach, battery acid and Raid. In the East, lakes, rivers and streams have gone dead, virtually every tree species is sick, and estimates of building damages and crop losses range between $1 billion and $5 billion a year, all due to air pollution. Global warming and destruction of the stratospheric ozone layer threaten not just life as we know it, but perhaps life itself.

Bush rejected the Reagan environmental rhetoric, but is yet to change the Reagan record.

Consider, for example, the following:

--Confronted by the largest oil spill in U.S. history, Bush vacillated for days, then finally adopted a let-Exxon-do-it cleanup policy. Predictably, the cleanup proved to be wholly insufficient, so Bush submitted oil-spill legislation to the Congress--not to increase the liability of oil companies for spills, but to limit it.

--During the campaign, suspicious voters were assured that Bush differed from Reagan and would tackle even global warming caused by air pollution. “Those who think we are powerless to do anything about the greenhouse effect forget about the ‘White House effect’; as President I intend to do something about it,” he said.

Yet Bush’s chief of staff initially rejected a plan to fulfill the campaign pledge of convening a global conference on the greenhouse effect. He yielded only after GOP senators wrote Bush--and then, only to a workshop. Days later, the congressional testimony of a top government scientist on global warming was censored to delete facts supporting his conclusion that the greenhouse effect had begun.

--While campaigning, Bush promised a change in the quality of environmental decision-makers. Yet six months after Reagan left office, most of the critical posts remain filled by caretaker civil servants, depressing morale and paralyzing the bureaucracy. Most Bush appointees have been Reagan holdovers, many of them proteges of James Watt. Others are campaign contributors or friends of Bush or his aides. The exception is William Reilly, the environmentalist appointed administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. Even Reilly’s appointment, viewed as a strategy to silence the environmental community, fits a pattern of calculated environmental neglect.

--Much was made of the inadequacy of the federal environmental budget during the campaign and Bush savaged Michael Dukakis’ record on Boston Harbor. Yet as President, Bush asked for zero additional money--that’s right, nothing--to clean the harbor. The rest of EPA’s budget fared the same: Bush increased it not one penny beyond Reagan’s proposal. Yet to develop new ways to burn coal, the dirtiest of all fuels and the leading cause of acid rain and global warming, Bush boosted spending $650 million.

Just as the President’s pre-NATO performance could be blamed on his staff, not Bush himself, so might his environmental record to this point. But soon, Bush is scheduled to make some personal choices on which he can be fairly judged--choices that could prove every bit as crucial to humanity’s future as those he made in connection with disarmament.

Bush saved himself from a potential NATO debacle by overruling his staff and exercising his personal judgment--what he called “the vision thing.” What the next few days will prove is whether Bush can do the same with respect to the environment. Will he be able to see the all-important forest despite the killer trees?