Bush Versus the Environment
-
- $11.99
-
- $11.99
Publisher Description
Since becoming president, George W. Bush has walked away from the Kyoto Protocol, pushed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, undermined protections for endangered species and wilderness, and retreated from his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide. But the president’s agenda reaches deeper than these well-known policies. In Bush Versus the Environment, Robert Devine shows how the White House is quietly undermining the entire system of environmental safeguards that has developed over the past thirty years. The administration's tactics include:
-Encouraging lawsuits against the federal government that challenge existing environmental laws, and then feebly defending the cases in court.
-Ignoring science that doesn’t support the president's goals, and pressuring government scientists to produce the results the administration wants.
-Using fuzzy math to overestimate the costs and underestimate the benefits of regulations that protect human health and the environment, which can lead to the elimination of much-needed rules.
These are just a few of the administration’s strategies, which are being pursued beneath the radar of a public that overwhelmingly supports environmental protections. Bush Versus the Environment is a compelling and important look at one of the most important issues facing America today, one that will have consequences that last long after Bush has left office.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The bias of this book is proenvironment, but National Geographic writer Devine (Alien Invasion: America's Battle with Non-Native Animals and Plants) is no impassioned polemicist. Indeed, he opens his pragmatic overview of the current administration's environmental policies by regretting that few presidential appointees let alone mid-level staffers or even media relations people responded to interview requests or even to fact-checking questions. Some of his overview is compelling, particularly a firsthand report on the rural poor of Pennsylvania's coal country, whose high incidence of asthma, lupus and renal cancer is related to emissions from the kind of coal-fired plant not required (through Bush's rollback of Clinton's policies) to install pollutant-reducing equipment. Some of his overview is heavy going, particularly a detailed study of the "bean counters" at the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), who, he says, selectively used statistics to often underplay the adverse impact of weakened environmental protections. And some of his overview, at least for anti-Bush buffs, covers familiar areas of concern and conflict: suppression of data on global warming, controversy over increased logging to prevent forest fires, opening up wilderness areas for snowmobiling, the stealth seeding of an array of scientific advisory panels with proindustry, antiregulatory appointments, etc. Devine believes that a majority of Americans still favor a balanced yet progressive approach to the environment qualities that he thinks are glaringly absent from what he casts as Bush's unblinking vision of "profit before protection."
