Humanity is on the threshold of a century of extraordinary bounty, courtesy of global climate change. That’s the opinion of Robert Balling, former scientific adviser to the Greening Earth Society, a lobbying arm of the power industry founded by the Western Fuels Association. In a world where atmospheric carbon dioxide levels soar from the burning of fossil fuels, he says, “crops will grow faster, larger, more water-use efficient, and more resistant to stress.” Quoting study after study, he invokes visions of massive melon yields, heftier potatoes, and “pumped-up pastureland.” Bumper crops of wheat and rice, he says, will benefit the world’s farmers and the hungry.

Blame it on the grain, yeah, yeah.

Balling’s assertions are backed by solid science: Gaseous CO2 fertilization does cause remarkable growth spurts in many plants, and could create a greener planet with beefier tomatoes and faster-growing, bigger trees. But there’s a catch: The insects, mammals, and impoverished people in developing countries who feed on this bounty may end up malnourished, or even starving.

A small but growing body of research is finding that elevated levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, while increasing crop yield, decrease the nutritional value of plants. More than a hundred studies, for example, have found that when CO2 from fossil-fuel burning builds up in plant tissues, nitrogen (essential for making protein) declines. A smaller number of studies hint at another troubling impact: As atmospheric CO2 levels go up, trace elements in plants (such as zinc and iron, which are vital to animal and human life) go down, potentially malnourishing all those that subsist on the plants. This preliminary research has given scientists reason to worry about bigger unknowns: Virtually no studies have been done on the effects of elevated CO2 on other essential trace elements, such as selenium, an important antioxidant, or chromium, which is believed to regulate blood-sugar levels.

The less-nutritious plants of a CO2-enriched world will likely not be a problem for rich nations, where “super-sized” meals and vitamin supplements are a dietary mainstay. But things could be very different in the developing world, where millions already live on the edge of starvation, and where the micronutrient deficit, known as “hidden hunger,” is already considered one of the world’s leading health problems by the United Nations.

The problem of hidden hunger grew out of the 1960s “green revolution.” That boom in agriculture relied on new varieties of high-yield crops and chemical fertilizers to staunch world hunger by upping caloric intake in the developing world. Unfortunately, those high-yield crops are typically low in micronutrients, and eating them has resulted in an epidemic of hidden hunger. At least a third of the world is already lacking in some chemical element, according to the U.N., and the problem is due in part to a steady diet of micronutrient-deficient green-revolution plants. Iron deficiency alone, which can cause cognitive impairment in children and increase the rate of stillbirths, affects some 4.5 billion people. Lack of iodine, another micronutrient, can result in brain damage and is a serious problem in 130 countries. According to the World Bank, hidden hunger is one of the most important causes of slowed economic development in the Third World.

Enter rising CO2 levels, which could exacerbate hidden hunger in this century. Current concentrations of atmospheric CO2 now exceed anything seen in the last 420,000 years — and likely in the last 20 million years, according to the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And forecasts call for CO2 levels to rise dramatically, from today’s 378 parts per million to 560 parts per million or more by as early as 2050. The micronutrient decline brought by these ballooning CO2 levels could collide dangerously with the developing world’s nutrient-poor green-revolution crops and its exploding population. Scientists also worry about how plant nutrient deficiencies might destabilize the world’s wild ecosystems in unexpected ways.

“This is one of those slow-motion effects that does not hit us like a hammer, so we don’t notice it,” says Irakli Loladze, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska. But, he says, failing to notice the hidden hunger fueled by changing CO2 levels does not lessen its potential impact: “The structure of the whole food web could change.”

Diet for a Nitrogen-Deprived Planet

Early carbon-dioxide enrichment experiments were relatively simple: All kinds of wild and cultivated plants were exposed in field or lab to current, doubled, and tripled levels of CO2, and scientists watched what happened. In more than 2,700 studies, plant growth typically exploded. Doubled CO2 levels resulted in an average increase in agricultural yield of over 40 percent.

But after about 1993, some scientists began to question this approach. While the early studies looked at overall growth, they ignored the nutritional quality of the bigger, faster-growing plants, according to Loladze. When researchers began measuring the nutritive value of CO2-enriched plants and feeding the vegetation to insects and livestock, they started getting discomforting data.

Those data reveal a clear pattern for the macronutrient nitrogen, the only dietary chemical element that has been extensively studied to date. Peter Curtis, a professor of plant ecology at Ohio State University, gathered 159 papers addressing the nitrogen-depletion problem and found a “reduction of nitrogen in seeds in both wild and crop species,” he says. Some species, like soybeans, showed no change, while barley and wheat showed a 20 percent reduction.

Though Curtis doesn’t see this nitrogen shortage as a crisis for industrial agriculture, where chemical fertilizers can make up nutritional shortfalls, he wonders how protein declines might affect “wildlife that rely on plant seeds — insects, seed-eating birds, or mammals, for example. For them, the nitrogen levels are really quite important.”

CO2-induced nitrogen deficiency in plants has already been shown to affect herbivorous insects and the carnivores that eat them. To make up for the plunge in plant protein, some plant-eating insects must dramatically increase their intake of vegetation. But unable to keep up with the need to eat enough food, some bugs suffer increased malnutrition, starvation, predation, and mortality, writes evolutionary biologist David Seaborg in a recent issue of Earth Island Journal.

When Western Michigan University entomologist David Karowe fed cabbage white butterfly caterpillars leaves grown in an atmosphere with double the earth’s current CO2 levels, the insects ate about 40 percent more plant matter than under current atmospheric conditions. But they still couldn’t meet their dietary needs. Their growth rate slowed by about 10 percent and their adult size was smaller. Peter Stiling at the University of South Florida made similar findings for leaf miners, insects that eat out tiny caverns in leaves where they live. When they took up housekeeping in CO2-enriched leaves, the insects had to eat out 20 percent larger leaf homes. But the bugs were still twice as likely to die of starvation as insects living at today’s CO2 levels.

As serious as these results seem, no one should jump to conclusions, says William Mattson, chief insect ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service in Rhinelander, Wis. He has spent the past five years monitoring 10 insect species and found they react differently to raised CO2 levels and lowered nitrogen levels, with some showing no change and others harmed, and no clear pattern yet in sight. He worries, though, that CO2 fertilization and nitrogen depletion could combine to alter insect balances in unexpected ways. For example, the leaf miners described above were also four times more likely to be killed by parasitic wasps — bad news for the miners but good news for the wasps. In another study, aphids reproduced 10 to 15 percent faster in enriched CO2 atmospheres — good for the aphids, but bad for the crops they infest.

Sorting out CO2 winners and losers ultimately depends on your point of view. To most people, “good insects” pollinate our crops, provide food for fish and birds, and regulate wild and domestic plant growth, and their decline would be problematic. However, farmers would likely herald a population crash in “bad bugs” — that is, crop-eating pests. Unfortunately, no one can guess what CO2-altered natural and cultivated systems might look like.

As CO2 levels rise, sheep ruminate
on the impacts.

The problem gets more complex with bigger animals. Clenton Owensby of Kansas State University has conducted one of the most extensive CO2 experiments involving mammals — specifically, sheep. “We got around a 22 percent increase in yield of forage grasses over an eight-year period in an enriched CO2 environment,” Owensby says — but, “over that same time period, we also saw an 8 to 12 percent reduction in nitrogen concentration in the grasses, with a 5 to 10 percent reduction in ruminant animal productivity.” That, he says, could translate into longer times spent raising sheep and cattle in the future, shaving already thin profit margins from financially strapped ranches. The problem, Owensby says, is that sheep and cattle cannot digest forage directly; they rely on microbes in their guts to break down cellulose. But reduced nitrogen decreases the microbial population, which slows the rate at which the forage can be digested, which in turn slows the rate at which forage can be eaten, and ultimately the rate at which the animals grow.

Owensby assumes it will be easy for industrialized nations to compensate. They can add nitrogen supplements to livestock diets, though that will still add some cost to meat production. But this would not be so easy in the developing world, where livestock productivity is often already marginal. And it would be nearly impossible with wild ruminants, such as browsing deer, elk, and gazelles, among which nitrogen deficiency remains unstudied.

Oddly, air pollution from fossil fuels may help offset the negative impacts of increased CO2 in plants. Auto exhaust and coal-burning emissions have increased nitrogen deposits in soils in the farm country of industrial nations by up to 50 times natural levels, according to Christian Korner of the Institute of Botany at the University of Basel, Switzerland. While this brings with it other serious problems such as acid rain, it could help ease or even solve nitrogen and protein deficiencies. But not without other repercussions, says Curtis: “The bottom line is that the combination of high CO2 and high nitrogen favors typical human-camp followers, mostly weedy species,” such as Canadian thistle, spotted knapweed, leafy spurge, and kudzu, all of which seriously damage croplands and ecosystems and compete with native plants. “That could lead to an acceleration in the decline of biodiversity,” he says.

Elementary, My Dear

What about the other 24 elements known to be vital to the human diet? Precious few studies have been conducted on these micronutrients, but the University of Nebraska’s Loladze surveyed the entire available scientific literature. He found that an overwhelming number of the three-dozen-plus experiments conducted to date showed that CO2 enrichment caused a significant decline in one or more micronutrients, which include zinc and magnesium.

Size isn’t everything.

“It is obviously known that carbon dioxide boosts plant growth; it is after all a ‘greenhouse’ gas,” says Loladze. “Even a high-school student in New Zealand growing plants with high amounts of CO2 was able to grow huge tomatoes. But when she investigated their quality, it turned out that the tomatoes had lower levels of micronutrients, and less nutrition in them.”

Loladze, to his dismay, found just two studies on rice, the world’s most important crop, and four on wheat, the second most important. One rice study found that four out of five elements decreased when grown in CO2-enriched air, with nitrogen dropping 14 percent, phosphorus 5 percent, iron 17 percent, and zinc 28 percent. Only calcium showed an increase, of 32 percent. The other rice study showed no significant change in micronutrient levels. In wheat, on average, every measured element except potassium declined in three studies. A just-published study by Chinese researchers led by Dong-Xiu Wu found that while high CO2 levels significantly increased grain yield, they severely decreased nutrient quality: nitrogen concentrations fell by 15 percent, phosphorus by 36 percent, potassium by 23 percent, and zinc by 32 percent.

Mattson points to still another problem with CO2. “Something else that may exacerbate micronutrient deficiency is that added CO2 tends to drive up [the production of] many plant non-nutrients” — poisons that enhance plant defenses against their would-be consumers. “The sum total of lowered nitrogen, lowered essential micronutrients, and heightened [plant poisons such as] tannins and other phenolics could be the worst kind of soup,” he says. What we’re doing, he believes, is running an unregulated and probably irrevocable chemical experiment on earth’s ecosystems.

Dude, Where’s My Carbon?

Now that researchers have detected CO2-induced nutrient deficiencies, they are seeking to understand why they happen. And they think they have found some relatively simple underlying causes — simple to scientists, that is, although perhaps not to those of us who glazed over in high-school biology.

We live in a carbon world, scientists explain: All life on earth, from oranges to orangutans, is carbon-based. Most of this carbon comes from our atmosphere, which is absorbed by plants, which pass it on to grazing animals, which in turn pass it on to their predators. Change the levels of atmospheric carbon, and all plants and animals along the chain may be affected.

Here’s how: Plants create much of their biomass out of thin air, from a steady diet of CO2 sucked through small leaf openings called stomata. Then, via the miraculous sleight-of-hand known as photosynthesis, the plants combine CO2 and water in the presence of chlorophyll and sunlight to make carbohydrates, simple sugars, and complex starches, which provide energy for plant growth. Much of the remainder of what plants need — nitrogen and trace elements — doesn’t come from the air, but is pulled up through the root system from the soil.

Scientists have isolated two mechanisms that potentially explain how elevated CO2 levels reduce plant nutrients. The first is a “biomass dilution” effect. As plants absorb more airborne carbon, they produce higher-than-normal levels of carbohydrates but are unable to boost their relative intake of soil nutrients. The result of this dilution effect is increased yields of carbohydrate-rich fruits, vegetables, and grains that contain lower levels of macro- and micronutrients. Put simply, a bite of bread in our current CO2 atmosphere ends up being more nutritious than one in the CO2-enriched atmosphere of the future.

A second problem: Plants exposed to increased CO2 levels start to narrow the stomata through which they inhale CO2 and exhale water vapor via transpiration. This benefits plants by making them more drought resistant, but it also means that fewer waterborne nutrients flow into the roots. According to Loladze, if carbon-dioxide levels are doubled, transpiration decreases by about 23 percent.

A particularly disturbing study suggests that the mechanisms of CO2 nutrient depletion may already be causing a decline in the quality of our food supply. Josep Penuelas of the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications in Barcelona, Spain, compared historical plant samples grown at preindustrial levels of atmospheric CO2 with modern equivalents. He found that today’s plants had the lowest levels of calcium, copper, iron, potassium, magnesium, sodium, sulfur, and zinc than at any time in the last three centuries.

Research for Tomorrow

The obvious way to reduce the risk of declining food quality is to cut fossil-fuel emissions, thereby reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations. But political resistance in the U.S. and the global failure to effectively curtail emissions means that CO2 levels will rise far higher in coming decades. Therefore, scientists say, we need to quickly embark on a crash program to research the biochemical impacts of CO2 and prepare for the potential nutritional harm.

“Nobody really knows how serious the changing chemical composition of plants caused by heightened CO2 will be,” warns Mattson. “We are just scratching the surface here. … It is a wide-open question about what impact this will have on the nutritional physiology or reproductive success of animals.”

Loladze agrees that three dozen studies, or even 200, prove nothing conclusively. Curtis suggests a novel fast-track strategy for quickly expanding that database: He says that data may not need to come from new experiments, but may already exist “as archived seeds” and other stored vegetative matter left over from the 2,700 CO2 plant experiments already completed. Korner, however, calls for an aggressive new round of nutrient experiments conducted on a global scale.

Such massive research would require major funding, something the Bush administration seems unlikely to provide. Still, throw more money at the problem, agrees Mattson, and, “you’ll get more people working, and you’ll accrue the knowledge faster. Whether it can influence policy, that’s difficult to say. We have an administration that has its mind set on what the policy should be. And it’s always possible for them to say we just don’t know enough yet to act. It’s a [faulty] defense anyone can employ: to say, ‘there is so much unknown; let’s not do anything.’”

At some point, though, there will be a tipping point, which is what most worries scientists like Mattson. He looks at the vast array of harm caused by increased greenhouse-gas levels — melting ice caps, extreme weather, the altering of wildlife habitat, and the biochemical impacts of rising CO2 levels — and concludes, “You push something a little bit every year over the long term, and you see little or nothing changing. And all of a sudden … one of those nonlinear changes occurs, where you push everything just far enough, and you’re over a cliff.”

Which way will the scales of justice tip?

Unlike most judicial nominees, Myers has never been a judge. Instead, his qualifications include decades as a paid lobbyist and lawyer to the coal and cattle industries. In his recent position as the Bush Interior Department’s chief attorney, Myers tried to give away valuable federal lands to a mining company and imperiled Native American sacred sites. “His nomination is the epitome of the anti-environmental tilt of so many of President Bush’s nominees,” says Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.).

Democrats aggressively blocked Myers’ appointment with a filibuster in 2004. So when his nomination lapsed at the end of this past congressional session, many legal experts assumed it was dead, along with the nominations of nine other judicial candidates that were blocked by Senate Democrats for their extremist ideology, industry ties, and/or ethical problems. But on Dec. 23, while Americans were distracted by the holidays, the president gave his corporate backers (especially those in the energy and mining industries) a Christmas present: He announced his intent to renominate seven of the filibustered candidates, including Myers. (The other three were given the option of being renominated, but withdrew themselves from consideration.)

“Renomination on this scope and scale of so many judges who the Senate has refused to confirm has never happened before,” says Glenn Sugameli, senior legislative counsel for Earthjustice, a nonprofit public-interest law firm. Noting that Congress has already confirmed 204 of Bush’s appointees, Sugameli asserts, “President Bush is trying to convert the Senate into a rubber stamp that will confirm 100 percent of his judicial nominees. That is what is really at stake here.”

Also at stake is the future of the U.S. environment. While much attention over natural-resource protection is focused on the executive and legislative branches of government, most decisive battles for the environment are won or lost in the judicial branch. And with Supreme Court Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist fighting cancer, and three other justices in their 70s or 80s, the president may have the chance to fill up to four Supreme Court vacancies with right-leaning anti-environmentalists.

Bush plans to go to the mat for his judicial nominees.

Photo: WhiteHouse.gov.

But as important as those nominations are, Bush’s nominations to the lower federal courts are as crucial to the environment. While the Supreme Court takes on less than 100 cases per year, the circuit (or appellate) courts hear more than 40,000 appeals annually and set most legal precedents that become the law of the land.

There are currently 37 federal judicial openings, with 15 of those on the circuit courts of appeal. For the environment, some of the key open judgeships include three vacancies on the District of Columbia Circuit (the court that hears most environmental cases involving executive-branch regulatory agencies such as the Interior Department, the U.S. EPA, and the Army Corps of Engineers), as well as seven vacancies on the West’s 9th Circuit.

“In many ways, the courts are more important than either Congress or the executive-branch agencies,” says Patrick Parenteau, professor of environmental law and director of the Environmental and Natural Resources Law Clinic at the Vermont Law School. “Congress may enact the laws, but it does so in very broad, sweeping terms. It is the courts that interpret, apply, and enforce the statutes.” Without the courts, such landmark legislation as the Clean Air and Water acts could have been stillborn, he says. “If you don’t have courts and judges willing to take a strong stand, those laws never take effect on the ground. They don’t change how things are done. The courts give teeth to environmental laws.”

President Bush, however, seems intent on extracting those teeth. And one of his key strategies for doing so is to pack the federal courts with right-wing extremists. The likely result could be one of the most heated Senate battles over judicial nominations ever, with some experts predicting the struggle will be a defining moment of Bush’s second term.

Taking Care of Business

Perhaps the most disturbing trend in Bush’s judicial appointees is their increasingly common links to industry. More than a third of Bush appointments to appellate courts and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims during his first term — 21 of 59 nominations since 2001 — have worked as lawyers or lobbyists for the oil, gas, and energy industries, according to a new investigation by the Center for Investigative Reporting. Three of these energy industry-linked Bush nominations have been made to the critically important 9th Circuit (with one confirmed so far), another nominated but not confirmed to the D.C. Circuit Court, and four confirmed to the little-known Court of Federal Claims, which deals with “takings” property claims made by developers and industry against the government. “The placement of the nominees suggests an administration strategy of nominating corporate-friendly judges in circuits where they will make the greatest impact,” notes CIR. “In many cases, these same corporations and industries are also major campaign contributors to the Bush administration and the Republican Party.”

Sheldon Goldman, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and expert on the history of the nominating process, notes that reliance on special-interest lobbyists to fill prime posts on the federal bench has been rare under past presidents, and he raises questions about the Bush justices’ ability to be “fair-minded and objective.” Goldman reveals in a 2003 Judicature journal article that 9.6 percent of Bush district-court appointments had come from large law firms with 100 or more lawyers, of the type that represent large corporations, while the percentage was just 2 percent under Jimmy Carter, 6.2 percent under Ronald Reagan, and 6.6 percent under Bill Clinton. Of recent presidents, only Bush Sr. recruited a slightly higher percentage of appointees from large law firms, coming in at 10.8 percent.

But Roger Pilon, vice president for legal affairs and director of the ultra-right Cato Institute’s Center for Constitutional Studies, denies and downplays such industry ties. “Twenty-one out of 59 judicial nominees had close ties to mining and other extraction industries? It is factually nonsense,” he says. “And even if it were true, so what?” Pilon contends that just because judicial nominees lobbied or lawyered for big business and big polluters, that’s no reason to think that, once appointed, they will show bias toward their old clients and against the environment. He calls such thinking “Marxist class-analysis claptrap.”

But obviously the National Association of Manufacturers thinks otherwise. This powerful business lobby is about to launch a multimillion-dollar campaign to aid the White House in its bid to win approval for its judicial nominations, reports the Los Angeles Times. The head of the association, former Michigan Gov. John Engler (R), a longtime friend of the president, implied in his Times interview that the appointment of federal justices is important to business, partly because of judges’ roles in civil liability cases. (Such cases might include corporations being held liable for oil spills, damaged fisheries, toxic waste-causing cancers or birth defects, etc.) It’s expected that pressure from the association’s powerful members, such as General Motors, might force the reversal of some Democratic senators who fought Bush’s most egregious corporate-connected nominees in his first term.

All of this strife over judicial nominations seems to challenge the old stereotype of an impartial U.S. judiciary. And indeed, a new study shows that political party affiliation does make a difference when it comes to the environment and judges. The study, by the nonpartisan Environmental Law Institute, looked at 325 federal trial and appellate court rulings between 2001 and 2004 concerning the National Environmental Policy Act, a foundation of U.S. environmental law that requires all federal agencies to take into account the impact of their actions on the environment.

It found that a plaintiff with pro-environmental goals had less than half the chance of success before a Republican-appointed judge (a 28 percent success rate) than before a Democratic appointee (59 percent success rate). Conversely, plaintiffs with pro-development or industry goals were successful only 14 percent of the time before Democratic appointees, but 58 percent of the time before Republican appointees.

The GOP judges’ anti-environmental stance has grown more pronounced under Bush. Of the 23 NEPA cases heard by the president’s appointees, only four were decided in favor of the environment — that’s 83 percent of cases decided in favor of industry, a marked decline from the already poor environmental success rate scored with nominees of past Republican presidents. (The report does note, however, that the Bush judges have served for such a short time that more data will be needed to fully affirm this trend.)

The NEPA study “may or may not show bias on one or both sides,” notes Sugameli. “But what it does clearly show is that who sits on the courts matters. It makes a difference, and affects people’s ability to breathe clean air, drink clean water, and to enjoy special places.”

Law and Disorder

Bush appointees, though relatively new to the federal bench, are already attempting to reinterpret landmark environmental decisions and change the way the statutes apply. In defiance of precedents and the public interest, the 9th Circuit’s Richard R. Clifton in a dissenting opinion would have allowed a national-forest timber sale to go forward despite an environmental group’s injunction to stop the sale. Meanwhile, the 5th Circuit’s Edith Brown Clement and Charles Pickering (both Bush appointments) have joined in a dissenting opinion that would have allowed a commercial and residential development in Texas, despite the risk to listed endangered species living on the site.

But as troubling as this initial erosion of environmental statutes might be, and as damaging as it could eventually become to specific locales and species, worse may lie ahead. Though individual judges can do severe environmental harm, higher courts can still overturn their decisions. Now, though, some ultra-conservative Republican-appointed judges are working to challenge the very constitutionality of environmental law. And new Bush nominations to the appellate courts and Supreme Court could provide the majorities needed to achieve that goal.

“The most important long-term issue before the U.S. Supreme Court, and the lower courts, is New Constitutionalism,” says Sugameli. This extreme anti-regulatory philosophy, also called New Federalism, has been refined by corporations, right-wing think tanks, and the ultra-conservative Federalist Society. Born in the Reagan era, New Federalism opposes big government, and especially the intrusion of the federal government into state and local public services and economic and regulatory matters, according to the Cato Institute website.

New Federalism would repudiate a broad interpretation of the U.S. Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause, upon which much of federal environmental law is based. Until the 1930s, this clause was used primarily to regulate trade between states. But from Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal era to the present day, judges have interpreted the clause as granting Congress the power to regulate business with regard to wage and hour limitations, health and safety, and the environment.

William G. Myers III.

Photo: DOI.

Some Bush nominees, however, say Congress has no authority to enact such measures. William G. Myers, for example, has argued in amicus briefs submitted to the Supreme Court that federal clean-water and endangered-species safeguards are unconstitutional. The Cato Institute’s Roger Pilon agrees: “The Endangered Species Act is utterly unconstitutional,” and so are the Clean Air and Water acts “for the most part,” he asserts. “The commerce power was written to ensure the free flow of commerce among the states,” period.

Destroy that constitutional foundation and you deny Congress the authority to provide most environmental protections, thereby causing the entire federal environmental regulatory structure as it exists today to collapse. It is a radical strategy that, if successful, would shred the safety net of federal laws that has safeguarded the environment for more than 30 years, and which Americans have come to take for granted. Pilon urges that this safety net be replaced with a patchwork of state environmental laws, an approach whose utter failure helped prompt the creation of the federal EPA by Richard Nixon in 1970.

New Federalism doesn’t stop there. Anti-regulatory judges — led by right-wing Supreme Court Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — also want to severely limit public access to the courts. In particular, they would like to outlaw most citizen lawsuits, thereby barring nonprofit environmental groups from launching cases against polluting industry, uncontrolled development, and unresponsive government.

Pilon contends, along with many Bush nominees, that environmental groups do not have “standing” — that is, they are not directly harmed (as an individual might be) by environmental damage, so they have no right to sue. Conservatives also say that neither environmental groups nor individuals have a right to sue when private industry damages the commons — public lands or waters owned by all of us. If a polluter harms the commons, they say, only the government has the right to sue. And if the government fails to act, the public’s only recourse would be to vote out the unresponsive officials.

Barring access to courts is antithetical to democracy, says Sugameli. It biases the system against nonprofit citizen’s groups and in favor of businesses. It is also prejudicial. “There is no question that corporations will continue to be able to go to court whenever they don’t like an environmental protection,” he says. “But there is a serious question as to how much citizens will continue to be able to go to court when they feel that environmental laws are protecting corporations and not people.”

Bush conservatives have hit upon still another strategy for attacking the environment: property rights. If Scalia and Thomas were to be joined on the Supreme Court by like-minded Bush-appointed justices, they would have the majority needed to set precedents giving industry privileged private-property rights. “For at least 25 years, since President Reagan, the property-rights movement has asserted that property ownership is absolute and enshrined in the Constitution,” says Jay Feinman, a professor at Rutgers University School of Law and author of Un-Making Law. That movement sees property rights as a core value of democracy, trumping the authority of Congress to make laws reducing pollution or preserving natural resources. When the government wants to protect air quality, wildlife, or wetlands, the movement contends, it must pay for all profits lost in the forsaking of economic activity, which industry leaders have cleverly — if erroneously — labeled “takings.”

This very broad definition of property rights, based loosely on the 5th Amendment of the Constitution, has been repeatedly asserted by conservative Republican judges on the federal bench, and especially by Bush appointees. Myers has taken the extreme view that property rights should receive the same level of constitutional scrutiny as free speech. “What we’ve seen in the Bush administration is appointees who come out of this property-rights movement and have ties to industry, and who we can expect to advance the cause to undermine government regulation,” says Feinman.

Going Nuclear

With Republican control over the executive and legislative branches of government nearly total, Bush’s second term will likely be defined by a struggle to solidify control over the judiciary. Two of the best predictors of the probable intensity of that struggle will be the willingness of the Senate to ignore its own time-honored judicial appointment-approval rules, and the extremism of Bush’s nominees for open judgeships.

In 2004, conservative Republican senators, angry over Democratic resistance to Bush appointments, began threatening to change Senate rules that would prohibit the blocking of judicial appointments through filibusters. The new rule would do away with the required 60 votes needed to approve judges and replace it with a simple majority vote. “This is called the nuclear option by its proponents, because even they recognize that such a move would blow up the Senate, ending all chance for cooperation on any issue,” says Sugameli.

As the 2005 congressional session got under way this month, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.) set the stage for this “nuclear war” by announcing that he will seek approval in February for an unnamed Bush judicial nominee. If Democrats filibuster that nominee, he says, then the nuclear option could come into play, reports the Associated Press.

Richard Epstein, a conservative law professor at the University of Chicago, is critical of the nuclear option but doesn’t think it would “blow up” the Senate. “What is important is that the same rules apply to a Republican president and Congress as to a Democratic president and Congress,” says Epstein. Democrats are hopeful that Frist will not dare launch the nuclear option, especially since Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has come out against it, citing the divisiveness it would cause.

As for the extremism of Bush’s second-term nominees, his renomination of the seven candidates already blocked by the Senate doesn’t bode well for the environment. Among them are such property-rights extremists as Myers and Janice Rogers Brown, who was nominated to the D.C. Circuit and opposed by 35 national and state environmental groups. Brown has declared that the Supreme Court’s 1937 decision upholding the New Deal as constitutional “marks the triumph of our own socialist revolution.” And her extreme views on property rights caused her to claim that private property is now “entirely extinct in San Francisco” and that the city is implementing a “neo-feudal regime.”

As for the Supreme Court, “All the indications are that the people being looked at to fill those vacancies [should they arise during Bush's second term] would include many with very extreme positions,” says Sugameli. Bush could also try to elevate either Scalia or Thomas, his two favorites and the two most anti-environmental justices, to the chief justice position.

Bush’s lifetime appointments to the federal courts — most of whom seem to be intentionally selected because of their youth — will shape and dominate environmental jurisprudence for many decades to come.

Right Young Things

Parenteau believes that the right-wing judicial strategies being pressed by the Bush administration amount to a corporate coup d’etat in which private special interests trump the public good and democracy. “It is probably not hysterical to characterize our situation as a constitutional crisis, because I feel that the majority values of this country are still strongly in support of strong laws protecting the environment. But what is happening is that those laws are being picked apart, dismantled, and deceptively, stealthily, slyly undermined. I think that our government’s checks and balances are breaking down,” as corporations gain a death grip on all three branches of government.

Sitting Supreme Court Associate Justice David Souter has long warned against the judicial use of constitutional arguments to invalidate Congress’s authority to regulate commerce — a tactic that could negate environmental, public-health, labor, minority, and women’s civil-rights protections in one massive strike. New Federalism is not new, he contends, but will march America back to the Lochner era of the courts, which lasted from the post-Civil War period until Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Joseph Lochner was a New York baker whose corporate right to force employees to work 60-hour weeks was upheld by the Supreme Court. For seven decades, the courts maintained a laissez-faire attitude about business practices, ruling that the economic sphere was off-limits to congressional regulation, and that private property, especially corporate private property, was sacrosanct. That era’s policies spurred political and corporate corruption, spawning the Robber Baron industrialists, a yawning gap between rich and poor, civil unrest, labor strikes and riots, bomb-throwing anarchists, two presidential assassinations, fierce government repression, genocide against the American Indians, and the near extinction of the American buffalo. It was an era whose gross human injustices were only reversed by New Deal reforms.

In the face of a kind of Lochner-era redux, environmental groups have little recourse, Feinman fears. “Other than opposing judicial nominations, we have a real problem here. We can’t just wait for the next election, or defeat a bill in Congress. With the judiciary, we are dealing with a matter of constitutional law. Once high courts rule in an area, there is nothing that can be done by executive action, or by legislation, to change things. That’s the end of the story. We could see a rollback of environmental law as part of a much broader rollback of government protection of the public interest. Once again, what is good for General Motors is good for the U.S.A.”

“Maybe the Cuyahoga River has to burst into flame again,” concludes Parenteau, referring to a pivotal outrage in 1969 that helped launch the environmental movement in the following years. The United States may need to see drastic climate shocks, or Bhopal-scale tragedies, before the public becomes determined enough to reverse the Bush administration’s judicial excesses. The political and social shape that such a rebellion might take — and how long it might take to emerge — is anyone’s guess.

Matt Patsky knows his green.

As the election looms, green-investing guru Matt Patsky has joined the political fray, making the radio talk show rounds to tell investors and voters why another Bush presidency will not only be bad news for the environment but also a disaster for the market.

Patsky is the portfolio manager for the Winslow Management Co., a pioneer in environmentally responsible investing. Winslow was founded in 1984 by Jackson Robinson, who believed — in opposition to much of the investment world — that companies which benefit the environment also benefit shareholders.

In this exclusive interview, Patsky dishes up his views on green investing on the eve of the election. And you better listen up: Winslow normally only offers its advice to clients with an account minimum of $3,000,000. Yeah, that’s three million dollars. Courtesy of Patsky and Grist, you’re getting these hot stock tips absolutely free.

What impacts do you expect the election to have on the stock market?

What I’ve been telling people is that in the very short term, the market will probably react favorably in November and December, regardless of who gets into office. That’s because what makes the market nervous, what makes it volatile, is uncertainty. And right now, with the presidential race so close, people are worried.

In the longer term, the results of this election will have very profound impacts on different investment sectors. There are sectors that will do better or worse depending on how the election turns out. For example, companies committed to environmental solutions will have an easier time if the election goes to Kerry. Corporations with negative environmental records will do well in a second Bush term.

In the macro, I hold that a Kerry election will be much better for the market overall in the next four years.

Where are you telling investors to put their money if Bush wins?

I recently joked with a reporter that a play on Canadian real estate would be a good opportunity.

But seriously, where should green investors put their money?

I can’t tell you there is a safe place for green investors to put their money if Bush gets reelected. Jack Robinson, my partner, who has been at this business for 20 years, has previously shown that corporate concern for minimizing environmental impacts translates into a better share on returns. That proved true under Reagan, and Bush the First, and Clinton: Stocks of companies that were good environmental citizens out-performed those that weren’t. That’s the concept our Winslow Green Index — an index of 100 “green-screened” companies — is based on.

But we’ve seen a reversal of that trend, for the first time ever, over the last two years. In that period, the best performing stocks in the S&P 500 were the companies that have been the most flagrant environmental polluters. Winslow’s Dirty Dozen — the 12 worst environmental citizens in the market — have outperformed every quarter for two years running. That has never happened before. And that is because investors are starting to believe there is no liability: that the EPA is ineffective, that there is no enforcement, and that polluters will never have to pay the piper.

It is a pretty dismal picture for green investors. The short answer is that you probably won’t find a bunch of safe, socially responsible places to put your money under Bush.

What about investments in alternative energy?

Under Bush, I think there will be continued pressure downward on renewable-energy stock. There has been this fascinating trend under his administration: Despite the fact that the long-term outlook for alternative energy must necessarily be good, the stocks have been pummeled over the last four years. Even higher oil prices haven’t lifted that dark cloud. It’s counterintuitive. You would think $50 per barrel oil would be good for wind power, right? You would expect wind turbine companies to go up, but they continue to go down. That trend would probably continue under a second Bush administration since it will be supportive of more fossil-fuel exploration and development. Under Kerry, that could all change.

If you want to invest in oil, the cleanest company by far, in terms of an attempt to do things in a more responsible way, is BP, or possibly Shell. They’re about the only somewhat environmentally sensitive way to play oil. Both companies have active solar and wind efforts, although Shell has managerial issues that revolve around recently reported falsely inflated forecasts for the company’s oil reserves. We don’t know how that will play out. BP, on the other hand, has a very solid record.

What would a Bush win mean over the long haul?

Currently, there is absolutely no fiscal discipline in Washington. That is going to have incredibly negative impacts as we go out over the long term. We are literally bankrupting the country. Under Republican control, that is where we stand. It is an interesting twist that we need to elect a Democrat in order to bring fiscal discipline to Washington.

We now have a president who seems convinced that there is no penalty for running unprecedented deficits. If your time frame is short, if all you’re interested in is making sure you can make as much money as fast as you can over the next four years, then none of this really matters.

But we have to remember that the U.S. economy is funded by foreign investment. Without that, we’re in trouble. If we continue to see pressure on the dollar, to see the U.S. reputation slide, foreign investors could start to question whether or not we are a place to put their money. You could see things come unglued, in a pretty ugly way, pretty quick.

I don’t want to be too alarmist about it, but there really are a lot of underlying issues that are more dramatic now than they have ever been. There is a reason why [billionaire] George Soros is taking out full-page ads opposing the administration. What Bush does will ultimately affect the markets in a very big, very profound, and negative way.

What would a Kerry win likely mean for investors?

There are many right now in the financial-service industries touting the idea that if we elect Kerry then the markets will collapse. That is absolute nonsense. That argument doesn’t hold water from a historical standpoint or based on Kerry’s proposed policies.

In the short term, if Kerry wins you’ll have that market rally I spoke about, lasting through November and December. Then, over the next four years, a Kerry administration will likely reinvigorate enforcement of environmental rules. The EPA will grow teeth. That would be a big change, and especially bad for our Dirty Dozen. They’ll be companies worth shorting, because they are going to get hit hard. Take a company like Kerr-McGee [a global energy and inorganic chemical company]. They’re dumping toxic perchlorate in the Colorado River and asking President Bush to intervene to get Congress to pass a law saying they don’t have any liability. Under Kerry, that’s likely to come back to haunt Kerr-McGee. They’re not only going to have to stop dumping, but also will be responsible for cleanup. So they are going to be a bankruptcy candidate, as are other big polluters.

I think that there will be a lot more emphasis on developing renewable energy under Kerry. There will be a lot more emphasis on clean coal technology. Both candidates say they support that, but under Kerry, we think there will be a real attempt to develop technology to reduce coal emissions, rather than just giving that cleaner technology lip service as Bush might do.

Macro, longer term, we would also hope that there is repair done to our country’s international reputation. People will hopefully get more comfortable with international travel again, and the travel industry will pick up. Maybe the airlines will actually survive. Right now people aren’t traveling. They are afraid.

Given our multi-trillion dollar deficit and the growing cost of the war in Iraq, can a Kerry win really make a big financial difference?

Can we shift from going in the wrong direction to going in the right direction? Can we get out of Iraq and repair the damage done to the U.S. economy? Not instantaneously. And it will be a difficult task. To do it, Kerry is going to have to make a lot of hard and unpopular decisions. If he is up to that, he won’t likely get rave reviews. And he won’t likely have Congress on his side. They will certainly be using the veto. Let me put it this way: Considering what he is up against, I do not think Kerry will enjoy a second term.

But no matter who is elected, it is going to be an ugly four years. It may be less ugly, and put us back on the right track if we elect Kerry instead of Bush, but it is still going to be a very difficult four years.

Are there any safe long-term green investment bets under either Kerry or Bush?

Putting money to work in green funds in Europe wouldn’t be a bad way to move, because the European economy has remained stronger and isn’t so impacted by U.S. fiscal policy. The market is very well-developed there, with at least a dozen mutual-fund complexes doing green investing. For example, the largest in the U.K. is Jupiter [Asset Management Ltd.] and its Jupiter green funds. You can also look at green investing in Canada, Japan, and parts of Asia. There are actually companies in China now that are trying to do a better job being green than companies in the United States.

What about socially responsible micro-credit as an investment opportunity?

Micro-credit is very, very interesting. It offers very safe, very socially responsible investing. There are community-based and internationally based micro-credit opportunities, where you are lending money or providing debt financing [in the developing world]; you’re not buying stock.

I was just asked to join the board of a company that does micro-lending for sustainable agriculture projects in the Third World. That company has a very solid return, and the results have been amazingly predictable and steady. The loan default rate is exceedingly low, because these people pay their bills! It is not a huge return. But you can get a solid 5 percent, with something like the certainty of a bank deposit.

This is a worthwhile activity for somebody who is environmentally and socially conscious and wants to get an adequate return on investment, but is not willing to take a lot of risk.

My investment counselor has this big chart in his office that he points to every time I get nervous about investing. It shows that when you put your money into the market for the long haul, you always stand to do well. Do you think that future performance will continue to model past performance?

I think you are hitting on something people don’t want to acknowledge, that we may go through a period where financial assets do not perform as well as they have historically. If you look over the last 50 years, you will see a 9 percent annual average return on the stock market, despite boom and bust. People say that if you ignore all the noise of ups and downs, that’s the gain on investment you’ll see.

But we are living in an unusual time. Could we be in for an extended period where returns on financial investments are lower than that past 50-year average? Maybe. But we don’t know.

Considering what environmental scientists are saying about the severity of climate change and the potential for other nasty environmental shocks in the near future, how should people invest?

You’ll want to keep a mix of fixed income and equities. It’s advisable that you invest in mutual funds in order to maintain a diversified portfolio. Anybody who cares about the environment should be looking to put some of their money in green mutual funds, but there aren’t very many out there, and unfortunately they don’t attract very much in terms of assets. That’s not because people don’t care. It’s because there is this perception that doing the right thing with your money will cost you. People want to retire comfortably, and not end up living in a trailer park because they gave all their money to the environmentally responsible alternative-energy companies. So we need to get to a point where people understand that they can do green-screened investing in a way that is not detrimental to returns, but that protects and enhances their investment.

For example, at Winslow we’ve been doing green screens that will give people a bond portfolio or large cap portfolio that cuts out the companies with the largest, most egregious liability risk [from severe environmental factors such as climate change], including insurance companies, oil companies that might be sued by Third World and island countries, etc. There are a lot of risks out there, and as the environmental problems become more real, those risks will only grow. And more people will begin to see that green screens are a way to better shield their investments.

A kind of secular apocalyptic sensibility pervades much contemporary writing about our current world. Many books about environmental dangers, whether it be the ozone layer, or global warming or pollution of the air or water, or population explosion, are cast in an apocalyptic mold.
– Historian Paul Boyer

When he opened the sixth seal, I looked, and behold, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as sackcloth, the full moon became like blood, and the stars of the sky fell to the earth as the fig tree sheds its winter fruit when shaken by a gale; the sky vanished like a scroll that is rolled up, and every mountain and island was removed from its place …
– Revelation 6:12-14

Abortion. Same-sex marriage. Stem-cell research.

U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right vote against these issues with near-perfect consistency. That probably doesn’t surprise you, but this might: Those same legislators are equally united and unswerving in their opposition to environmental protection.

Forty-five senators and 186 representatives in 2003 earned 80- to 100-percent approval ratings from the nation’s three most influential Christian right advocacy groups — the Christian Coalition, Eagle Forum, and Family Resource Council. Many of those same lawmakers also got flunking grades — less than 10 percent, on average — from the League of Conservation Voters last year.

These statistics are puzzling at first. Opposing abortion and stem-cell research is consistent with the religious right’s belief that life begins at the moment of conception. Opposing gay marriage is consistent with its claim that homosexual activity is proscribed by the Bible. Both beliefs are a familiar staple of today’s political discourse. But a scripture-based justification for anti-environmentalism?*

Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed — even hastened — as a sign of the coming Apocalypse.

We are not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. The 231 legislators (all but five of them Republicans) who received an average 80 percent approval rating or higher from the leading religious-right organizations make up more than 40 percent of the U.S. Congress. (The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian Coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who earlier this year quoted from the Book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land. Not a famine of bread or of thirst for water, but of hearing the word of the Lord!”) These politicians include some of the most powerful figures in the U.S. government, as well as key environmental decision makers: Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tenn.), Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Senate Republican Conference Chair Rick Santorum (R-Penn.), Senate Republican Policy Chair Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), House Majority Whip Roy Blunt (R-Mo.), U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, and quite possibly President Bush. (Earlier this month, a cover story by Ron Suskind in The New York Times Magazine described how Bush’s faith-based governance has led to, among other things, a disastrous “crusade” in the Middle East and has laid the groundwork for “a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion.”)

And those politicians are just the powerful tip of the iceberg. A 2002 Time/CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the Book of Revelation are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks.

Like it or not, faith in the Apocalypse is a powerful driving force in modern American politics. In the 2000 election, the Christian right cast at least 15 million votes, or about 30 percent of those that propelled Bush into the presidency. And there’s no doubt that arch-conservative Christians will be just as crucial in the coming election: GOP political strategist Karl Rove hopes to mobilize 20 million fundamentalist voters to help sweep Bush back into office on Nov. 2 and to maintain a Republican majority in Congress, says Joan Bokaer, director of Theocracy Watch, a project of the Center for Religion, Ethics, and Social Policy at Cornell University.

Because of its power as a voting bloc, the Christian right has the ear, if not the souls, of much of the nation’s leadership. Some of those leaders are End-Time believers themselves. Others are not. Either way, their votes are heavily swayed by an electoral base that accepts the Bible as literal truth and eagerly awaits the looming Apocalypse. And that, in turn, is sobering news for those who hope for the protection of the earth, not its destruction.

Once Upon End Time

Ever since the dawn of Christianity, groups of believers have searched the scriptures for signs of the End Time and the Second Coming. Today, most of the roughly 50 million right-wing fundamentalist Christians in the United States believe in some form of End-Time theology.

Those 50 million believers make up only a subset of the estimated 100 million born-again evangelicals in the United States, who are by no means uniformly right-wing anti-environmentalists. In fact, the political stances of evangelicals on the environment and other issues range widely; the Evangelical Environmental Network, for example, has melded its biblical interpretation with good environmental science to justify and promote stewardship of the earth. But the political and cultural impact of the extreme Christian right is difficult to overestimate.

It is also difficult to understand without grasping the complex belief systems underlying and driving it. While there are many divergent End-Time theologies and sects, the most politically influential are the dispensationalists and reconstructionists.

Tune in to any of America’s 2,000 Christian radio stations or 250 Christian TV stations and you’re likely to get a heady dose of dispensationalism, an End-Time doctrine invented in the 19th century by the Irish-Anglo theologian John Nelson Darby. Dispensationalists espouse a “literal” interpretation of the Bible that offers a detailed chronology of the impending end of the world. (Many mainstream theologians dispute that literality, arguing that Darby misinterprets and distorts biblical passages.) Believers link that chronology to current events — four hurricanes hitting Florida, gay marriages in San Francisco, the 9/11 attacks — as proof that the world is spinning out of control and that we are what dispensationalist writer Hal Lindsey calls “the terminal generation.” The social and environmental crises of our times, dispensationalists say, are portents of the Rapture, when born-again Christians, living and dead, will be taken up into heaven.

“All over the earth, graves will explode as the occupants soar into the heavens,” preaches dispensationalist pastor John Hagee, of the Cornerstone Church in San Antonio, Texas. On the heels of that Rapture, nonbelievers left behind on earth will endure seven years of unspeakable suffering called the Great Tribulation, which will culminate in the rise of the Antichrist and the final battle of Armageddon between God and Satan. Upon winning that battle, Christ will send all unbelievers into the pits of hellfire, re-green the planet, and reign on earth in peace with His followers for a millennium.

Dispensationalists haven’t cornered the market on End-Time interpretation. The reconstructionists (also known as dominionists), a smaller but politically influential sect, put the onus for the Lord’s return not in the hands of biblical prophesy but in political activism. They believe that Christ will only make his Second Coming when the world has prepared a place for Him, and that the first step in readying His arrival is to Christianize America.

“Christian politics has as its primary intent the conquest of the land — of men, families, institutions, bureaucracies, courts, and governments for the Kingdom of Christ,” writes reconstructionist George Grant. Christian dominion will be achieved by ending the separation of church and state, replacing U.S. democracy with a theocracy ruled by Old Testament law, and cutting all government social programs, instead turning that work over to Christian churches. Reconstructionists also would abolish government regulatory agencies, such as the U.S. EPA, because they are a distraction from their goal of Christianizing America, and subsequently, the rest of the world. “World conquest. That’s what Christ has commissioned us to accomplish,” says Grant. “We must win the world with the power of the Gospel. And we must never settle for anything less.” Only when that conquest is complete can the Lord return.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy

People under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth when the droughts, floods, and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the Apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the Rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a Word?

Many End-Timers believe that until Jesus’ return, the Lord will provide. In America’s Providential History, a popular reconstructionist high-school history textbook, authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell tell us that: “The secular or socialist has a limited resource mentality and views the world as a pie … that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.” However, “the Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s Earth. The resources are waiting to be tapped.” In another passage, the writers explain: “While many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”

Natural-resource depletion and overpopulation, then, are not concerns for End-Timers — and nor are other ecological catastrophes, which are viewed by dispensationalists as presaging the Great Tribulation. Support for this view comes from an 11-word passage in Matthew 24:7: “[T]here shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.” Other End-Timers see suggestions of ecological meltdown in Revelation’s four horsemen of the Apocalypse — War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death — and they cite a verse mentioning costly wheat, barley, and oil as foretelling food and fossil-fuel shortages. During the End Time, the four horsemen shall be “given power over a fourth of the earth to kill by sword, famine and plague, and by the wild beasts of the earth.” Some End-Timers note that Revelation 8:8-11 predicts a fiery mountain falling into the sea and causing great destruction, followed by a blazing star plummeting from the sky. This star is called “Wormwood,” which dispensationalists say translates loosely in Ukrainian as “Chernobyl.”

A plethora of End-Time preachers, tracts, films, and websites hawk environmental cataclysm as Good News — a harbinger of the imminent Second Coming. Hal Lindsey’s 1970 End-Time “non-fiction” work, The Late Great Planet Earth, is the classic of the genre; the movie version pummels viewers with stock footage of nuclear blasts, polluting smokestacks, raging floods, and killer bees. Likewise, dispensationalist author Tim LaHaye’s “Left Behind” novels — at one point selling 1.5 million copies per month — weave ecological disaster into an action-adventure account of prophesy.

At RaptureReady.com, the “Rapture Index” tracks all the latest news in relation to biblical prophecy. Among its leading environmental indicators of Apocalypse are oil supply and price, famine, drought, plagues, wild weather, floods, and climate. RaptureReady webmaster Todd Strandberg writes to explain why climate change made the list: “I used to think there was no real need for Christians to monitor the changes related to greenhouse gases. If it was going to take a couple hundred years for things to get serious, I assumed the nearness of the End Times would overshadow this problem. With the speed of climate change now seen as moving much faster, global warming could very well be a major factor in the plagues of the tribulation.”

Another prophecy index points to acts of nature (drought in Ethiopia, famine in South Africa, floods in Russia, fires in Arizona, heat waves in India, and the breakup of the Antarctic ice shelf) as proof of the approaching doomsday, noting that “When these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh” (Luke 21:28).

According to a chart on the End-Time website ApocalypseSoon.org, we are at “the beginning of sorrows” (Matthew 24:3-8) marking the Great Tribulation. The site links to a BBC News article on infectious diseases and a chronicle of extreme weather events on Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Ross Gelbspan’s climate-change website as evidence of those unfolding sorrows. However, it adds a stern disclaimer regarding these external links: “We do not, by any means, approve or recommend some of the sites that this page links to. They were chosen simply because they document literally what the Word of God prophesies for the End Days.”

If I Had a Hammer

To understand how the Christian right worldview is shaping and even fueling congressional anti-environmentalism, consider two influential born-again lawmakers: House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) and Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chair James Inhofe (R-Okla.).

DeLay, who has considerable control over the agenda in the House, has called for “march[ing] forward with a Biblical worldview” in U.S. politics, reports Peter Perl in The Washington Post Magazine. DeLay wants to convert America into a “God centered” nation whose government promotes prayer, worship, and the teaching of Christian values.

Inhofe, the Senate’s most outspoken environmental critic, is also unwavering in his wish to remake America as a Christian state. Speaking at the Christian Coalition’s Road to Victory rally just before the GOP sweep of the 2002 midterm elections, he promised the faithful, “When we win this revolution in November, you’ll be doing the Lord’s work, and He will richly bless you for it!”

Neither DeLay nor Inhofe include environmental protection in “the Lord’s work.” Both have ranted against the EPA, calling it “the Gestapo.” DeLay has fought to gut the Clean Air and Endangered Species acts. Last year, Inhofe invited a stacked-deck of fossil fuel-funded climate-change skeptics to testify at a Senate hearing that climaxed with him calling global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

DeLay has said bluntly that he intends to smite the “socialist” worldview of “secular humanists,” whom, he argues, control the U.S. political system, media, public schools, and universities. He called the 2000 presidential election an apocalyptic “battle for souls,” a fight to the death against the forces of liberalism, feminism, and environmentalism that are corrupting America. The utopian dreams of such movements are doomed, argues the majority leader, because they do not stem from God.

“DeLay is motivated more than anything by power,” says Jan Reid, coauthor with Lou Dubose of The Hammer, a just-published biography of DeLay. “But he also believes in the power of the coming Millennium [of Jesus Christ], and it helps shape his vision on government and the world.” This may explain why DeLay’s Capitol office furnishings include a marble replica of the Ten Commandments and a wall poster that reads: “This Could Be The Day” — meaning Judgment Day.

DeLay is also a self-declared member of the Christian Zionists, an End-Time faction numbering 20 million Americans. Christian Zionists believe that the 1948 creation of the state of Israel marked the first event in what author Hal Lindsey calls the “countdown to Armageddon” and they are committed to making that doomsday clock tick faster, speeding Christ’s return.

In 2002, DeLay visited pastor John Hagee’s Cornerstone Church. Hagee preached a fiery message as simple as it was horrifying: “The war between America and Iraq is the gateway to the Apocalypse!” he said, urging his followers to support the war, perhaps in order to bring about the Second Coming. After Hagee finished, DeLay rose to second the motion. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, “what has been spoken here tonight is the truth from God.”

With those words — broadcast to 225 Christian TV and radio stations — DeLay placed himself squarely inside the End-Time camp, a faction willing to force the Apocalypse upon the rest of the world. In part, DeLay may embrace Hagee and others like him in a calculated attempt to win fundamentalist votes — but he was also raised a Southern Baptist, steeped in a literal interpretation of the Bible and End-Time dogma. Biographer Dubose says that the majority leader probably doesn’t grasp the complexities of dispensationalist and reconstructionist theology, but “I am convinced that he believes [in] it.” For DeLay, Dubose told me, “If John Hagee says it, then it is true.”

Onward Christian Senators

James Inhofe might be an environmentalist’s worst nightmare. The Oklahoma senator makes major policy decisions based on heavy corporate and theological influences, flawed science, and probably an apocalyptic worldview — and he chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

That committee’s links to corporate funders are both easier to trace and more infamous than its ties to religious fundamentalism, and it’s true that the influence of money can scarcely be overstated. From 1999 to 2004, Inhofe received more than $588,000 from the fossil-fuel industry, electric utilities, mining, and other natural-resource interests, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. Eight of the nine other Republican members of Inhofe’s committee received an average of $408,000 per senator from the energy and natural resource sector over the same period. By contrast, the eight committee Democrats and one Independent came away with an average of just $132,000 per senator from that same sector since 1999.

But the influence of theology, although less discussed, is no less significant. Inhofe, like DeLay, is a Christian Zionist. While the senator has not overtly expressed his religious views in his environmental committee, he has when speaking on other issues. In a Senate foreign-policy speech, Inhofe argued that the U.S. should ally itself unconditionally with Israel “because God said so.” Quoting the Bible as the divine Word of God, Inhofe cited Genesis 13:14-17 — “for all the land which you see, to you will I give it, and to your seed forever” — as justification for permanent Israeli occupation of the West Bank and for escalating aggression against the Palestinians.

Inhofe also openly supports dispensationalist Pat Robertson, who touts every tornado, hurricane, plague, and suicide bombing as a sure sign of God’s return; who accused both Jimmy Carter and George Bush Sr. of being followers of Lucifer; and who makes no secret of the efforts of his Christian Coalition to control the Republican Party, according to Theocracy Watch.

A good fundamentalist, Inhofe scored a perfect 100 percent rating in 2003 from all three major Christian-right advocacy groups, while earning a 5 percent from the League of Conservation Voters (and a string of zeroes from 1997 to 2002). Likewise, eight of the nine other Republicans on the Environment and Public Works Committee earned an average 94 percent approval rating in 2003 from the Christian right, while scoring a dismal 4 percent average environmental approval rating. The one exception proves the rule: Moderate Lincoln Chafee (R.-R.I.) last year earned a 79 percent LCV rating and just 41 percent from the religious right.

As committee chair, Inhofe has subtly chosen scripture over science. The origins of his 2003 Senate speech attacking the science behind global climate change, for example, reveal his two masters: the speech is traceable to fossil fuel industry think tanks and petrochemical dollars — but also to the pseudo-science of Christian right websites. In that two-hour diatribe, Inhofe dismissed global warming by comparing it to a 1970s scientific scare that suggested the planet was cooling — a hypothesis, he fails to note, held by only a minority of climatologists at the time. Inhofe’s apparent source on global cooling was the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty, a Christian-right and free-market economics think tank. In an editorial on that site called “Global Warming or Globaloney? The Forgotten Case for Global Cooling,” we hear echoes of Inhofe’s position. The article calls climate change “a shrewdly planned campaign to inflict a lot of socialistic restriction on our cherished freedoms. Environmentalism, in short, is the last refuge of socialism.” Inhofe’s views can be heard in the words of dispensationalist Jerry Falwell as well, who said on CNN, “It was global cooling 30 years ago … and it’s global warming now. … The fact is there is no global warming.”

Inhofe’s views are also closely tied to the Interfaith Council for Environmental Stewardship, a radical-right Christian organization founded by radio evangelist James Dobson, dispensationalist Rev. D. James Kennedy of Coral Ridge Ministries, Jerry Falwell, and Robert Sirico, a Catholic priest who has been editing Vatican texts to align the Catholic Church’s historical teachings with his free-market philosophy, according to E Magazine.

The ICES environmental view is shaped by the Book of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over the fish of the seas, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on this earth.” The group says this passage proves that “man” is superior to nature and gives the go-ahead to unchecked population growth and unrestrained resource use. Such beliefs fly in the face of ecology, which shows humankind to be an equal and interdependent participant in the natural web.

Inhofe’s staff defends his backward scientific positions, no matter how at odds they are with mainstream scientists. “How do you define ‘mainstream’?” asked a miffed staffer. “Scientists who accept the so-called consensus about global warming? Galileo was not mainstream.” But Inhofe is no Galileo. In fact, his use of lawsuits to try to suppress the peer-reviewed science of the National Assessment on Climate Change — which predicts major extinctions and threats to coastal regions — arguably puts him on the side of Galileo’s oppressors, the perpetrators of the Christian Inquisition, writes Chris Mooney in The American Prospect.

“I trust God with my legislative goals and the issues that are important to my constituents,” Inhofe has told Pentecostal Evangel magazine. “I don’t believe there is a single issue we deal with in government that hasn’t been dealt with in the Scriptures.” But Inhofe stayed silent in that interview as to which passages he applies to the environment, and he remained so when I asked him if End-Time beliefs influence his leadership of the most powerful environmental committee in the country.

And the Cow Jumped Over the Moon

So weird have the attempts to hasten the End Time become that a group of ultra-Christian Texas ranchers recently helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. (The beast will be ready for sacrifice by 2005, according to The National Review.)

It can be difficult for environmentalists, many of whom cut their teeth on peer-reviewed science, to fathom how anyone could believe that a rust-colored calf could bring about the end of the world, or how anyone could make a coherent End-Time story (let alone national policy) out of the poetic symbolism of the Book of Revelation. But there are millions of such people in America today — including 231 U.S. legislators who either believe dispensationalist or reconstructionist doctrine or, for political expediency, are happy to align themselves with those who do.

That’s troubling, because the beliefs in question are antithetical to environmentalism. For starters, any environmental science that contradicts the End-Timer’s interpretation of Holy Writ is automatically suspect. This explains the disregard for environmental science so prevalent among Christian fundamentalist lawmakers: the denial of global warming, of the damaged ozone layer, and of the poisoning caused by industrial arsenic and mercury.

More important, End-Time beliefs make such problems inconsequential. Faith in Christ’s impending return causes End-Timers to be interested only in short-term political-theological outcomes, not long-term solutions. Unfortunately, nearly every environmental issue, from the conservation of endangered species to the curbing of climate change, requires belief in and commitment to an enduring earth. And yet, no amount of scientific evidence will likely shake fundamentalists of their End-Time faith or bring them over to the cause of saving the environment.

“It’s like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by compass — a compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom,” quipped comedian Bill Maher on Larry King Live. “And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire.”

Those who doubt the dangers of such faith-based guidance need only recall the 9/11 hijackers, who devoutly believed that 72 black-eyed virgins awaited them as their reward in paradise.

In the past, it was not deemed politically correct to ask probing questions about a lawmaker’s intimate religious beliefs. But when those beliefs play a crucial role in shaping public policy, it becomes necessary for the people to know and understand them. It sounds startling, but the great unasked questions that need to be posed to the 231 U.S. legislators backed by the Christian right, and to President Bush himself, are not the kind of softballs about faith lobbed at the candidates during the recent presidential debates. They are, instead, tough, specific inquiries about the details of that faith: Do you believe we are in the End Time? Are the governmental policies you support based on your faith in the imminent Second Coming of Christ? It’s not an exaggeration to say that the fate of our planet depends on our asking these questions, and on our ability to reshape environmental strategy in light of the answers.

Many years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to his “religious grandparents,” who, whenever they were asked about the future, proclaimed, “Armageddon’s comin’!” And they believed it. Christ was due back any day, so they never bothered to paint or shingle their house. What was the point? Over the years, I drove by their place and watched the protective layers of paint peel, the bare clapboards weather, the sills and roof rot. Eventually, the house fell into ruin and had to be torn down, leaving my friend’s grandparents destitute.

In a way, their prediction had proven right. But this humble apocalypse, a house divided against itself, was no work of God, but of man. This is a parable for the 231 Christian right-backed legislators of the 108th Congress. Their constituency’s cherished beliefs may lead to the most dangerous and destructive self-fulfilling prophecy of all time.

*[Correction, 04 Feb 2005: The asterisked section of the article, above, originally read:

But a scripture-based justification for anti-environmentalism -- when was the last time you heard a conservative politician talk about that?

Odds are it was in 1981, when President Reagan's first secretary of the interior, James Watt, told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. "God gave us these things to use. After the last tree is felled, Christ will come back," Watt said in public testimony that helped get him fired.

Today's Christian fundamentalist politicians are more politically savvy than Reagan's interior secretary was; you're unlikely to catch them overtly attributing public-policy decisions to private religious views. But their words and actions suggest that many share Watt's beliefs. Like him, many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future.

In fact, Watt did not make such a statement to Congress. The quotation is attributed to Watt in the book Setting the Captives Free by Austin Miles, but Miles does not write that it was made before Congress. Grist regrets this reporting error and is aggressively looking into the accuracy of this quotation.]

[Update, 11 Feb 2005: Grist has been unable to substantiate that Watt made this statement. We would like to extend our sincere apologies to Watt and to our readers for this error.]

And, yes, unlike our current president, I am willing to admit my mistake: I missed the Hanley AP story last March. And, yes, The New York Times did run a version of Hanley’s story on March 21, 2004.

But considering that this could turn out to be one of the most significant stories of the year and of the century — representing a harbinger of runaway catastrophic climate change — I don’t think the Times did it justice. They gave it 393 words, buried on page 22, and waited until the last paragraph to mention the ominous word “feedback,” and then failed to define the term (Hanley did a far better job in his original, longer AP piece).

A “positive feedback,” as so neatly explained in Daily Grist, can lead to a “runaway greenhouse effect,” wherein humankind’s CO2 emissions start by overwhelming the world’s natural carbon sinks, causing them to lose their ability to absorb carbon dioxide. Continued human emissions trigger a self-reinforcing cycle of natural CO2 release and a rapid out-of-control and catastrophic warming. (Human emissions could, for example, produce enough global warming to unlock vast amounts of stored methane in arctic tundra and/or carbon in plant material from dieing forests or rampant wildfires.) Some scientists worry that the high CO2 numbers in 2002 and 2003 are not accounted for by human emissions, and could indicate the start of a positive feedback effect.

Just such a feedback may have caused the Permian extinction some 250 million years ago when 90 percent of all life on earth was wiped out …

… And as the Permian shows, and as this blog writer learned today, “feedback” is everything. So I stand by my original contention: Climate change is underplayed in the mainstream media, and yes, even in The New York Times. This CO2 story, as reported by Charles Hanley, is critically important to our future, and to the current presidential election. It belonged on page one back in March 2004, and it still belongs there this October.

A perfect example of the underreporting by the US press of extraordinarily important climate change news came on October 10th when The Guardian UK announced that, “An unexplained and unprecedented rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere two years running has raised fears that the world may be on the brink of runaway global warming.”A Google search shows that the story has barely made a blip in the U.S. media — with minor reports on CNN online, CBS online, Salon.com, and in a few other places, and with “papers of record” like The New York Times remaining utterly silent. Around the world, the story has been trumpeted by at least 33 major foreign news sources including Reuters, BBC, the Telegraph, Scotsman, The Age Australia, the Turkish Press, News24 South Africa, the Hindu in India, and New Zealand Herald.

The Guardian story goes on to quote a number of highly respected climate change scientists who fear that the abrupt speed-up in atmospheric carbon dioxide “may be evidence of the long feared climate change ‘feedback’ mechanism,” by which human-caused global warming triggers alterations to the earth’s natural systems, which in turn causes the release of more and more C02, causing the warming to escalate and accelerate out of control like the Doomsday Machine from Dr. Strangelove. If these new atmospheric measurements really are a warning sign of impending “runaway” climate change, then humanity has no time to lose in cutting CO2 emissions and in converting to alternative fuels. Indeed, it could already be too late. Meanwhile, the U.S. media on October 10th and 11th reported the latest Bush/Kerry name calling, the death of “Superman,” the Nobel Prize in Economics, and a mysterious bus crash in Arkansas …

This is the kind of irresponsible underreporting, and misreporting, that keeps the American electorate ignorant of the looming threat of climate change, and other environmental problems.

What, I wonder, would have happened to the Bush campaign if every major U.S. newspaper had featured the CO2 story on Page 1? What and who would Americans be more afraid of then: terrorism or climate change? Osama bin Laden or George W. Bush?

Oh well, I think I’ll just give it all up and go to the grand ballroom of the SS Titanic and have another strawberry daiquiri.

Gov. James McGreevey (left)
and DEP chief Bradley
Campbell.

In the run-up to the 2004 election, those who have high hopes that a change in administration will automatically mean the curbing of environmental abuses by government should look to recent events in New Jersey for a cautionary tale. In the Garden State, Democratic Gov. James McGreevey, who has historically been a friend to the environment, has perplexed and outraged environmentalists by taking several pages from the Bush administration playbook.

McGreevey last month signed sweeping legislation giving developers fast-track access to 1.5 million acres of the state. The act radically streamlines the permitting process for new construction in urban and suburban areas, and even rural areas designated as town centers. Critics fear that such rapidly permitted development will come at the expense of the environment and public oversight.

The New Jersey fast-track legislation contains extraordinary provisions. It forces the state departments of environmental protection, transportation, and community affairs to either approve or disapprove a developer’s permit application in just 45 days — after which time, unresolved requests get automatic approval. The act also privatizes the permitting process, letting developers hire private consultants to write and review permits, and largely extinguishing agency oversight. In another proviso, approved fast-track permits, when contested in court, become final with a single judge’s ruling. No public or agency appeal is allowed.

Environmentalists say the fast-track law imperils the last remaining open space in New Jersey’s designated “smart growth” zones, encompassing 20 percent of the state. It puts endangered species like the black-crowned night heron, peregrine falcon, and bald eagle at risk, denying them vital urban nesting grounds along the Atlantic Flyway. And, the advocates say, it could adversely affect about 85 percent of the state’s people, allowing fast-tracking not just of housing and commercial developments, but even new highway and port projects.

Playing Fast and Loose

McGreevey’s process with fast-track emulated Bush administration tactics in a number of troubling ways. First, the bill was written behind closed doors, with the exclusive help of business, and without the involvement of the environmental community — much like Vice President Dick Cheney’s energy plan. The act was secretly drafted last spring by Michael DeCotiis, McGreevey’s top lawyer, with input from the New Jersey Development Council. This quasi-governmental advisory board, established by the governor, includes 28 powerful builders who have contributed $3.25 million to McGreevey and other Democrats.

Once written, fast-track was rammed through the legislature with unprecedented speed: The bill first became available for public comment on a Friday in June, was voted out of committee the next Monday, was passed by the Democrat-dominated legislature that Thursday, and was signed in seclusion by the governor — moves calculated to keep the unpopular law out of the media eye. These are tactics familiar to the Bush White House, which has regularly announced environmental bad news on Friday afternoons.

Attorney Tom Borden of the Rutgers Environmental Law Clinic compares fast-track’s rushed passage to that of the U.S. Patriot Act, noting that no state legislators “had likely read this bill before they approved it, to see the fundamental flaws.”

This peregrine falcon prefers
life in the slow lane.

Photo: U.S. FWS.

Even McGreevey’s appointed Department of Environmental Protection commissioner, Bradley Campbell, recognizes the harm done to the governor’s eco-friendly reputation. “Because the legislation was rushed through, and the legislative process was a terrible one, it has been natural for environmental groups to assume the worst,” he says. But, he adds, “As everyone sees how we implement this law, [environmentalists] will breathe a collective sigh of relief, because they will find that the governor’s commitment to lead the nation in tough environmental land-use standards is intact and strong.”

Environmentalists aren’t buying it, and have come out en masse against the law. “There’s a broad and deep fury at this,” George Hawkins, chair of the New Jersey Council of Watershed Associations, told the New Jersey Star Ledger. “It’s a backroom deal.”

Just days before fast-track materialized, the public had celebrated the legislative passage of McGreevey’s Highlands Protection Act, restricting development on 395,000 rural acres in northwest New Jersey. In retrospect, conservationists see fast-track as payback to the New Jersey Development Council and other big developers, many of whom are McGreevey campaign contributors, and who were upset by the governor’s land-protection initiatives in the Highlands and elsewhere.

Caught in the Act

Borden calls the act unconstitutional, a violation of the separation of powers and due process. “The legislature is required to protect public health and safety,” he says. “But what this act does is to establish a system that delegates that responsibility away to private consultants, allowing them to authorize their own permits. It establishes unreasonable application deadlines, automatic approvals, and a lack of judicial review that leave state agencies’ hands tied. It is an abdication of governmental obligation to protect the people and the environment.”

Borden says that fast-track mirrors Bush tactics intended to gut the National Environmental Policy Act. By streamlining NEPA, which calls for tough environmental assessments of proposed airports, roads, and other federal projects, Bush claims — as does McGreevey — to be cutting regulatory “red tape” and speeding economic growth. Instead, environmentalists say, fast-tracking rolls back environmental safeguards and public oversight.

Campbell calls the NEPA/fast-track analogy “a ridiculous assertion.” Fast-track “is different because it is narrowed to those areas of the state where both planning and environmental data suggest that development is appropriate,” he says. “It is exactly the opposite of Bush administration proposals that streamline logging and other [harmful activities] in areas known to be environmentally sensitive.”

Environmentalists call this hairsplitting. “The act is potentially disastrous” for the urban and suburban environment, Borden says. “How disastrous depends on implementation.” The act’s language is so broad, say critics, that unless its scope is constrained by as-yet-unwritten regulations, it could set back state conservation efforts by decades.

Campbell defends fast-track, claiming that it improves upon “one-size-fits-all” laws that are equally strict for pristine wildlands and urban areas. “The old approach undermines environmental protection by making it cheaper and easier to build in the [pristine] areas that we most want to protect, and setting artificial barriers to development — adding cost and delay — in cities and aging suburbs and other areas appropriate to development.”

Environmentalists counter that urban green places are invaluable precisely because they are so rare, and thus deserve the same strict protection as pristine lands. Borden also contends that fast-track violates McGreevey’s own executive order on environmental justice by setting a weaker protection standard for low-income, African-American, and Hispanic urban communities than for wealthier, mostly white areas. The law could unfairly target development for the communities already most burdened by pollution, adding new environmental problems while restricting public comment.

In a worst-case scenario, says Borden, a fast-track project could harm “groundwater, surface water, wetlands, public health, and lead to public exposure to [industrially] contaminated soils.” As written, the law is so broad that it could even speed building atop the state’s 15,000 toxic waste sites, according to a New Jersey Star Ledger editorial. Such sites, the paper adds, are enmeshed in complex issues and prone to harsh disagreements that could never be fairly resolved in 45 days.

Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!

McGreevey’s fast-track legislation resembles the president’s environmental policies in yet another way. Like so many Bush initiatives, on everything from snowmobiles in Yellowstone to logging in national forests, fast-track will likely be tied up in lawsuits for years.

Still, no one in New Jersey is asserting that Bush and McGreevey are cut from the same cloth. They aren’t. But what remains troubling is the abrupt about-face of an environmentally friendly administration, and the speed with which it embraced Bush-like stratagems to pass pro-business, anti-democratic legislation.

In just three and a half years, the White House has legitimized a barrage of dirty tricks — unprecedented secrecy, arcane legal loopholes, executive edicts, and privatization of the regulatory process — that any clever official can now use to reward major campaign contributors and overthrow established environmental law. It remains for advocates to be vigilant with politicians of all parties until the genie of political corruption can be put back in the bottle.