Judd Legum and The Nation have pithily summarized nine of Bush’s most egregious environmental offenses (as well as 91 non-environmental ones):
The Bush Administration gutted clean-air standards for aging power plants, resulting in at least 20,000 premature deaths each year.
The Bush Administration eliminated protections on more than 200 million acres of public lands.
President Bush broke his promise to place limits on carbon dioxide emissions, an essential step in combating global warming.
Days after 9/11, the Bush Administration told people living near Ground Zero that the air was safe — even though they knew it wasn’t — subjecting hundreds of people to unnecessary, debilitating ailments.
The Bush Administration created a massive tax loophole for SUVs — allowing, for example, the write-off of the entire cost of a new Hummer.
The Bush Administration put former coal-industry big shots in the government and let them roll back safety regulations, putting miners at greater risk of black lung disease.
The Bush Administration said that even though the weed killer atrazine was seeping into water supplies — creating, among other bizarre creatures, hermaphroditic frogs — there was no reason to regulate it.
The Bush Administration has proposed cutting the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency by $600 million next year.
President Bush broke his campaign promise to end the maintenance backlog at national parks. He has provided just 7 percent of the funds needed, according to National Park Service estimates.
Not a bad start, but there’s oh so much more! Inexcusable negligence on mercury pollution, yanking the U.S. out of Kyoto, “Healthy Forests,” “Clear Skies,” trying to roll back stricter standards on arsenic in drinking water, stocking regulatory agencies with industry stooges, squelching the release of scientific information on climate change and much else, doling out ever-larger tax breaks to the nation’s largest polluters, screwing salmon and so many other endangered critters … What am I forgetting?
For a truly exhaustive list, check out NRDC’s The Bush Record. (And I do mean exhaustive. I mean, see their list of Bush admin sins from May 2004 alone.)
