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Bush’s budget

In the Daily Grist today, we cover a story about the farm subsidy cuts in Bush's new budget. Due to the nature of that venue -- just the fact, ma'am! -- we don't express any skepticism about the news.

So let me do it here: It's bullshit.

Nobody in their right friggin' mind thinks agricultural subsidies -- which Bush raised in his first term -- are going to get cut in his second. This is a circus sideshow, meant to distract attention from the grossly regressive cuts elsewhere in the budget.

The most dastardly way of reading the much-ballyhooed cuts are as a backdoor attempt to cut foodstamps. Here's how it works: Bush recommends that the USDA cut subsidies; Congress appropriates an amount for the department commensurate with the cuts; powerful ag-state Senators defend their subsidies; to come in within its new budget, the USDA cuts food stamps instead. Brilliant, no? That's what Ed Kilgore and Sam Rosenfeld suspect -- what Kilgore calls a "two-cushion shot."

Matt Yglesias, however, points out that the budget already contains explicit cuts in food-stamp funding, so maybe the ag-subsidy cuts are the kind that Mark Schmitt describes, known to all concerned, including the administration, as purely symbolic and never to become real.

Whatever the case, in this draconian budget -- particularly damaging to public health -- ag-subsidy cuts are no reason to take heart.

Evangelicals

Glenn Scherer's much-cited piece "The Godly Must Be Crazy," which argued that far-right Christian evangelicals are hostile to environmental protection, is apparently not the end of the story. The Washington Post's Blaine Harden finds evidence that evangelicals are going green. Joel Makower discusses the issue, as does the Progressive Blog Alliance. Sustainablog also points us to more info at Harvard's Forum on Religion and the Environment and Rev. Larry Rice's essay "As the Giant Sleeps ... Creation Suffers."

This strikes me as a subject in dire need of some empirical -- as opposed to anecdotal -- research. Just how many evangelicals are the raving End Timers Glenn describes and how many the "creation care" types Harden describes? There's an anthropological flavor to a lot of this reportage, which just goes to show how poorly understood the evangelical community is, particularly in light of their extraordinary political influence.

He loves it because it’s trash

Occasionally a politician is not full of himself, and we like that. When Nebraska's former lieutenant governor, Dave Heineman, stepped in to fill the shoes of governor Mike Johanns -- who left to head up the Department of Agriculture -- it was Heineman himself who broke the news to a restless Nebraska press corps. And then, earning the love of envelope-enviros everywhere, Heineman noted that he was going to instruct state offices to use up all of Johanns' old stationery rather than chucking it. "They can just put 'Dave Heineman' on the bottom [of letters]," Heineman told the Lincoln Journal Star. "We're not going to waste that paper."  The Student Conservation Association jumped all over that, giving Heineman its Call of Conservation award and proclaiming his decision "letter-perfect." And when he submitted a budget that included a 10 percent increase in education funding? Well, let's just say swooning occurred.

Doomed to repeat the past?

Did the dinosaurs die out because of global warming? Well, sort of.

In an op-ed in Sunday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Peter Ward, a University of Washington professor of biology and earth and space sciences, takes a look at climate change through the unlikely lens of paleontology. Ward points out that prehistoric volcanic eruptions released enough carbon-dioxide into the atmosphere to radically alter the planet's climate, resulting in serious ecosystem disturbances and extinctions.

African-Do

Congo Basin rainforest protected by treaty The world’s second-largest rainforest, spanning 10 countries in the Congo Basin of Africa and disappearing at a rate of some 3.7 million acres a year, is now a wee bit safer. This weekend, leaders of seven central African nations signed a treaty aimed at slowing the widespread illegal logging, […]

Whitman on the environment

Ex-EPA administrator (and N.J. governor) Christie Todd Whitman is somewhat of a mystery to progressives. She talks like a moderate, and even dares criticize the Bush junta, but she was complicit in the very hard right policies she now disavows -- and, conspicuously, didn't disavow them at the time. The question in the mind of many pundits is, "naive dupe or dishonest hack?" After reading Whitman's op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle today arguing that we need "a new debate on the environment," I'm leaning toward hack.

Well, at least she’s a feminist

Interior Secretary Gale Norton is reviled by many enviro activists for pushing energy development at the expense of environmental protection. But as Elizabeth R. Washburn argues in an op-ed in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, she's to be commended for "helping women break through the glass ceiling in a federal bureaucracy known for its good old boy leanings."

In her four years at the helm of the Interior Deparment, Norton has filled key management positions with women, including Lynn Scarlett, Rebecca Watson, Kathleen Clarke, Johnnie Burton, Fran Mainella, Sue Ellen Wooldridge, and Teresa Chambers (though things went a bit awry in Chambers' case). "This is the first time that such a large group of women has been assembled to make decisions that affect land, minerals, water and the general environment of the United States," writes Washburn.

That's impressive. But personally -- even as a progressive who cares about equal representation -- I'm far more interested in policy outcomes than in who's behind them. Give me a stale old white guy who cares about multilateralism and opposes "preemptive war" over Condoleezza Rice any day.

Show Al Gore your stuff

INdTV -- the new independent cable TV network being started by Al Gore and Joel Hyatt -- is seeking submissions. Are any Gristmill readers out there aspiring (and/or experienced) TV producers? Got a video camera? Think it might be nice to see some real environmental coverage on television for once? Send them something.

(Via Treehugger.)

Week in review

As always, Worldchanging's week in sustainable vehicles from Mike Millikin and week in sustainable business from Gil Friend are worth reading.

Exeter

The big Exeter, U.K., conference on global warming ended last week. You can read a slightly hysterical wrap-up in The Independent and a slightly wonkier, link-filled wrap-up on Worldchanging.

Update [2005-2-7 20:53:35 by Dave Roberts]:Ah, how could I forget the Indispensible RealClimate?