George W. Bush

Few Americans are ever likely to see George W. Bush's greatest environmental legacy

Behold Bush’s environmental legacy. Photo: nasa.gov My assignment, which I chose to accept, is to offer a tangent of positive thoughts about the Bush administration’s environmental record before readers return to the barrage of verbal drubbing that other Grist writers are no doubt serving up. Rather than pick out nuggets that lie here and there […]

Paulson brags on his delayer boss

This 'graph on the WSJ blog just about made me choke:

Of course, the obsession over what do to with developing countries -- especially China -- is one of President Bush's biggest environmental legacies, Secretary Paulson said, continuing the administration's week-long farewell tour. By relentlessly focusing on the role of developing-world emissions, President Bush "changed the debate," Sec. Paulson said.

Two points. First, the strategy of delaying U.S. action on climate change by recourse to fear-mongering about China and India is not a Bush invention. Conservatives (and, er, Democrats) have been pulling that crap since the '90s. That was the basis for the Senate rejecting Kyoto via the Byrd-Hagel Resolution.

Second, it is true that Bush has kept this delaying tactic at the center of the national debate. What is truly mystifying is why a Bush administration official who purports to be concerned about climate change would boast about it.

White House chefs and the limits of personal choice

About a month ago, high-profile foodies got pretty amped up about whom Obama would choose as White House chef. Three of them -- Berkeley sustainable food doyenne Alice Waters, Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl, and New York City restaurateur Denny Mayer -- even got together to pen a letter urging the incoming president to replace the current White House chef with someone who chooses locally grown, organic food -- preferably sourced from an on-site vegetable garden. According to a New York Times account, the letter states:

A person of integrity who is devoted to the ideals of sustainability and health would send a powerful message that food choices matter. Supporting seasonal, ripe delicious American food would not only nourish your family, it would support our farmers, inspire your guests, and energize the nation.

Last week, Obama defied this gentle effort to convince him to send the incumbent chef packing. Cristeta Comerford, who has been in charge of cooking first-family meals for the Bushes since 2005, will retain her post, the Obama team announced.

My first reaction to this news was disappointment. After choosing an agribiz-friendly pol as USDA chief, couldn't Obama at least make a symbolic nod in the direction of the sustainable-food movement by picking a new chef?

Now I'm not sure what the fuss was about in the first place.

Bush on Kyoto, on his way out the door

"I listened, I've told people, 'Yes, you can try to be popular.' In certain quarters in Europe, you can be popular by blaming every Middle Eastern problem on Israel. Or you can be popular by joining the International Criminal Court. I guess I could have been popular by accepting Kyoto, which I felt was a flawed treaty, and proposed something different and more constructive."

-- President George W. Bush at his final press conference

Bush's last marine protection area isn't so much with the protection

On Tuesday the Bush administration announced plans to create the world's largest marine protection area in the Pacific Ocean.

It's a big deal. Huge even. Progressives like Jonathan Stein are rightly shocked and excited.

Remember though, an attitude of utter cynicism toward the Bush administration has served as an unfailingly accurate guide for eight years now. Let's not be too quick to give it up.

After all, there's this:

Two years ago with fanfare, President Bush declared a remote chain of Hawaiian islands the biggest, most environmentally protected area of ocean in the world.

It hasn't worked out that way.

Cleanup efforts have slowed, garbage is still piling up and Bush has cut his budget request by 80%.

And one wonders just how a cash-strapped federal government plans to police this brand new marine sanctuary. Turns out, Jim Connaughton, Chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, was asked just that earlier this week during a press briefing:

Q: Two questions. One, you mentioned monitoring. You also mentioned how remote this area is -- and I have actually fished this area quite a bit. And my question to you is, monitoring is one thing, but enforcement is an entirely different issue. And I don't honestly see how you can enforce any of this out there with the amount of government-based traffic that you have in the area. How do you plan to enforce these laws?

CHAIRMAN CONNAUGHTON: Well, let's begin -- first, this is our experience -- these are challenging areas to get to, so there's an embedded enforcement of just the difficulty of getting to these areas. Two, we operate from the presumption that most people who care about the resource, including your constituency, are law-abiding citizens, and so we expect that there will be a fair amount of increased awareness of the importance of the resource, and certainly that the boating community is very good about staying up to date on charts, especially the adventurous boating community, and staying up to date on -- just for safety purposes -- the conditions with respect to these remote areas.

Now, is there the potential for some Chinese commercial fishing fleet to come in and intrude the area? The answer to that is yes. And so one of our goals is through the management planning, and through several years of building out capacity, to also build out our capability to enforce.

So, the president's plan is to someday get around to have better enforcement. As to monitoring, Connaughton had this to say:

A legacy-making move for the outgoing prez

President George W. Bush deserves praise from ocean lovers for his creation of three new marine national monuments in the Pacific Ocean. This action protects some of the few remaining pristine coral reefs in the world by prohibiting all forms of commercial fishing and severely restricting recreational fishing.

These are among the last places on the planet where you can still see sharks and other top predators in something like a healthy state. President Bush -- and the Pew Environment Group, Marine Conservation Biology Institute and Environmental Defense Fund, who worked so hard for these monuments -- can be justifiably proud of the results.

It's easy to point out that the protected areas around the 10 islands could have been 16-times larger if Bush had included the full 200-mile exclusive economic zone in the monuments. As National Geographic scientist Enric Sala points out, there's no magic scientific line at 50 miles. It looks more like a political line to me.

Tim DeChristopher and Utah stand up to Big Oil

I've never been big on rules.

Neither, apparently, is Tim DeChristopher. He's the young activist who just completely derailed the Bush administration's plans to sell more of our public lands to the oil companies.

He sat in the lease sale in Salt Lake City on Dec. 19 and "bought" 22,500 acres of public lands right out from under the suits from Chevron and Exxon.

One small problem -- Tim doesn't actually have the money. It almost doesn't matter, though, because he's monkeywrenched the process so thoroughly that they won't be able to conduct another sale until after the Obama administration takes over -- and thus hopefully never.

Tim needs to raise $45,000 by this Friday, Jan. 9, in order to avoid fraud charges and put the sale out of reach to the Bush administration and their oily friends. He's already raised almost half.

I, for one, will be supporting Tim DeChristoper, Bidder 70, with a tax-deductible contribution via the Center for Water Advocacy in Moab, Utah.

He deserves thanks for reminding all of us that direct action still gets the goods!

U.S. negotiating team in Poznan dodges questions on Bush’s climate inactivism

Below is another dispatch from the climate talks in Poland by CAP Senior Fellow Andrew Light, first printed in WonkRoom. —– In one of the more surreal moments of this year’s U.N. climate change talks, Bush’s chief environmental adviser blamed Russia for the Bush administration’s climate change obstructionism. The U.S. negotiating team featuring James Connaughton, […]

The Stephen Johnson story

Anyone interested in understanding not only Bush’s environmental legacy but the Bush Era simply must carve out the time to read "Smoke and Mirrors," a blockbuster series on the EPA put together by Philadelphia Inquirer. Go. Read it. There’s too much in it for a facile blog summary, but I do want to comment one […]