In other words: A discussion of The Bush Administration
Road to ruin
If it doesn't look like we're doing so well with the war in Iraq these days, well you can always think of a more important war, the war against self-destruction. That isn't going well either.
While newspapers report that Kilimanjaro's icecap is melting and Greenland's glaciers are crumbling, the US government has been telling its scientific advisers to do more research before it can consider any action to restrict greenhouse gases; the scientists reported back that they had done all the research. The attitude of the White House to global warming was summed up by the online journalist Mickey Kaus as: "It's not true! It's not true! And we can't do anything about it!" What terrifies all American politicians, deep down, is that it is true and that they could do something about it, but at horrendous cost to American industry and lifestyle.
In the meantime, all American consumers have been asked to do is to buy Ben & Jerry's One Sweet Whirled ice cream, ensuring that a portion of Unilever's profits go towards "global warming initiatives". Wow!
...
Americans made crops grow in places that are entirely arid. They built dams - about 250,000 of them. They built great cities, with skyscrapers and symphony orchestras, in places that appeared barely habitable. They shifted rivers, even reversed their flow. "It's the American belief that with enough hard work and perseverance anything - be it a force of nature, a country or a disease - can be vanquished," says Clapp. "It's a country founded on the idea of no limits. The essence of environmentalism is that there are indeed limits. It's one of the reasons environmentalism is a stronger ethic in Europe than in the US."
...
This brings us to the third factor: the Bush administration, the first government in modern history which has systematically disavowed the systems of checks and controls that have governed environmental policy since it burst into western political consciousness a generation ago. It would be ludicrous to suggest that Bush is responsible for what is happening to the American environment. The crisis is far more deep-seated than that, and the federal government is too far removed from the minutiae of daily life.
But the Bushies have perfected a technique of announcing regular edicts (often late on a Friday afternoon) rolling back environmental control, usually while pretending to do the opposite. Morale among civil servants at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington was already close to rock-bottom even before its moderate leader, Christine Todd Whitman, finally threw in her hand in May. Gossip round town was that she had endured two years of private humiliation at the hands of the White House. Few environmentalists have great hopes for her announced successor, the governor of Utah, Mike Leavitt.
What is really alarming is the intellectual atmosphere in Washington. You can attend seminars debunking scientific eco-orthodoxy almost every week. Early in the year, there was much favourable publicity for a new work Global Warming and Other Eco-myths, produced by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, an organisation reputedly funded by multinational corporations. Outside Washington, it can be far nastier. "I've never threatened anyone in my life," a conservation activist in Montana complained to the Guardian. "I do know, though, that I have gotten very ugly threats left on my telephone answering machine over the past year, and twice had to scour my sidewalk in front of the building to erase the dead body chalk outlines."
Out in the west, words such as enviro-whackos are popularised by rightwing radio hosts such as the ex-Watergate conspirator Gordon Liddy, who passes on to his millions of listeners the message that global warming is a lie. "I commute in a three-quarter-tonne capacity Chevrolet Silverado HD," he swanked in his latest book. "Four-wheel drive, off-road equipped, extended curb pickup truck, powered by a 300hp, overhead valve, turbo supercharged diesel engine with 520lb-feet of torque... It has lights all over it so everyone can see me coming and get out of the way. If someone in a little government-mandated car hits me, it is all over - for him." Fuel economy in American vehicles hit a 22-year low in 2002.
- rob 12:27 PM - [PermaLink] -
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