Bush and environment

medicineman

New Member
From his earliest days in office, Bush has been at war with the environment:Secret email gives advice on denying climate change

[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Antony Barnett in New York[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]Sunday April 4, 2004[/FONT]
[FONT=Geneva,Arial,sans-serif]The Observer[/FONT]


George W. Bush's campaign workers have hit on an age-old political tactic to deal with the tricky subject of global warming - deny, and deny aggressively.
The Observer has obtained a remarkable email sent to the press secretaries of all Republican congressmen advising them what to say when questioned on the environment in the run-up to November's election. The advice: tell them everything's rosy.
It tells them how global warming has not been proved, air quality is 'getting better', the world's forests are 'spreading, not deadening', oil reserves are 'increasing, not decreasing', and the 'world's water is cleaner and reaching more people'.
The email - sent on 4 February - warns that Democrats will 'hit us hard' on the environment. 'In an effort to help your members fight back, as well as be aggressive on the issue, we have prepared the following set of talking points on where the environment really stands today,' it states.
The memo - headed 'From medi-scare to air-scare' - goes on: 'From the heated debate on global warming to the hot air on forests; from the muddled talk on our nation's waters to the convolution on air pollution, we are fighting a battle of fact against fiction on the environment - Republicans can't stress enough that extremists are screaming "Doomsday!" when the environment is actually seeing a new and better day.'
Among the memo's assertions are 'global warming is not a fact', 'links between air quality and asthma in children remain cloudy', and the US Environment Protection Agency is exaggerating when it says that at least 40 per cent of streams, rivers and lakes are too polluted for drinking, fishing or swimming.
It gives a list of alleged facts taken from contentious sources. For instance, to back its claim that air quality is improving it cites a report from Pacific Research Institute - an organisation that has received $130,000 from Exxon Mobil since 1998.
The memo also lifts details from the controversial book The Skeptical Environmentalist by Bjorn Lomborg. On the Republicans' claims that deforestation is not a problem, it states: 'About a third of the world is still covered with forests, a level not changed much since World War II. The world's demand for paper can be permanently satisfied by the growth of trees in just five per cent of the world's forests.'
The memo's main source for the denial of global warming is Richard Lindzen, a climate-sceptic scientist who has consistently taken money from the fossil fuel industry. His opinion differs substantially from most climate scientists, who say that climate change is happening.
But probably the most influential voice behind the memo is Frank Luntz, a Republican Party strategist. In a leaked 2002 memo, Luntz said: 'The scientific debate is closing [against us] but not yet closed. There is still a window of opportunity to challenge the science.'
Luntz has been roundly criticised in Europe. Last month Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, attacked him for being too close to Exxon.
Rob Gueterbock of Greenpeace condemned the messages given in the Republican email. He said: 'Bush's spin doctors have been taking their brief from dodgy scientists with an Alice in Wonderland view of the world's environment. They want us to think the air is getting cleaner and that global warming is a myth. This memo shows it is Exxon Mobil driving US policy, when it should be sound science.'
The memo has met some resistance from Republican moderates.
Republican Mike Castle, who heads a group of 69 moderate House members, senators and governors, says the strategy doesn't address the fact that pollution continues to be a health threat. 'If I tried to follow these talking points at a town hall meeting with my constituents, I'd be booed.'
Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords, who left the Republican Party in 2001 to become an independent partly over its anti-green agenda, called the memo 'outlandish' and an attempt to deceive voters.
'They have a head-in-the-sand approach to it. They're just sloughing off the human health impacts - the premature deaths and asthma attacks caused by power plant pollution,' Jeffords said.
Republican House Conference director Greg Cist, who sent the email, said: 'It's up to our members if they want to use it or not. We're not stuffing it down their throats.'
He said the memo was spurred by concerns that environmental groups were using myths to try to make the Republicans look bad. 'We wanted to show how the environment has been improving,' Cist said. 'We wanted to provide the other side of the story.'

IN THE EARLY 1980s you didn't need to be a member of EarthFirst! to know that Ronald Reagan was bad for the environment. You didn't even have to be especially politically aware. Here was a man who had, after all, publicly stated that most air pollution was caused by plants. And then there was Reagan's secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who saw no need to protect the environment because Jesus was returning any day, and who, in a pique of reactionary feng shui, suggested that the buffalo on Interior's seal be flipped to face right instead of left.
By contrast, while George W. Bush gets low marks on the environment from a majority of Americans, few fully appreciate the scope and fury of this administration's anti-environmental agenda. "What they're doing makes the Reagan administration look innocent," says Buck Parker, executive director of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm. The Bush administration has been gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, laws that have traditionally had bipartisan support and have done more to protect the health of Americans than any other environmental legislation. It has crippled the Superfund program, which is charged with cleaning up millions of pounds of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and vinyl chloride in more than 1,000 neighborhoods in 48 states. It has sought to cut the EPA's enforcement division by nearly one-fifth, to its lowest level on record; fines assessed for environmental violations dropped by nearly two-thirds in the administration's first two years; and criminal prosecutions-the government's weapon of last resort against the worst polluters-are down by nearly one-third.
The administration has abdicated the decades-old federal responsibility to protect native animals and plants from extinction, becoming the first not to voluntarily add a single species to the endangered species list. It has opened millions of acres of wilderness-including some of the nation's most environmentally sensitive public lands-to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Under one plan, loggers could take 10 percent of the trees in California's Giant Sequoia National Monument; many of the Monument's old-growth sequoias, 200 years old and more, could be felled to make roof shingles. Other national treasures that have been opened for development include the million-acre Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, the 2,000-foot red-rock spires at Fisher Towers, Utah, and dozens of others. And then, of course, the White House has all but denied the existence of what may be the most serious environmental problem of our time, global warming. After campaigning on a promise to reduce emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, Bush made an abrupt about-face once elected, calling his earlier pledge "a mistake" and announcing that he would not regulate CO2 emissions from power plants-even though the United States accounts for a fourth of the world's total industrial CO2 emissions. Since then, the White House has censored scientific reports that mentioned the subject, walked away from the Kyoto agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, and even, at the behest of ExxonMobil, engineered the ouster of the scientist who chaired the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change http://www.bushgreenwatch.org/ - 22k - 22k What a fine job he's done to protect us and the envitonment, eh!
 

medicineman

New Member
As far as I know, Bush is not running for reelection.

Vi
And so we should not hold him accountable for crimes against humanity? Lets see, If a politician commits a crime and is leaving office, he should just be let go, forgotten about and dismissed! And I thought you had some brains. Just let the criminals go. How about Foley, ya wanna let him go also. Wait I know, you're gonna say Bush has not been convicted, Well I'm saying, Convict him, he's a criminal just as much as the guy that robs a liquor store with an AK47! He's robbed citizens of their health, their jobs, their health care, the list is too long to post. The crimes that asshole has commited are manyfold!
 

ViRedd

New Member
Well, OK ... let's assume you're correct in your assessment of Bush. Now please be specific and list the "crimes" he's committed. Remember ... be specific now.

Vi
 

medicineman

New Member
Well, OK ... let's assume you're correct in your assessment of Bush. Now please be specific and list the "crimes" he's committed. Remember ... be specific now.

Vi
I think you're a little crazy and blind. Crimes against humanity, The list is way to long to put in here. I'd be posting for months. I'll give you a little taste: Started a war with false, made up information, a pre-emtive war, the first in the History of the nation (crimes against humanity) every death attributed to this war rests on George Walker Bushs' head! That number alone we all know runs over 100,000. so I'm saying He is the boss, so he is responsible, like manslaughter! 100,000+++ manslaughter deaths attributed to him. To complete just this one charge I'd need all the names of those that have died! How many other crimes has he commited? Take the environment, how many children will have cancer from his lassez-faire environmental policys, (crimes against humanity). I'm tired of your bullshit Vi, you are not quite human I suspect!
 

ViRedd

New Member
"I'll give you a little taste: Started a war with false, made up information"

False, made up information? What information was that? Surely you're not referring to "Saddam had WMD?" I hope. Bill Clinton and most of the Democrats in power at the time said the same thing as they were relying on the same intelligence as Bush was. The "lied about WMD" thingie was laid to rest a long time ago, Med. Get some new news.

"a pre-emtive war, the first in the History of the nation "

I believe that Bush acted in a Constitutional manner by going to Congress for approval, did he not? I believe that the majority of both sides of the asile gave their consent, did they not? And ... was the Revolutionary War not preemptive? How about WWI? I don't believe we were attacked by the Germans prior to WWI. Korea? Vietnam? Gulf War? Who attacked us prior to all these wars?

"Take the environment, how many children will have cancer from his lassez-faire environmental policys"

AhHa ... now I get it ... capitalism causes cancer! Damn ... right there, on a cannabis site, we get the cure for cancer ... just turn over the entire private sector to government bureaucrats and we have the cure! Brilliant thinking there Med.

Vi
 

medicineman

New Member
"I'll give you a little taste: Started a war with false, made up information"

False, made up information? What information was that? Surely you're not referring to "Saddam had WMD?" I hope. Bill Clinton and most of the Democrats in power at the time said the same thing as they were relying on the same intelligence as Bush was. The "lied about WMD" thingie was laid to rest a long time ago, Med. Get some new news.

"a pre-emtive war, the first in the History of the nation "

I believe that Bush acted in a Constitutional manner by going to Congress for approval, did he not? I believe that the majority of both sides of the asile gave their consent, did they not? And ... was the Revolutionary War not preemptive? How about WWI? I don't believe we were attacked by the Germans prior to WWI. Korea? Vietnam? Gulf War? Who attacked us prior to all these wars?

"Take the environment, how many children will have cancer from his lassez-faire environmental policys"

AhHa ... now I get it ... capitalism causes cancer! Damn ... right there, on a cannabis site, we get the cure for cancer ... just turn over the entire private sector to government bureaucrats and we have the cure! Brilliant thinking there Med.

Vi
FUCK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
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