According to Ryan Grimm at Politico.com, when asked what the President would do if the current iteration of the farm bill made its way to the President’s desk White House spokesman Scott Stanzel replied, “as it stands now, it is not something the president would support.” Stanzel wrote in an email:

“The proposal before Congress would dramatically increase spending, in part by masking additional spending in budgetary gimmicks and accounting tricks.”

Farm bills pass - that’s what they do

Despite the threat, there may be enough Congressional support to override the veto. According to House Agriculture Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN), “If the White House is stupid enough to veto this, they’re going to get overridden.”

The farm bill is a very popular funding mechanism for Congressional spending. Every state’s congressional delegation works extremely hard to get their slice of the agricultural pie - not doing so does not bode well in the eyes of powerful ag interests and the voters of agricultural states. In short, farm bills do not get vetoed. At least very rarely do they get vetoed.

The one exception to the rule is when a second term president uses a veto (or threatens to veto) an appropriations bill, such as a farm bill - and criticize Congress for loading it with pork and earmarks - without any serious political repercussions. Interestingly enough, the last time a farm bill was vetoed was nearly 10 years ago, when another late second-term president successfully vetoed a farm bill - a veto which Congress made no attempt to override. But the political climate is quite different from that of ten years ago, and I would suspect that this President does not have the political capital to successfully veto the farm bill.
See also: “Small Wind Remains in Farm Bill” :: Green Options (12/2007)

Photo: mike138

Interested parties can now let the agency know what they think on EPA’s new interactive Web page (I’d love to a fly on that digital wall). Additionally, agency officials will be made available occasionally online for interactive chat sessions. The first of these was held last Thursday, when EPA’s chief information officer Molly O’Neill was made available for answering questions interactively online.

It is no secret that, under the Bush administration, the EPA has cut back on information available to the public through channels like the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the EPA libraries. The administration has also been under tremendous scrutiny for interference with EPA science on several separate occasions throughout the last seven years. And in a recent report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 900 employees of the EPA feel like their work has been interfered with for political reasons; sixty-percent of those who responded to the Union’s survey encountered some form of executive manipulation.

With new evidence of tampering and data manipulation continuing to mount on what seems like a daily basis, the “national dialogue” could not have come a minute later - that is if the EPA wants to salvage any shred of its rapidly waning legitimacy.

The initiative may indicate a desire on behalf of the EPA to repair the bruised relationships between the agency and the public, and to restore public confidence in the EPA’s ability to perform its duties without political interference from the White House. And while I applaud this effort, perhaps the EPA could adopt their “national dialogue” as a standard practice, as opposed to closing it at the end of June - as if there will be nothing left to say come July.

Related Posts:

“Bush Administration Just Says ‘No’ to Science” :: Red, Green, and Blue (4/2008)

“Thank You Bush for Weakening Smog Limits” :: Red, Green, and Blue (3/2008)

huh?

In light of my recent post about the demoralizing effect this administration has had upon EPA scientists and other agency ‘lifers’, I was more than just a little surprised to hear about the story leaked in Monday’s Washington Times that reports President Bush is “poised to change course and announce as early as this week that he wants Congress to pass a bill to combat global warming, and will lay out principles for what that should include.”

White House spokeswoman Dana Perino declined on Monday to confirm rumors that action was imminent, though she would not rule it out. She said the administration’s discussions are building toward an expected debate on climate change in the Senate in June [watch video of White House press conference here].

If President George W. Bush throws his support behind mandatory carbon dioxide regulations, it would indeed be a major shift away from his insistence that placing binding caps on emissions would harm the U.S. economy.

Not So Fast?
Jeffrey Holmstead, an attorney with Bracewell and Giuliani LLP and a former EPA official, said the White House was not “on the verge of a fundamental shift” in climate change policy. “I don’t think that anyone should be holding their breath waiting for a dramatic new cap-and-trade proposal from the administration,” Holmstead said. [read more about the environmental leanings of Giuliani and Bracewell LLP here]

It is possible that word from the White House may come as early as Thursday, when Bush is scheduled to speak in the Rose Garden to recipients of the President’s Environmental Youth Awards.

I would argue that the only opportunity the current president has to leave a positive and lasting legacy is to take ownership of the climate change and global warming issues (and all of the thorny issues they present). Bush would have to seize the opportunity with all the capacity, all of the willpower, and all of the resources that he can possibly muster as the leader of the wealthiest and most powerful country in the world and channel it towards solving the most pressing problem facing humanity today.

Many would argue that this president damaged the environment as well as the institutions we have built to protect it, beyond any hope of repair. While it may be true that the ecological damages may never be undone, the beauty of the democratic project is such that, it allows us to challenge those assumptions and rebuild those crumbling institutions which allowed the ecological damage in the first place.

Reuters
The Washington Times
Photo courtesy of JohnnyC

The Morale Problem
The recent cover story by Margaret Kriz the National Journal paints a rather dramatic picture of the downward spiraling morale at the EPA and the agency’s decrease in overall effectiveness as a result. Legal experts say that even more than under Bush’s two previous administrators, Christine Todd Whitman and Mike Leavitt, Johnson’s EPA is regularly pushed around by politically powerful advisers at the White House and in other departments. The article states that agency morale is almost as bad as it was in the early 1980s after President Reagan appointed pro-industry Anne Gorsuch Burford to head it. Georgetown Law Professor Danield Esty, said that the current administration has pulled the EPA

“[O]ff to the extreme end of the right-wing perspective on the environment, reflecting not even a consensus within the Republican Party but the views of some who are particularly hostile to the agency’s historic mission.”

The Money Problem
At a time when the nation’s top environmental regulators face increasingly complex pollution problems, President Bush is pushing for dramatic cuts in EPA’s budget. The White House’s proposed fiscal 2009 budget would provide just $7.1 billion — fewer actual dollars than EPA has received in any fiscal year since 1997.

Riding It Out
In the meantime, disgruntled EPA professionals are longing for the day when the next administration takes over their agency and they can go to work knowing that their science will receive the attention it deserves and the funding it requires. A scathing editorial in Nature wrote that

“In a rational world, Johnson would resign in favour of someone who could at least feign an interest in the environment. Alas, it seems that he will probably stay on until January 2009, refusing waivers, fighting lawsuits and further depressing employees’ morale.”

The National Journal
Nature
Photo courtesy of keeping it real via flickr

Other motivation for this cartoon comes from the historical (and current) treatment of native Americans, and this unsourced quote from MAD Magazine: “The suburbs are where they cut down all the trees and then name the streets after them!”

The Bush administration has announced it will wave more than thirty federal laws to finish building a wall along the Mexican border by the end of this year. The Washington Post calls the move the most sweeping use of the administration’s waiver authority during the wall’s construction. The waivers allow the Bush administration to bypass mandatory reviews on how the wall will affect ecological areas in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson called the waiver “an extreme abuse of authority.”

Environmental groups have filed petitions challenging the waivers before the Supreme Court siting several potential ecological hazards that would be created by the fence. Biologists are especially concerned about a handful of extremely rare jaguars that prowl up from Mexico over mountain trails in some of the wildest country in the southwest.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff issued two waivers covering 470 miles of the border from California to Texas where the department plants to build fencing into a flood-control levee in a wildlife refuge. In a statement issued on Tuesday, Chertoff warned, “Criminal activity at the border does not stop for endless debate or protracted litigation.”

Like it or not, what Secretary Chertoff refers to as, “endless debate” and “protracted litigation,” have become central components of our democratic system. Issuing a waiver of environmental impact studies for a controversial border fence threatens the very underpinnings of our democratic processes and sets a very dangerous precedent for future incursions. Slippery slope anyone?

Photo: Daquella Manera

In a stunning reversal of direction, the Bush administration has officially requested a new addition to the Endangered Species list. What threatened species could elicit this drastic change of course for the Bush Administration? It is, of course, the elusive Climate Change Skeptic (dubium mundus fervesco), whose habitat is being threatened by rational thinking, increased rates of deforestation, low gas-mileage standards, and the abundance of “cheap” coal. The stunning news comes just after a story in the Washington Post reported that the current administration has never requested that an animal be protected by the Endangered Species Act. Of the current administration’s 59 listed species, none of them were requested by the administration themselves.

But the Bush administration is not alone in wanting to protect such skeptics as Fred Singer and Patrick Michaels, in fear that the breed may die out completely in the coming years. Fortunately, the skeptics have received significant funding from coal and oil companies, including ExxonMobil. They also have well-documented connections with public relations firms that have set up industry front groups to sway public opinion and clean up the image of a notoriously dirty fuel. The behavior of Dubium Mundus Fervesco - in the words of one leaked memo - indicates the animals aim to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact).”

Compared to his father’s administration as well as President Clinton’s, George W. Bush has done remarkably little in terms of endangered species protection. Since 2001, Bush has listed 59 species, compared to Clinton’s 521 and Bush senior’s 231. Additionally, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne has not declared a single native species as threatened or endangered since he was appointed nearly two years ago.

One can only hope that this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that this president and future ones will continue to use the Endangered Species Act to protect other imperiled species that are as critical to the political ecosystem as the elusive climate change skeptic.

GOAT- High Country News Blog
The Washington Post

[Note: The information in this post is for entertainment purposes only and is intended solely as an obligatory April Fools Day gag !]

George W. Bush has definitely been a polarizing personality in his two terms as leader of the United States of America. From the beginning and his War on Iraq he has seemingly attempted to paint himself as nothing more than a moronic menace. Of late, Bush has turned his sights on becoming the world’s greatest environmental foe.

Some may call my words harsh. Others will praise them. They are however, nothing more than my personal opinion about him.

However his actions against the environment are both unquestionable and unconscionable.

A recent Reuters article stated that ‘In cases this week dealing with polar bears, ozone smog and environmental research, groups that monitor these decisions faulted the Bush administration for slighting science in favor of politics.’ I feel that, in looking at the past few months, this statement fails to explain just how Bush has thrown his weight around.

On Wednesday the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released new 8-hour primary and secondary ozone standards of 75 parts per million. This was down from the previous limit which set it at 80 parts per million, but was still well above limits proposed not only by environmental and advocacy groups, but the members of the EPA itself.

Senator Hillary Clinton said in a statement on her website that “President Bush opened a new front in his administration’s war on science this week. His personal intervention to weaken the Environmental Protection Agency’s new limits on ozone proves that he has abandoned even a pretense of scientific integrity in decision-making. His efforts are directly at odds not only with accepted science, but with his government’s own arguments before the United States Supreme Court.”

“This is only the latest in a long series of examples where the Bush administration’s perversion of science helps special interests at the expense of public health — though it is certainly one of the more brazen. I will work with Senate Environment Committee Chair Barbara Boxer to investigate the President’s decision and to hold him accountable,” she added.

In response to criticism and by way of explanation, White House spokesman Tony Fratto explained that “What we were trying to do on the smog decision was try to have a decision that was consistent with our interpretation of the statute. This was not a weakening of regulations or standards governing ozone, but it was an effort to make those standards consistent.”

However many groups believe that these new regulations are built around coal-fired power plants and other industries that emit ground-level ozone.

“This is a pattern unfortunately that extends across the Environmental Protection Agency, across pretty much every science based agency in the federal government,” said Tim Donaghy of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

I’ll hold it there for the moment, and come to the polar bears soon. Needless to say, if we continue to see behavior like this from Bush, or even from other world leaders, we’re screwed.

Photo Courtesy of rkimpeljr via Flickr