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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
In the halls of the White House itself, environmentalists expect to see the Bush administration continue to hide the impacts of its energy policies: "We can expect more government secrecy, more suppression of basic scientific data, even efforts to deny citizens the basic right to appear in court to defend themselves and their communities against environmental assaults and dangers," says Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club in a statement.
In fact, in the very week of Bush's reelection, new evidence of his administration's attempts to squash action on global warming surfaced. There's no sign that Bush in his second term will do anything but continue to ignore global warming, even though its potentially catastrophic effects are acknowledged by rest of the world, including the Queen of England!
"I think that it's exceedingly wishful thinking to believe that we would reverse course," says Joseph Romm, author of "The Hype About Hydrogen." "Unfortunately, I think we're going to lose this decade to inaction on global warming -- and it is a decade that we can't afford to lose. History is not going to judge this administration on the war in Iraq or terrorism or the deficit. History is going to judge this administration on global warming because historians are going to be living in a time when the climate is much worse than today, and possibly catastrophically so."
Many of the consequences of the actions that the Bush administration took in its first term will only begin to really be felt in the second, according to Pope from the Sierra Club. With Superfund bankrupt, toxic waste dumps won't be cleaned up. And plots on public lands that have been leased for drilling will start to see the invasion of heavy machinery. "There will be real consequences on the ground from what they've done," he said.
For enviros trying to hold Bush's polices at bay, one of the first legislative battles they anticipate is a new version of the old energy bill. First launched in 2001, it has since languished and died in Congress but will likely come back like a coal-and-toxin zombie that can't be killed.
"The energy bill would make global warming worse because it would build more coal-fired power plants, as it fails to invest in renewable energy," says Bell from the Sierra Club. "It doesn't place caps on our global warming emissions. It basically ignores the issue and it doesn't take the single biggest step to curbing global warming, which is raising fuel-economy standards. It takes us in the wrong direction."
While the Republican tilt of the new Senate would appear to make the environmental battle even tougher than it was during Bush's first term, it's not a lost cause. Bell points out that a number of the Democrats who lost their seats in the Senate this year, like Sen. Tom Daschle and Sen. Zell Miller, didn't support the filibuster that most recently killed the energy bill in the Senate. And a number of moderate Republicans, like McCain, crossed the aisle to do so.
"We still feel that we can keep this bad energy bill from becoming law. But I think that the Republicans will go back and try to put more and more provisions in there for the coal industry, the oil industry and the utilities industry," says Bell. "And they'll probably try to push forward to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
Some Republican senators are already talking about introducing Arctic drilling into a budget bill in February or March, which only requires a simple majority to pass.
But conservationists -- and the public -- likely won't give it up easily. "There is widespread support for keeping the Arctic Refuge wild, unspoiled and free of oil rigs," says Wayland from the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I think that if they had the election, and then all of a sudden they held a vote to open the Arctic, there would be a lot of public outcry." Even so, she adds, "we're just going to be vigilant."
Wayland thinks its likely that Bush will immediately try to open up more public lands for natural gas drilling, since we're moving into the winter with high natural gas prices. She also anticipates further legislative attacks on the Endangered Species Act -- which gets in the way of development -- as well as the return of Bush's "Clear Skies" initiative, which would actually weaken the requirements under the Clean Air Act for eradicating mercury pollution from coal-fired power plants.
Environmental groups hope to reach out to sportsmen who in Bush's first term proved to be the kind of conservationists that Bush did listen to -- sometimes. Just before the election, due to an unprecedented outcry from people of all political stripes in Montana and Wyoming, the administration roped in plans to drill in the Montana's Rocky Mountain Front. "There's increased recognition that even in the Republicans' own base, there is opposition to unrestricted oil and gas drilling and rolling back environmental protections," says Wayland.
