Ex-EPA Chiefs Blame Bush Regarding Global Warming

[Jamila]

You know, I don't know how it gets much worse than this.

I mean, when SIX former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency get together - five of them from your own political party - and finger you for neglecting environmental problems, what do you do?

That's the dilemma that Pres. Bush is in right now.


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060118/ap_on_go_ot/global_warming



Ex-EPA Chiefs Blame Bush in Global Warming


By JOHN HEILPRIN, Associated Press Writer


WASHINGTON - Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency — five Republicans and one Democrat — accused the Bush administration Wednesday of neglecting global warming and other environmental problems.


"I don't think there's a commitment in this administration," said Bill Ruckelshaus, who was EPA's first administrator when the agency opened its doors in 1970 under President Nixon and headed it again under President Reagan in the 1980s.

Russell Train, who succeeded Ruckelshaus in the Nixon and Ford administrations, said slowing the growth of "greenhouse" gases isn't enough.

"We need leadership, and I don't think we're getting it," he said at an EPA-sponsored symposium centered around the agency's 35th anniversary. "To sit back and just push it away and say we'll deal with it sometime down the road is dishonest to the people and self-destructive."

All of the former administrators raised their hands when EPA's current chief, Stephen Johnson, asked whether they believe global warming is a real problem, and again when he asked if humans bear significant blame.

Agency heads during five Republican administrations, including the current one, criticized the Bush White House for what they described as a failure of leadership.

Defending his boss, Johnson said the current administration has spent $20 billion on research and technology to combat climate change after President Bush rejected mandatory controls on carbon dioxide, the chief gas blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

Bush also kept the United States out of the Kyoto international treaty to reduce greenhouse gases globally, saying it would harm the U.S. economy, after many of the accord's terms were negotiated by the Clinton administration.

"I know from the president on down, he is committed," Johnson said. "And certainly his charge to me was, and certainly our team has heard it: 'I want you to accelerate the pace of environmental protection. I want you to maintain our economic competitiveness.' And I think that's really what it's all about."

His predecessors disagreed. Lee Thomas, Ruckelshaus's successor in the Reagan administration, said that "if the United States doesn't deal with those kinds of issues in a leadership role, they're not going to get dealt with. So I'm very concerned about this country and this agency."

Bill Reilly, the EPA administrator under the first President Bush, echoed that assessment.

"The time will come when we will address seriously the problem of climate change, and this is the agency that's best equipped to anticipate it," he said.

Christie Whitman, the first of three EPA administrators in the current Bush administration, said people obviously are having "an enormous impact" on the earth's warming.

"You'd need to be in a hole somewhere to think that the amount of change that we have imposed on land, and the way we've handled deforestation, farming practices, development, and what we're putting into the air, isn't exacerbating what is probably a natural trend," she said. "But this is worse, and it's getting worse."

Carol Browner, who was President Clinton's EPA administrator, said the White House and the Congress should push legislation to establish a carbon trading program based on a 1990 pollution trading program that helped reduce acid rain.

"If we wait for every single scientist who has a thought on the issue of climate change to agree, we will never do anything," she said. "If this agency had waited to completely understand the impacts of DDT, the impacts of lead in our gasoline, there would probably still be DDT sprayed and lead in our gasoline."

Three former administrators did not attend Wednesday's ceremony: Mike Leavitt, now secretary of health and human services; Doug Costle, who was in the Carter administration, and Anne Burford, a Reagan appointee who died last year.

___

On the Net:

EPA: http://www.epa.gov

----------------------------------------------

Thank you for these very brave and very honest people -

 

[A_Wanderer]

"If this agency had waited to completely understand the impacts of DDT, the impacts of lead in our gasoline, there would probably still be DDT sprayed and lead in our gasoline."

Inadvertantly highlights the cost of junk science. The demonisation of DDT in the absence of more effective means of mosquito control, environmental groups have done a "great" job in ensuring that it's use gets curtailed rather than having it used in reasonable ammounts in conjunction with other means.

 

[Jamila]

 

[A_Wanderer]

Malaria kills, in the absence of viable alternatives bans of the pestide are more damaging than using them and having it persist in the food chain for a decade or two.

In the absence of a proper understanding of global climate, the factors governing the current warming trend and the effectiveness of counter-measures it could be harmful putting vast sums of money towards climate change when it could be better spent buying out fishing licences, improving agricultural practices and minimising deforestation around the globe (although given the recent discovery that methane is being emitted by living trees that could be counter-productive - the point is we do not know). Get more facts on the table and less GIGO computer models.

 

[Liesje]

I like how people are so quite to outright "blame Bush" for the environment when really it's OUR damn fault. Sure, blame Bush all you want....but do you drive a car? Do you run your air conditioner? Do you use plastic or Styrofoam? ("you" being in general, not any specific person here) Being conscious of the environment is more than just loving the fuzzy animals. Last time I checked, we have some of the strictest environmental regulations in the world, but NORMAL PEOPLE on a day-to-day basis are neglecting the little things that promote conserving the environment. This makes my blood boil b/c most of the people I know who label themselves as being liberal and environmentalists are the most wasteful people I know, and it's usually just pure laziness.

 

[melon]

I like how people are so quite to outright "blame Bush" for the environment when really it's OUR damn fault. Sure, blame Bush all you want....but do you drive a car? Do you run your air conditioner? Do you use plastic or Styrofoam? ("you" being in general, not any specific person here) Being conscious of the environment is more than just loving the fuzzy animals. Last time I checked, we have some of the strictest environmental regulations in the world, but NORMAL PEOPLE on a day-to-day basis are neglecting the little things that promote conserving the environment. This makes my blood boil b/c most of the people I know who label themselves as being liberal and environmentalists are the most wasteful people I know, and it's usually just pure laziness.

The point missing here is that fuel efficiency, emissions standards, A/C efficiency, and even the production of plastic and styrofoam are subject to federal regulations. If left to business alone, we'd still be driving 7 mpg clunkers like in the 1970s.

To completely abandon progress is unrealistic, and individual consumers (particularly when the vast majority are ambivalent) cannot affect industry change. Business will always bitch. It's in their nature to bitch over everything, but sometimes it's the role of government to give them a push in terms of environmental responsibility. Otherwise, business will always do the barest minimum it's required to do.

Melon

 

[Liesje]

The point missing here is that fuel efficiency, emissions standards, A/C efficiency, and even the production of plastic and styrofoam are subject to federal regulations. If left to business alone, we'd still be driving 7 mpg clunkers like in the 1970s.

To completely abandon progress is unrealistic, and individual consumers (particularly when the vast majority are ambivalent) cannot affect industry change. Business will always bitch. It's in their nature to bitch over everything, but sometimes it's the role of government to give them a push in terms of environmental responsibility. Otherwise, business will always do the barest minimum it's required to do.

This is precisely my point. People are always yacking about the shitty environment and loose regulations, but it's almost the same story as the AIDs pandemic in Africa - no one really forces the issue enough to MAKE it effect government. The government isn't going to decide on it's own to tighten regulations just out of the goodness of their own hearts. It's up to the citizens to push the issue. But no....we'd rather continue destroying land in favor of cookie-cutter suburbal sprawl and drive three SUVs per family and wave our fingers at Bush.

 

[yolland]

The decline of civic responsibility is a big part of the problem re: the disinterest/hypocrisy of people at the local level, as is the tendency for environmental politics to get framed as ineffectual hippie idealists vs. self-interested businessmen and their city council cronies. The mere idea of that scenario instantly dampens most people's enthusiasm.

LivLuv is right, these are issues too important to abandon to dead-end one-upmanship at the federal level, but being involved in a few local environmental groups, I find the poison of cynicism and apathy has trickled down to this level as well. Getting whole communities of people (and communities is what it takes) to be proactive about not only pushing for, but participating in the planning of recycling programs, ecofriendly urban planning, conservation of local resources, support of businesses willing to take on the risks of pursuing environmentally sounder practices--these things don't happen with cynics at the helm. You need enthusiastic, committed people who have the will, the ambition, and above all the sense of personal obligation to a better collective future to make it work and carry it through from the big picture to the small one.

Unfortunately, many people feel embarrassed or turned off by the kind of idealistic big-picture talk that it really does have to start from, like it or not. They decide from the beginning that it won't go anywhere, and so it doesn't. Or they take it into account, sort of, once a year in the voting booth, but leave it up to Whoever the rest of the time because I'm just too busy, or I just don't have the patience for sitting through those hearings, or I'm too poor to support environmentally responsible businesses and still have all the stuff I need/want. The reality is that there are ways around all these kinds of problems, compromise positions that may inconvenience you a little but will also have a genuine impact in the long run. But it does require a willingness to try, and a sense of obligation to something bigger than yourself, something that is good in and of itself but may not bear immediate fruits.

It's the old problem of sustaining an ethic of personal and collective responsibility in the culture of the me-first-quick-fix.

 

[Liesje]

Thank you, yolland, for explaining that much better than I ever could. That's precisely what I'm getting at.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Is there a difference between civic responsibility and just performing an excercise that makes us feel like we are making a difference when we are actually not (for instance recycling materials that are cheaper to landfill and make more of?).

 

[yolland]

IMO that's primarily a rhetorical question, but yes, civic responsibility is readily distinguishable from naive do-goodism (which is actually in some ways another manifestation of the me-first-quick-fix mentality). Naturally, it goes without saying that *some* measures undertaken with the best civic intentions will later turn out to have been ill-advised, or based on flawed analyses, or simply ineffectual, and should thus be dropped. So what? That's par for the course. We're talking about the little steps here, not massive, all-in-one-shot overhauls of entire systems of production.

 

[Jamila]

I take the bus or cycle to work.

But that takes the focus off the fact that with Bush and Cheney in office, steps that could be taken by the federal government to improve oil efficiency (better mileage regulations for private vehicles) and to decrease greenhouse gases are SYSTEMATICALLY UNDERCUT AND NOT TAKEN.

This makes environmental degradation worse and increasingly IRREVERSIBLE!

BTW, I either bus it or cycle it everywhere I go.

 

[Liesje]

I take the bus or cycle to work.

But that takes the focus off the fact that with Bush and Cheney in office, steps that could be taken by the federal government to improve oil efficiency (better mileage regulations for private vehicles) and to decrease greenhouse gases are SYSTEMATICALLY UNDERCUT AND NOT TAKEN.

This makes environmental degradation worse and increasingly IRREVERSIBLE!

BTW, I either bus it or cycle it everywhere I go.

But steps could be taken on ANY issue. Bush and Cheny could raise taxes 300% and give all the proceeds to Africa, or they give money to every poor person in the USA. But they don't, b/c those aren't issues the public has in mind when we go to the polls. I don't care about the science of the matter. Just because there's a science behind it and serious lasting consequences doesn't mean the government is responsible for implementing drastic changes when the majority of citizens simply don't care. "Steps could be taken" in ANY direction regarding ANY pet issue. It has nothing to do with Bush and Cheney and everything to do with what we as Americans use when we elect our politicians. The AIDS/aid issue for Africa is a perfect example. Bush has tried his darndest to get more money in the right places and what it all boils down to is besides the small fraction of people in this country who realize the impact of this issue, there's not enough pressure in the right places to actually make it happen.

 

[nbcrusader]

The science of global warming leave a lot to be desired. The terms "global warming" and "greenhouse gases" are tossed around any time there is a variance in any given weather metric.

Bottom line - the terms are the best advertising environmentalist groups use for fundraising today.

 

[Jamila]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/17/AR2006011700895.html


Is It Warm in Here?
We Could Be Ignoring the Biggest Story in Our History

By David Ignatius

Wednesday, January 18, 2006; Page A17

One of the puzzles if you're in the news business is figuring out what's "news." The fate of your local football team certainly fits the definition. So does a plane crash or a brutal murder. But how about changes in the migratory patterns of butterflies?

Scientists believe that new habitats for butterflies are early effects of global climate change -- but that isn't news, by most people's measure. Neither is declining rainfall in the Amazon, or thinner ice in the Arctic. We can't see these changes in our personal lives, and in that sense, they are abstractions. So they don't grab us the way a plane crash would -- even though they may be harbingers of a catastrophe that could, quite literally, alter the fundamentals of life on the planet. And because they're not "news," the environmental changes don't prompt action, at least not in the United States.


What got me thinking about the recondite life rhythms of the planet, and not the 24-hour news cycle, was a recent conversation with a scientist named Thomas E. Lovejoy, who heads the H. John Heinz III Center for Science, Economics and the Environment. When I first met Lovejoy nearly 20 years ago, he was trying to get journalists like me to pay attention to the changes in the climate and biological diversity of the Amazon. He is still trying, but he's beginning to wonder if it's too late.

Lovejoy fears that changes in the Amazon's ecosystem may be irreversible. Scientists reported last month that there is an Amazonian drought apparently caused by new patterns in Atlantic currents that, in turn, are similar to projected climate change. With less rainfall, the tropical forests are beginning to dry out. They burn more easily, and, in the continuous feedback loops of their ecosystem, these drier forests return less moisture to the atmosphere, which means even less rain. When the forest trees are deprived of rain, their mortality can increase by a factor of six, and similar devastation affects other species, too.

"When do you wreck it as a system?" Lovejoy wonders. "It's like going up to the edge of a cliff, not really knowing where it is. Common sense says you shouldn't discover where the edge is by passing over it, but that's what we're doing with deforestation and climate change."

Lovejoy first went to the Amazon 40 years ago as a young scientist of 23. It was a boundless wilderness, the size of the continental United States, but at that time it had just 2 million people and one main road. He has returned more than a hundred times, assembling over the years a mental time-lapse photograph of how this forest primeval has been affected by man. The population has increased tenfold, and the wilderness is now laced with roads, new settlements and economic progress. The forest itself, impossibly rich and lush when Lovejoy first saw it, is changing.

For Lovejoy, who co-edited a pioneering 1992 book, "Global Warming and Biological Diversity," there is a deep sense of frustration. A crisis he and other scientists first sensed more than two decades ago is drifting toward us in what seems like slow motion, but fast enough that it may be impossible to mitigate the damage.

The best reporting of the non-news of climate change has come from Elizabeth Kolbert in the New Yorker. Her three-part series last spring lucidly explained the harbingers of potential disaster: a shrinking of Arctic sea ice by 250 million acres since 1979; a thawing of the permafrost for what appears to be the first time in 120,000 years; a steady warming of Earth's surface temperature; changes in rainfall patterns that could presage severe droughts of the sort that destroyed ancient civilizations. This month she published a new piece, "Butterfly Lessons," that looked at how these delicate creatures are moving into new habitats as the planet warms. Her real point was that all life, from microorganisms to human beings, will have to adapt, and in ways that could be dangerous and destabilizing.

So many of the things that pass for news don't matter in any ultimate sense. But if people such as Lovejoy and Kolbert are right, we are all but ignoring the biggest story in the history of humankind. Kolbert concluded her series last year with this shattering thought: "It may seem impossible to imagine that a technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing." She's right. The failure of the United States to get serious about climate change is unforgivable, a human folly beyond imagining.

davidignatius@washpost.com

 

[A_Wanderer]

Gaia Angry!

 

[A_Wanderer]

It seems that the planet is always in a state of self-organising criticality, the same feedback loops that we view as "perfect" today did not exist a few thousand years ago. As environments change species do die out, but in their place new species diversify filling specific ecological niches.

Today we are in the grips of a mass extinction, a factor in this is the rise of humanity, but we also have inadvertant side effects, we may be averting global catastrophe by keeping the planet in an inter-glacial state artificially. Our CO2 emissions could be averting massive global cooling. Our aerosols buffer against significant global warming.

 

[financeguy]

No offense to the scientists here but I am completely fed up with hearing conflicting and nigh-on irreconcilable opinions from science on this issue.

It makes it totally impossible for the non-scientist to make any kind of sense of the issue.

The Y2k was quite frankly a fraud perpretated by an element of the IT community on the general public.

Are we being had again - this time by a branch of science?

 

[A_Wanderer]

A better comparison would be "the population bomb", only here you have a collectivist system being established to tax wealthy emitting nations to shift towards poorer ones. Heres just one more piece of the puzzle

Warming ocean currents are bringing sardines back to Monterey Bay after decades of decline.

Some scientists think global warming could be partly responsible for the burgeoning sardine population, although no one can say for sure whether warmer water is part of a natural cycle.

"Global warming may make it so that we always have sardines in California," said oceanographer Jerrold Norton of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

The silvery fish are making a comeback from Mexico to British Columbia.

link

The point of that is that changes in climate around the globe however they may be caused can have effects that are not altogether negative. The effects of climate change are big unknowns, the causes of climate change also has some big unknowns, climate models used 5 years ago have been turned over with new discoveries and new predictions get made.

Do not build expensive policy detrimental to national interests on this stuff. There are some genuine environmental problems out there that warrant more attention but don't get it because "global warming" (which has now been replaced with "climate change" to encompass all extreme weather) takes up the headlines. Groundwater salinity in Australia is more important than a hypothetical 2 degree celsius rise in a century. Overfishing, deforestation etc. are all areas that deserve attention.

 

[Liesje]

A_Wanderer, maybe you can answer b/c you seem to know a great deal about science and I don't....but I remember learning in grade school about how the climate has changed drastically, even without the presence of humans. For example, I swear we learned that where I live (Michigan) was once hot and semi-tropical, like Florida, and again at one time it was frozen and full of snow animals like wolves and mastadons. Of course, in each of these changes, certain species live and certain die and new ones come about.

 

[A_Wanderer]

Yes you are right, the large mammals that you listed existed during the last ice age and would have encompassed that latitude. The way that we uncover paleoclimate can be by signs of ice, such as linear streaks on rocks called glacial striations, also glacial till (the rocks brought down with the glacier and deposited as sediment) is a sign. If we are dealing with a marine environment with icebergs you get dropstones, here rocks that get stuck inside the ice eventually drop out of the iceberg as it melts and fall to the bottom of the sea leaving an impression beneath the underlying sediment. Also fossils of plants and animals around at the time can be indicators of environment (if you find fossilised trees from a temperate zone or a savannah it can be useful in reconstructing what was going on).

The location of continents is crutial when dealing with geological time, they move around, thankfully we have palaeomagnetic data that can aproximate the latitude of continents. This can checked with fossil information.

The snownball earth hypothesis looks back into earths past over 500 million years ago and posits a situation where all the continents shifted to the equator as a single supercontinent. With this configuration (and the system of currents) the polar ice caps were able to grow and keep growing unabated comletly enveloping the earth in ice, covering land and sea, stopping interaction between the atmosphere and rocky earth (lithosphere). The planet would have remained at -40 C, it would place tremendous pressure on life (which at that time was restricted to algae's - it was slimeworld). The mechanism that knocked it out was the greenhouse effect, without having rock-atmosphere interactions the greenhouse gasses released by volcanism were able to build up ultimately allowing enough warming to melt the ice and restore the world to an unfrozen state, with the former life of slimeworld decimated it opened up ecological niches for other life forms including the multicelluar proto-animals and proto-plants.

Over the geological history of the earth there has been at various stages much more carbon dioxide in the earths atmosphere than there is today, much warmer temperatures, series of glacial periods interupted by inter-glacial warm spots (we are in such a spot today). The flora and fauna of the planet is in a constant state of flux, species go extinct all the time naturally (the background extinction rate) at some stages extinction rates peak and we have mass extinctions - we are in a mass extinction today. Things change, they can change on a rapid scale (40M changes in sea level over a few tens of thousands of years recently).

The issue today is that our recorded state of change is greater than anything seen before, we are also seeing a dramatic loss in biodiversity around the globe. There is a margin of unknown in these effects but if we take them as a given we should understand what we can do to adress the situation (climate engineering could be cheaper than curbing emissions) and understand what the effects will really be, for instance 2005 was Australias hottest year on record but it had fewer extreme weather events than usual, right now Russia is in the grips of a severe winter - a model of more greenhouse gas by man = hotter temps all over doesn't account for this. Even the Antarctic peninsula where glaciers are in retreat today is not matched on other bits of the continent where more ice is being layed down. Also bear in mind sea ice is no threat when it melts - ice displaces more water than it is made up of.

Where we fit into all this is still largely unknown and the ammount of potential climate change averted by the Kyoto protocol is but a small fraction of a degree. If we can really initiate change for the worse inadvertantly then we should be able to engineer it deliberately for the better.

 

[Jamila]

For those who are interested, the 17th Global Warming International Conference will be held in Miami from 20-21 April 2006.

Here is the link to their website:

http://www.globalwarming.net/


I hope some people will be motivated to learn more about the hazards of the world's global warming trends and of its VERY REAL potential threats to future survival on our planet.


Listen - everyone has an opinion. We don't always have to agree.

But when SIX former heads of the U.S. government agency charged with protecting the environment speak in a unified voice as described above, COMMON SENSE TELLS YOU SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG with the way that we are treating our environment.

 

[Liesje]

Listen - everyone has an opinion. We don't always have to agree.

But when SIX former heads of the U.S. government agency charged with protecting the environment speak in a unified voice as described above, COMMON SENSE TELLS YOU SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG with the way that we are treating our environment.

I think you're taking my comments too personally. I never said what we're going to the environment is OK. Go back and read what I said for what it is. I thought I made it VERY clear that people are mistreating the environment every day at the most basic levels. My problem is with the way you're trying to assign blame. It makes no sense.

 

[Jamila]

Actually, LivLuv, I wasn't addressing you.

Sorry you misunderstood.

 

[Liesje]

Heh, you outright blame Bush for global warming, and I'm the one with a misunderstanding? Wow......just...wow....

 

[Dreadsox]

Heh, you outright blame Bush for global warming, and I'm the one with a misunderstanding? Wow......just...wow....

Its best not to respond....

Or you will make it worse

You are with us or against us

No room for deviation

That makes us all one

 

[Liesje]

Dread

 

[Jamila]

It is amazing how you can say something nice to someone here and still get flamed.

It's really amusing.

This is my contention in this thread:

"when SIX former heads of the U.S. government agency charged with protecting the environment speak in a unified voice as described above, COMMON SENSE TELLS YOU SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG with the way that we are treating our environment. "


These former heads of the EPA are saying Bush isn't doing enough to help the environment, not me.


I just agreed with them.

Isn't that allowed here in FYM?


Let's keep the discussion steadied on issues in this thread - not personal likes and dislikes.

 

[nbcrusader]

Please quantify what is “doing enough to help the environment”.

The political statement of six individuals does not establish a presumption that SOMETHING IS VERY WRONG with the way that we are treating our environment.

And as for your suggestion that you were “only agreeing with them,” you forget your other comments like:

I hope some people will be motivated to learn more about the hazards of the world's global warming trends and of its VERY REAL potential threats to future survival on our planet.

Wagging you finger is not the same as “only agreeing with them.”