Earth Criminal George W. Bush

By James Donahue

April 2005

Of all his misdeeds during his tenure in public office, the one thing future historians will surely brand President George W. Bush for will be his administration’s unwillingness to put a stop to the wholesale industrial rape of the Earth’s delicate ecology.

If we even have a future.

While most other nations of the world are banding together in an almost frantic effort to at least put some brakes on the massive emissions of greenhouse gasses that are now heating the planet at an alarming rate, a presidential spokesman last week said Mr. Bush will not consider even a watered-down effort by the Energy Department to join them.

Citing a study by the Energy Information Administration that determined that mandatory limits on all U.S. emissions of carbon dioxide and other “greenhouse” gases would not significantly affect average economic growth rates, the agency proposed a plan for setting limits on emissions starting in 2010.

Bush, who flatly rejected U.S. participation in the Kyoto international treaty negotiated by the Clinton administration, has made it clear he will give no consideration to the new plan either.

White House spokeswoman Michele St. Martin, representing the Council on Environmental Quality, said last week: “Any reduction in U.S. GDP (Gross Domestic Product) is serious, and would impact not only American business, but American families.”

She said the commission’s new plan would cost about $313 billion in GDP and 101,000 jobs a year by 2050.

 The agency proposed a 36 percent increase in the average fuel economy for cars and light-duty trucks between 2010 and 2015, doubling to $3 billion a year the budget for federal energy research and development, and new tax incentives for gasifying coal and building nuclear plants.

The study showed that the plan would cost every U.S. household $78 a year and only reduce the GDP by one-tenth of one percent by 2050.

Mr. Bush, an obvious puppet to the big business interests that bought his way into the White House in 2000 and again in 2004, is not listening to his best advisors who are still making a last-ditch effort to save what is left of the Earth’s dying ecological system.

It obviously did not faze him that a team of 1,360 experts in 95 nations has just joined together in one voice in a newly released report that warned of a grim future for all life on this planet.

The study said that a rising human population has polluted and overexploited two-thirds of the ecological systems on which life depends, ranging from clean air to fresh water in just the past 50 years.

“Human activity is putting such strain on the natural functions of Earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer taken for granted,” the report by the board of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment stated.

Ten to 30 percent of mammal, bird and amphibian species are already threatened with extinction and this list grows expedientially with each passing day.

“Over the past 50 years, humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel,” the report said.

“This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.”

If Mr. Bush was a real leader, he would listen to this report, bite the bullet, and take immediate action to not only accept this new plan for controlling greenhouse gas emissions, but do all in his power to join the rest of the world in a movement to get this problem resolved.

Failure to act now threatens all life on this planet. And the end may come sooner than most people think.