Environmental Botox - Great Piece On Bush's 2004 EPA Greenwashing

[hatrack]

Despite a snowstorm that paralyzed traffic in Washington, D.C., on January 26, Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Mike Leavitt forged ahead with a planned indoor photo-op. Boasting of "collaboration" with assembled oil and automobile company representatives, Leavitt "unveiled" the super-clean Toyota Prius and other "green" vehicles that actually had been in showrooms since last fall. Before the week was out, Leavitt also had churned out press releases touting new funds for cleanup of the Great Lakes, the Chesapeake Bay and for dirty diesel school buses. And, following Leavitt's recommendation, the Justice Department had filed the Bush administration's first clean-air lawsuit against an electric power company.

Has President Bush suddenly become an election-year convert to environmentalism—a development my boss likened to Jeffrey Dahmer's becoming a vegetarian?

Or does it have something to do with the emergence of John Kerry as the Democratic presidential front-runner? Kerry, an environmental champion who's been endorsed by the League of Conservation Voters, cites the Bush anti-environmental record in virtually every speech he makes. A couple of things seem clear. For starters, Leavitt has obviously been brought in to inject the Bush team with some environmental botox - a few cosmetic changes aimed at smoothing out the administration's radically anti-environmental appearance between now and Election Day.

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Similarly, Leavitt has implied that the Bush administration is undertaking a major enforcement crackdown against power companies that violated "new source review" rules-which are designed to prevent older smokestack factories from increasing emissions without modernizing pollution controls. The reality is that the industry-crafted Bush plan, which would let most power companies off the hook, was blocked by a federal appeals court. While urging the courts to reverse ground and let the industry-supported rules to take effect, Leavitt has declared he will enforce the tougher older version of the rules. So far, however, the only Bush lawsuit—against a relatively obscure public power company in Kentucky—involves a case so egregious that it would apparently violate even the weaker, pro-industry rules that have been put on ice."

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http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9896