Bush Response To Environmental Critics - A New PR Offensive!!

[hatrack]

"The Bush administration is moving to defuse some of the severest criticisms of its environmental policies, just as several Democratic presidential candidates are taking aim at its record.

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Last month, the president abandoned efforts to use a Supreme Court ruling as justification for rewriting clean water rules to reduce by nearly a third the number of streams and wetlands protected from commercial and residential development. The Sierra Club and other critics cited it as an example of what they consider Bush's bias in favor of industry and disregard for the environment.

Bush halted the rulemaking several days after meeting with officials of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership and other groups representing nearly 40 million hunters, fishermen and conservationists. The groups said the proposed policy would destroy valuable fishing and hunting habitats. Bush, a hunter, was impressed by the argument and affirmed his commitment to allowing no net loss in the nation's wetlands, according to conservationists familiar with the meeting.

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Administration and Bush campaign officials play down any suggestion of a coordinated effort to burnish the president's environmental record. But some activists say the recent spate of environmentally friendly initiatives contrasts with the first year of Bush's presidency, when officials challenged dozens of Clinton administration environmental regulations and policies -- including one to toughen the standards for arsenic in drinking water -- and the United States withdrew from an international global warming treaty."

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3982-2004Feb1.html