Environment
BUSH: The president has reversed many environmental policies established by the Clinton administration. Upon taking office, Bush set off a political storm by rejecting Clinton’s plans to reduce the levels of arsenic in drinking water. An eruption of indignation inspired a retreat. The matter was bucked back for further study to the National Academy of Sciences, which had recommended the reductions. Then a raucous row arose over releasing the names of participants in a task force convened by Vice President Dick Cheney to develop a national energy policy. Environmental organizations contend the task force was a cozy cabal of energy-industry representatives meeting in violation of federal sunshine laws. Cheney countered that private meetings were necessary, and permissible, to assure candor. A federal district court initially ruled against Cheney’s position but was ordered in June by the Supreme Court to reconsider. In May 2001, based on that task force’s work, the administration issued a national energy policy containing 105 recommendations. Few have been implemented. When the Environmental Protection Agency sought to relax standards on industrial smokestack emissions, environmentalists erupted again, and the administration ordered a retreat. In July Bush reversed Clinton’s ban on road building in nearly 60 million acres of national forest. In most cases the administration insists on cost-benefit analyses.
BUT: Worship of cost-benefit analysis leaves unanswered whose costs and whose benefits. While expenditures for an environmental program can be precisely stated, potential benefits often stretch far into the future. The long-term downside of delays in protecting the environment are often unclear until the costs for cleanup become overwhelming.
KERRY: The League of Conservation Voters says Kerry supported 96 percent of environmental legislation since he entered the Senate in 1985 and rates him “the strongest environmentalist in the field.” In his presidential campaign, Kerry issued a “Conservation Covenant,” in which he pledges to create “cleaner and greener communities.” He says he will establish an EPA task force to identify toxic dangers and that he will pep up the lagging Superfund cleanup program. He is committed “to improving our parks and taking on traffic congestion” as well as reversing what he calls Bush “rollbacks” of environmental regulations. In accord with the Clean Water Act, the senator promises to make America’s waters “drinkable, swimmable, and fishable.” He assigns a high priority to “environmental justice,” citing studies that show poor people and minorities bear a disproportionate share of the nation’s pollution costs.
BUT: While Kerry’s voting record on environmental causes is solid, he never won approval of a major environmental law during his nearly two decades in the Senate. That is not for lack of trying. Over the past 15 years, he has introduced or cosponsored some 40 environmental bills and amendments. In his early years in the Senate, he lacked the seniority that brings legislative influence. And for more than half his congressional career, the Senate has been under Republican control. If elected he could very well run into similar political obstacles, especially if the Senate and the House are controlled by Republicans.
CLIMATE CHANGE
BUSH: Shortly after taking office, the administration shocked the environmental movement by renouncing the Kyoto Protocol, the 1997 international agreement that established long-term limits on greenhouse gas emissions. The administration argued that the protocol would impair American economic growth while exempting China, India, and other developing nations from emission reductions as they sought to catch up. The White House also discounted warnings of global climate change induced by greenhouse gases, contending—contrary to near-unanimous findings by U.S. research agencies and international scientific bodies—that climate change was an unproven hypothesis. The administration called for more research and created the Climate Change Research Initiative to concentrate on areas of uncertainty about the scope, pace, and effects of climate change. The initiative, parceled out to the Department of Energy, NASA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and five other federal agencies, has experienced rapid budget growth, from $41 million in fiscal 2003 to a presidential request for $238 million in 2005. To guide the efforts, Bush created a cabinet-level global change committee headed by the secretaries of energy and commerce in collaboration with the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And the administration’s plans for expanding research on global climate change have passed muster by a review committee convened by the National Academy of Sciences.
BUT: Increased research is widely regarded in the scientific community as a diversion from the serious steps needed to reduce CO2. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, “the Bush administration has done absolutely no analysis to substantiate its claim that the Kyoto Protocol or domestic policies to reduce carbon dioxide pollution from power plants would seriously harm the U.S. economy.”
KERRY: Kerry participated in the 1997 Kyoto conference. In 2001, when Bush repudiated the Kyoto Protocol, Kerry took to the Senate floor and attacked the move. In his speech, Kerry noted that the president “has repeatedly questioned the underlying science of climate change and attempted to reignite the debate over whether the threat is real.” Kerry pointed out that Bush’s position conflicted with the findings of distinguished scientific bodies, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, “a scientific panel founded at the behest of his own father.” Kerry introduced the Global Climate Change Act in 2001 to restrain and reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. With the Republicans in command of Congress and the White House, the legislation was stillborn.
BUT: In 1997 Kerry joined 94 other senators in support of a nonbinding resolution that undercut the Kyoto Protocol by insisting that developing nations agree to emissions reductions in the same time frame as the United States. The resolution also specified that the agreement not cause serious harm to the U.S. economy. Although merely advisory, the resolution created the impression that the treaty might be rejected by the Senate. Apparently embarrassed by his vote, Kerry later explained that “the prospect of human-induced global warming as an accepted thesis with adverse consequences for all is here, and it is real.” He conceded that he would have “worded some things differently” in the resolution but said,“I have come to the conclusion that these words are not a treaty killer.”
