The Bush Approach To Environment, Alternative Energy & Being Control Freaks

White House Interfered In Climate Change Report, Lawmaker Says

Despite the surprisingly green endorsement of alternative fuels and environmental issues, even to the point of finally admitting that global warming is a genuine phenomenon, President Bush and company are still trying to manipulate and control how we handle the crises.

The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee launched into its oversight role Tuesday with a hearing on potential administration interference in communicating the results of federal scientific work.

The hearing - the committee's first in this session of Congress -- focused largely on a bipartisan investigation into allegations that the White House Council on Environmental Quality has suppressed the findings of government climate scientists. Reps. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Tom Davis, R-Va., now the chairman and ranking member respectively, initiated the review during the last Congress.

The investigation focused in part on records surrounding a 2003 Environmental Protection Agency report, and how the draft report was edited by the White House and the Office of Management and Budget. The committee sought those materials in July 2006 under federal sunshine laws, Waxman said. Most records have not been provided to the committee, he said, but staffers were given the chance to view some of the materials without retaining copies.

Waxman reported that according to staffers' notes, the White House made numerous, significant edits to the EPA document. Officials from the president's Office of Science and Technology Policy suggested that a discussion of human health and ecological impacts of climate change be deleted, he said, and OMB officials urged that EPA add "balance" to the climate section, prompting that "global climate change has beneficial effects as well as adverse impacts."

A Faith-Based Fuel Initiative

It appears that all the talk about alternative fuels, energy conservation and addressing global warming is an issue that the Bush administration wants our "faith" and trust so they can manage these issues. But a few congress critters have an idea of putting Bush's words, faith and agenda to the test by speeding up the process a bit.

In 1975, after the oil embargo, Congress approved the most successful energy-saving measure this country has ever seen: the Corporate Average Fuel Economy system, known as CAFE, which set minimum mileage standards for cars. Within 10 years, automobile efficiency had virtually doubled, to 27.5 miles per gallon in 1985 from just over 14 miles per gallon in 1976.

The mileage standards are still 27.5 m.p.g. Except for minor tweaks, Congress has refused to raise fuel efficiency requirements or close a gaping loophole that lets S.U.V.’s and pickups be measured by a more lenient standard.

Americans who heard President Bush’s State of the Union address, including his pledge to reduce America’s gasoline consumption, can be forgiven for thinking he was finally ready to change that. But all Mr. Bush really asked for was the authority to set mileage standards in a different way. Rather than requiring companies to meet an average fuel-efficiency standard, balancing gas savers against gas guzzlers, he would assign targets model by model, based on factors like size and weight.

As for what those new targets might be, Mr. Bush would leave it to his secretary of transportation to decide. And he asked the country to take it on faith that this new measurement system, combined with technological advances, would lead to annual mileage improvements of 4 percent a year.

Our fear is that this program will take far too long to get going, if it gets going at all. Like Congress, the Transportation Department has been notoriously solicitous of the automobile industry.

But there’s a way Congress can get moving. Senator Barack Obama plans to reintroduce a bill that would set a 4 percent annual increase in efficiency as a target, just what Mr. Bush says he wants. The bill would also give both the Transportation Department and the manufacturers considerable flexibility. But the department could not deviate from the target unless it could demonstrate that the costs outweighed the benefits.

Even that is too much wiggle room for lawmakers like Senator Dianne Feinstein and Representative Edward Markey. While allowing for administrative flexibility, they would require a firm fleetwide standard of 35 m.p.g. with no escape hatches. But given the long Congressional stalemate, the Obama bill could be an important first step. It commands some bipartisan support, and unlike Mr. Bush’s approach, it promises real as opposed to hypothetical results.

Bush Directive Increases Sway on Regulation

Of course, in the tradition of grabbing for more power, authority and control--in keeping with the "control freak methodology" that has been the mainstay of the Bush presidency--President Bush has issued orders that give him, and those that pledge allegiance to him rather than our nation and the Constitution, more direct control over how regulatory matters are handled. If he can't win by signing statements, grabs for more executive power than allowed by the Constitution, he will try to win by executive orders. This approach, however, circumvents the input of experts that do not agree with the Bush vision and entrenched views, negates input and feedback from consumers and citizens, and leans toward making things easier for big businesses and those that follow the false GOP claim to "smaller government" and less regulatory mismanagement.

President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.

In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a regulatory policy office run by a political appointee, to supervise the development of rules and documents providing guidance to regulated industries. The White House will thus have a gatekeeper in each agency to analyze the costs and the benefits of new rules and to make sure the agencies carry out the president’s priorities.

This strengthens the hand of the White House in shaping rules that have, in the past, often been generated by civil servants and scientific experts. It suggests that the administration still has ways to exert its power after the takeover of Congress by the Democrats.

The White House said the executive order was not meant to rein in any one agency. But business executives and consumer advocates said the administration was particularly concerned about rules and guidance issued by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

In an interview on Monday, Jeffrey A. Rosen, general counsel at the White House Office of Management and Budget, said, “This is a classic good-government measure that will make federal agencies more open and accountable.”

Business groups welcomed the executive order, saying it had the potential to reduce what they saw as the burden of federal regulations. This burden is of great concern to many groups, including small businesses, that have given strong political and financial backing to Mr. Bush.

Consumer, labor and environmental groups denounced the executive order, saying it gave too much control to the White House and would hinder agencies’ efforts to protect the public.

Typically, agencies issue regulations under authority granted to them in laws enacted by Congress. In many cases, the statute does not say precisely what agencies should do, giving them considerable latitude in interpreting the law and developing regulations.

The directive issued by Mr. Bush says that, in deciding whether to issue regulations, federal agencies must identify “the specific market failure” or problem that justifies government intervention.

RELATED NEWS ON THE ENVIRONMENT

World Scientists Near Consensus on Warming

Scientists from across the world gathered Monday to hammer out the final details of an authoritative report on climate change that is expected to project centuries of rising temperatures and sea levels unless there are curbs in emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

Scientists involved in writing or reviewing the report say it is nearly certain to conclude that there is at least a 90 percent chance that human-caused emissions are the main factor in warming since 1950. The report is the fourth since 1990 from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is overseen by the United Nations.

The report, several of the authors said, will describe a growing body of evidence that warming is likely to cause a profound transformation of the planet.

Three large sections of the report will be forthcoming during the year. The first will be a summary for policy makers and information on basic climate science, which is expected to be issued on Friday.

Among the findings in recent drafts:

* - The Arctic Ocean could largely be devoid of sea ice during summer later in the century.

* - Europe’s Mediterranean shores could become barely habitable in summers, while the Alps could shift from snowy winter destinations to summer havens from the heat.

* - Growing seasons in temperate regions will expand, while droughts are likely to ravage further the semiarid regions of Africa and southern Asia.

In the Rockies, Pines Die and Bears Feel It

Jesse Logan retired in July as head of the beetle research unit for the United States Forest Service at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Utah. He is an authority on the effects of temperature on insect life cycles. That expertise has landed him smack in the middle of a debate over protecting grizzly bears.

You just never know where the study of beetles will take you.

Dr. Logan seems, in fact, to be on a collision course with the federal government, in the debate over whether to lift Endangered Species Act protections from the grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park.

The grizzly population in the greater Yellowstone area is estimated to be at least 600. The population is centered in the park proper, federal scientists say, where it has reached its likely natural maximum and has leveled off. But in adjoining stretches of national forest, the number of grizzlies is continuing to go up by 4 percent to 7 percent a year. Their resurgence in the past 50 years is why the federal government announced in 2005 the start of proceedings to take them off the endangered or threatened species list.

Dr. Logan enters the fray on the question of what grizzly bears eat, how much of it will be available in the future, and where. All that, he says, hinges on the mountain pine beetle and the whitebark pine.

The tree (Pinus albicaulis) has no value as commercial timber. But gnarled and bushy whitebark pines anchor the timberline in much of the West. They hold the soil for other vegetation to get a foothold, and they trap snow, prolonging the spring runoff.

They are slow-growing trees and may not even bear cones until they are a half-century old. In the late 19th century, the naturalist John Muir counted rings in a weatherbeaten example high in California’s Sierra Nevada. Its trunk was just six inches across. To his astonishment it was 426 years old.

The beetle’s usual targets were once midaltitude lodgepole and ponderosa pines. But it has begun extending its range as it adapts to warming temperatures in the Rockies — two degrees since the mid-1970s. As a result, it has been killing whitebark pines at altitudes in the Rockies and the Cascades of Oregon and Washington that would have once been too cold.

Beetle attacks have added to the toll taken by a disease called white pine blister rust. In the northern Rockies, the beetle infests 143,000 acres. Entire forest vistas, like that at Avalanche Ridge near Yellowstone National Park’s east gate, are expanses of dead, gray whitebarks.