Here are two sentences that capture so much about the Bush administration, including the way it thinks, governs, treats unwelcome news, considers the public’s safety, and respects science, to name a few.
The Environmental Protection Agency ignored scientific evidence and agency protocols in order to set limits on mercury pollution that would line up with the Bush administration’s free-market approaches to power plant pollution, according to a report released yesterday by the agency’s inspector general.
Staff at the EPA were instructed by administrators to set modest limits on mercury pollution, and then had to work backward from the predetermined goal to justify the proposal, according to a report by Inspector General Nikki Tinsley.
How perfect is that? A toxic metal, known to pose a serious risk to children and expecting mothers, threatens an untold number of Americans, and Bush’s EPA, charged with the responsibility of protecting us and enforcing environmental regulations, does everything backwards.
This comes a few months after we learned that the Bush gang took coal industry language — word for word — and used it for new EPA regulations on mercury emissions not once, not twice, but three times.
How could all of this happen? Paul Krugman helped explain about a year ago.
The answer is that the foxes have been put in charge of the henhouse. The head of the E.P.A.’s Office of Air and Radiation, like most key environmental appointees in the Bush administration, previously made his living representing polluting industries (which, in case you haven’t guessed, are huge Republican donors). On mercury, the administration didn’t just take industry views into account, it literally let the polluters write the regulations: much of the language of the administration’s proposal came directly from lobbyists’ memos.
E.P.A. experts normally study regulations before they are issued, but they were bypassed. According to The Los Angeles Times: “E.P.A. staffers say they were told not to undertake the normal scientific and economic studies called for under a standing executive order…. E.P.A. veterans say they cannot recall another instance where the agency’s technical experts were cut out of developing a major regulatory proposal.”
And get this: 48% of respondents in a recent Post/ABC poll said they approve of Bush’s handling of the environment. Either the poll sample included a lot of coal industry lobbyists and executives or there are a tragically high number of people out there who have no idea what Bush is doing to the environment.