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Defining the Bush Administration Environmental Record
This afternoon, the Senate Environment and Public Works committee will hold a hearing examining the Bush administration’s environmental record. Our Center for American Progress colleagues took a hard look at the president’s legacy on this issue earlier this year. Their conclusion? “Seven Years of Failure: Bush gets an F for the Earth.” While the interactive timeline they prepared only runs through May 2008, you still get a pretty clear picture:
(Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the timeline to scan backwards in time all the way to the opening days of the Bush administration’s environmental failures in 2001. Click on the photos accompanying the events for more information.)
UPDATE: This seemed apropos:
(From the Cartoonist Group.)
Comments on this article
It can be hard to decide which has been a more important factor behind Bush’s dismal record on the environment – always heeding the corporate lobby position or a fundamental lack of interest in analysis or science or experimentation. But the lack of interest in science – which starts from an unusual lack of curiousity about anything – will probably end up defining Bush more in historical accounts. It is that same lack of intellectual curiousity that characterizes the tactics in Iraq or the approach to solving social problems.
We don’t need a scientist as president. But we need someone who sets the tone throughout the government – here is the clear goal, keep working on it until you get it right. But the Bush Administration has never been willing to give its agencies that measure of intellectual freedom to find solutions. It might too easily shift policy in ways that the right wing ideologues oppose.
If you look at the policy areas where Bush would not get an F – such as support for dealing with AIDS in Africa – whatever credit Bush deserves is never based on innovation or new thinking.
September 25th, 2008 at 9:42 pm