Never has the saying, “what a long strange trip it’s been,” sounded so right. The last eight years have been disturbing, they have been exceedingly frustrating and they have put our country and our world miles back from where we presumably all thought we'd be. Lucky for us, the nightmare is almost over. According to our Backwards Bush clock the President Bush debacle is less than 50 days from being no more. And it couldn’t come a moment sooner.
As the clock ticks down and 44 gets set to take office – the lame duck in charge is busy cranking out pardons, pushing through bogus legislation and trying to convince the world that he’s still the likable loser (loser maybe, likable no).
Weeks ago, as part of a lame duck president ritual, President Bush pardoned a Missouri man who in 1995 set out pesticide-laced hamburger meet that resulted in the death of 3 bald eagles – a federal offense and a downright despicable crime. To Leslie Owen Collier’s defense, he had placed the meat outside of his home to kill coyotes that were disrupting area turkeys. The three bald eagles, as well as a red-tailed hawk and a great horned owl died when they fed off the carcasses of the dead coyotes.
The real reckless danger is occurring as President Bush carelessly enacts legislation and regulations that are harming the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and others. According to he Scientific American in recent weeks, the Bush team has “tried to remove gray wolves from the list of endangered species, and proposed loosening controls on factory farm waste and letting power plants operate near national parks as well as let mining companies remove mountaintops to get at coal underneath.” And as reported by The Washington Post, “The Bush administration is "close" to finalizing a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be harmed by agency projects, according to the Interior Department.” This of course would take away the decision making from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as the experts, who have reviewed potentially protected animal or plant cases for more than 30 years.
And if that wasn’t enough The Salt Lake Tribune recently listed a laundry list of midnight hour blitzes by the Bush Administration:
--Opened up 2 million acres of Western land to the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. Another 360,000 acres -- including large swaths of public land near Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Dinosaur National Monument on the border of Utah and Colorado -- were opened to oil drilling.
--Exempted large factory farms and mountaintop mining operations from parts of the Clean Water Act. The prohibition against dumping mining waste into rivers and streams dates back to the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who was not exactly an environmental radical.
--Loosened clean-air rules to make it easier to build power plants, refineries and chemical plants near national parks. It also changed rules to make it easier for coal-fired power plants to avoid installing pollution controls or clean up soot and smog emissions.
--Changed rules to prevent Congress from blocking uranium mining on claims filed near the Grand Canyon. Higher prices for uranium have prompted hundreds of new mining claims on federal land. In June, a House committee ordered that about 1 million acres of land near the Grand Canyon be exempt from mining. The rule change would block that.
The DTE blog is committed to reporting and sharing environmental news and sustainability information from across the Inland Northwest.
Never has the saying, “what a long strange trip it’s been,” sounded so right. The last eight years have been disturbing, they have been exceedingly frustrating and they have put our country and our world miles back from where we presumably all thought we'd be. Lucky for us, the nightmare is almost over. According to our Backwards Bush clock the President Bush debacle is less than 50 days from being no more. And it couldn’t come a moment sooner.
As the clock ticks down and 44 gets set to take office – the lame duck in charge is busy cranking out pardons, pushing through bogus legislation and trying to convince the world that he’s still the likable loser (loser maybe, likable no).
Weeks ago, as part of a lame duck president ritual, President Bush pardoned a Missouri man who in 1995 set out pesticide-laced hamburger meet that resulted in the death of 3 bald eagles – a federal offense and a downright despicable crime. To Leslie Owen Collier’s defense, he had placed the meat outside of his home to kill coyotes that were disrupting area turkeys. The three bald eagles, as well as a red-tailed hawk and a great horned owl died when they fed off the carcasses of the dead coyotes.
The real reckless danger is occurring as President Bush carelessly enacts legislation and regulations that are harming the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Air Act and others. According to he Scientific American in recent weeks, the Bush team has “tried to remove gray wolves from the list of endangered species, and proposed loosening controls on factory farm waste and letting power plants operate near national parks as well as let mining companies remove mountaintops to get at coal underneath.” And as reported by The Washington Post, “The Bush administration is "close" to finalizing a regulatory overhaul of the Endangered Species Act to allow federal agencies to decide whether protected species would be harmed by agency projects, according to the Interior Department.” This of course would take away the decision making from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service, also known as the experts, who have reviewed potentially protected animal or plant cases for more than 30 years.
And if that wasn’t enough The Salt Lake Tribune recently listed a laundry list of midnight hour blitzes by the Bush Administration:
--Opened up 2 million acres of Western land to the development of oil shale, one of the dirtiest fuels on the planet. Another 360,000 acres -- including large swaths of public land near Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park in Utah and Dinosaur National Monument on the border of Utah and Colorado -- were opened to oil drilling.
--Exempted large factory farms and mountaintop mining operations from parts of the Clean Water Act. The prohibition against dumping mining waste into rivers and streams dates back to the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who was not exactly an environmental radical.
--Loosened clean-air rules to make it easier to build power plants, refineries and chemical plants near national parks. It also changed rules to make it easier for coal-fired power plants to avoid installing pollution controls or clean up soot and smog emissions.
--Changed rules to prevent Congress from blocking uranium mining on claims filed near the Grand Canyon. Higher prices for uranium have prompted hundreds of new mining claims on federal land. In June, a House committee ordered that about 1 million acres of land near the Grand Canyon be exempt from mining. The rule change would block that.
