With four days to go until president-elect Barack Obama is inaugurated, history is documenting George Bush’s environmental record at home and abroad.
By Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk 
…"He has undone decades if not a century of progress on the environment," said Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, one of America’s largest environmental groups. "The Bush administration has introduced this pervasive rot into the federal government which has undermined the rule of law, undermined science, undermined basic competence and rendered government agencies unable to do their most basic function even if they wanted to. We’re excited just to push the reset button." … "Certainly the most destructive part of the Bush environmental legacy is not only his failure to act on global climate change, but his administration’s covert attempt to silence the science alerting us to the urgency of the problem," said Jonathan Dorn of the Earth Policy Institute (EPA) in Washington. … "Every effort has been made to weaken existing law and there has been no effort to advance regulatory solutions to the most important issue we face, which is climate change," said Frances Beinecke, president of the National Resources Defence Council. A particular target of the Bush administration’s project of deregulation was the Endangered Species Act. The campaign was driven in part by the administration’s concern that the act – with its protections for polar bears – could be used to force limits on greenhouse gas emissions. … Other controversial actions included:
- Gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts
- Dismantling the protections of the Endangered Species Act
- Opening millions of acres of wilderness to mining, oil and gas drilling, and logging
- Defunding programmes charged with the clean-up of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead and mercury
- Reducing the enforcement effort in the Environmental Protection Agency
- Removing grizzly bears and wolves from the endangered species list
- Endorsing commercial whaling
- Approving mountain-top removal for coal mining
[To these, I would add the systematic attempts to defund NASA’s Earth Sciences programs. –Jim] The worst of times: Bush’s environmental legacy examined
