Stop Bush's War Against Nature!

Trampling the laws that protect our environment is easy when big corporations tell you exactly how to do it.

The Bush Administration is helping big corporations to trample our environmental laws so they can put more pollution in our air water, cut down our national forests, damage our public lands, and make taxpayers-rather than polluters-foot the bill for cleaning up toxic waste.

Dirty Air

The Bush Administration is turning corporate memos into policy, allowing laws that protect our air from power plants to be laid to waste.

Toxic Cleanups Delayed

The Bush Administration has dramatically slowed down the cleanup of toxic waste sites and shifted the burden of paying for cleanups from the polluters to taxpayers.

Dangerous Nuclear Waste Decision

Despite campaign promise, highly radioactive waste could soon be shipped through communities in 44 states to a dump that will contaminate ground water.

Assault on Wildlife

Thanks to the Bush Administration the only thing more endangered than some animals are the laws that protect them.

Disappearing National Forests

Americans steadfastly support wild forest protection, yet the Bush Administration is opening these last vestiges of our natural heritage to destructive logging, drilling, and road construction.

Clean Water Threatened

More raw sewage in our rivers, more mining waste in our streams, more destruction of our wetlands- the Bush Administration wants to allow it.

Public Lands Give-away

Mining and drilling on public land is perhaps the biggest giveaway around, while parks and refuges continue to suffer from pollution.

Corporate Energy Policy

The Bush Administration is forging an energy policy that puts corporate interests ahead of national security and our environment.

The above is the tenth in a series of earth day ads highlighting the Bush Administrations role in the environment.

SaveOurEnvironment.Org

Environmentalists Had 48 Hours To Comment to Energy Department

The Times-Picayune By Don Van Natta Jr.

Washington-April 10, 2002

  Energy department officials gave 11 environmental groups just 48 hours to submit their proposals for consideration in Vice President Dick Cheney's national energy report last year according to a batch of documents released by the department today.
  The request for recommendations was made in March of 2001 after Mr. Cheney's national task force had already consulted with dozens of energy executives to help formulate a national energy policy. Leaders of environmental groups have long complained that the White House did not extend to them the same courtesy given to energy corporations that had made large donations to the Republican Party to help elect President Bush and Mr. Cheney in 2000.
  The groups have said that Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham met with 109 representatives of the energy industry and trade associations but no environmental groups from late January to May 17, 2001, when the report was released.
  In a March 21, 2001, e-mail message that appears to substantiate those complaints, a senior department official instructs a colleague to telephone 11 environmental groups to compile "energy policy options they are advocating."
  "Can you review the proposals and recommend some we might like to supports that are consistent with administration energy statements to date?" the official Margot Andersen, wrote to another staff member, Peter Karpoff.
  The email message was sent at 12:49 pm on Wednesday, March 21, 2001. "Need by Friday noon," Ms. Andersen wrote to Mr. Karpoff.
  The 11 groups listed are: the Alliance to Save Energy, Environmental Defense, the Union of Concerned Scientists, the American Council for an Energy Efficient Economy, the Sierra Club, the World Resources Institute, the World Wildlife Fund, Greenpeace, the Wind Energy Association, the Tellus Institute and Resources for the Future.
  Jill Schroeder, an Energy Department spokeswoman, said the environmental groups had other opportunities to submit opinions.
  "We did reach out to environmental groups," Ms. Schroeder said. "We incorporated a lot of their recommendations into the energy policy. To say that this was the only contact with environmentalists is short-sighted."

White House Cuts Science Fellowship

©2002 The New York times

Program provides millions for research

Washington-

The Bush administration is eliminating a respected fellowship program for graduate research in the environmental sciences, administration officials have said.

As part of the Environmental Protection Agency program Science to Achieve Results, the fellowship provides $10 million annually to students pursuing graduate degrees in environmental science, policy and engineering.

Since 1995, STAR has provided money to about 800 students, awarding $60 million for graduate-level environmental research. The program now supports 311 fellows, with each receiving $30,000 to $34,000 for one to three years, said Chris Saint, assistant director at the agency's National Center for Environmental Research, which administers the program.

"This is the only Federal program that is specifically designed to support the top students going into environmental science" and related fields, said David Blockstein, a senior scientists with the National Council for Science and the Environment.

Lost in shuffle

Under President Bush's 2003 budget proposal, most of STAR's $100 million budget would remain intact, but the graduate fellowship would end, apparently falling victim to an effort by the administration to consolidate financing for environmental education under the National Science Foundation.

"There are no specific programs being transferred from the EPA to the NSF," said Bill Noxon, a spokesman for the science agency.

House Committee on Science, which provides congressional oversight for parts of each agency, said the fellowship had been lost in the budget shuffle.

"It doesn't show up in their budget, and know one knows anything about it," the staff member said. "It's not really explicit why this program is being cut."

Plans to end the fellowship were made after more than 1,350 applications had been submitted for the 2003 program, Saint said. In February applicants were notified that the program had been cancelled.

A number of interests groups and lawmakers have called for reinstatement of the fellowship, including the Ecological Society of America and the American Chemical Society, as well as Rep. Lynn Rivers, D-Mich., and Rep. Sherwood Boehlert, R-N.Y., who is chairman of the House Science Committee.

Mixed Messages

Killing the program "would decapitate graduate environmental research by eliminating the best funding source for the best students," Blockstein said.

Supporters of the fellowship say the Bush administration has sent mixed messages.

Last year, Christie Whitman, administrator of the EPA, defended the fellowship in House appropriation hearings, saying it "continues to successfully engage the best environmental scientists and engineers from academia through a variety of competitive, peer-reviewed grants."

President Bush has consistently emphasized the importance of scientific research in environmental decision-making.

Dr. Daniel Rubenstein, chairman of the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton, argued, "If the goal is to formulate policy that is based on science so that it is made effective, then this program is a way to ensure that the next generation of scientists are in the pipeline."