Ellington

President Bush may have stammered the most during the second debate when he was asked to defend his environmental record. Indeed, when I put the words "Bush, bad and environment," into my Internet search engine, a bloody 404,000 hits popped up, the first 50 of which spoke almost exclusively on how Bush has seemingly waged war on the planet, according to some very outraged environmentalist groups.

You don't even need the "bad"; just use the words "Bush" and "environment." You may be surprised by the amount of venom that comes up. I, personally, managed to count up to 274 environmental infringements before I cut the computer off and walked away to protectively cuddle my 9-year-old son—who will apparently die of arsenic or mercury poison before age 30.

Bush's War on Nature kicked off early in his presidential career. On Jan. 20, during his very first month, Bush froze all conservation rules set at the end of the Clinton term—including tougher rules for raw sewage release into rivers and tributaries, and he proposed opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Then in March he appointed an oil and mining lobbyist, J. Steven Griles, as deputy secretary of interior, as well as installing other lobbyists for the logging and oil industries, like Mark Rey and Allen "there'd-be-no-crisis-if-all-endangered-and threatened-species-became-extinct" Fitzsimmons. (That's his own quote.)

In the same month, Bush did a flip-flop and reneged on his campaign promise to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, and then refused to defend a court order protecting 58 million acres of wild forest. Also in March, he withdrew proposed stricter limits on arsenic in drinking water and rejected the Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change, as was alluded to in last Friday's debate. He didn't try to re-negotiate it; he just rejected it. Bush still denies the very existence of global warming, despite the sworn oath from grandparents the world over that mountain icecaps used to come down a whole lot lower. He has even pointedly silenced members of his own science team who've disagreed with him on the scientific fact of global warming. Federal EPA officers have resigned in disgust.

All this happened within his first three months. By his fourth month, I was convinced that Bush was a Voltavarian mega-zord disguised as a benign big-eared monkey so he can quietly kill us all with pollution and pave the way for an effortless Voltavarian takeover of Earth.

Bush made no mention of global warming at the recent RNC convention because it went against the interest of his supporters in the oil and gas industry. Bush, a former oilman himself with at least one failed oil business under his belt, received more than $2 million oil industry smackers for his reelection campaign, making him the largest recipient of that industry's campaign dollars. Ever.

Also, the Center for Responsive Politics (opensecrets.org) says the coal industry has given more than $200,000 to Bush, making him the biggest cash gob for that industry as well. Payback from the White House came in the form of numerous attempts to lower EPA standards on gasoline, relax gas per-mile standards on vehicles, the right to drill in national parks and a move to relax mercury emissions for coal burning plants. (To see how retarded mercury supposedly can make your kids, plug in the words "mercury" and "autism" and brace yourself for the string of hits.)

Bush is also a big beneficiary of the nuclear industry—the same one that produces waste that will be burning the skin off people thousands of years from now. It's the same industry that's so mind-numbingly dangerous that the federal government is the only entity barmy enough to insure it.

On the other hand, Kerry, for all his lack of charisma, is the polar opposite. Though Republicans routinely label Kerry as the ultimate flip-flopper, Kerry took no double stances when it came to tree-hugging. Plug in the words "Kerry" and "environment" and you may get 676,000 hits, mostly praising Kerry as some kind of uber-environmentalist, intermingled with the occasional anti-Kerry rant from blubbery noisemakers like Rush Limbaugh, who seem just fine with a poisoned world without national forests.

Kerry has a 96-percent lifetime voting record on the environment with the League of Conservation Voters. The same association awarded Bush the first ever "F" rating for an American president.

Kerry introduced the Acid Rain Reduction Act in his first year in the Senate, supported increased funding to research alternative-fuel vehicles, co-sponsored an amendment proposing increased fuel efficiency standards to the 2002 energy bill, later opposed Bush's efforts to weaken drinking water standards for arsenic, and successfully attached an amendment to the 2001 Bush budget package to "reduce greenhouse gas emissions." Kerry has also sought the pulling of federal subsidy money from the nuclear industry, which might come as no small surprise. Public Citizen's report, "Hot Waste, Cold Cash," available as a PDF at publiccitizen.org offers a round-up of how much money Kerry has received from nuclear PACs. (Kerry only received $500 from a nuclear PAC back in the 1997-98 election cycle. V.P running mate John Edwards, according to the same source, has accepted $0.)

Adam Lynch is a free-lance reporter in Jackson.