anniebirdsong
10/12/2004 5:35:00 PM
Below are quotes from a Newsweek Magazine interview]
with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.:
All of our major environmental statutes are being
eviscerated. This is the first administration in history
to not voluntarily list a species under the Endangered
Species Act. The Superfund Program [created to eliminate
health and environmental threats posed by hazardous waste
sites] is now bankrupt because the administration doesn't
want polluters to have to clean up after themselves but
wants the tax payers to pay for it. The Clean Water Act
is being altered so that it will no longer protect most
water in the United States. The fundamental compromise
in the Clean Air Act, which was the requirement that
old sources at some point upgrade to remove pollutants
at the same level as new plants, has now been
compromised.
The energy industry contributed $48 million to the
Republican Party in the 2000 election. Now they're
getting billions of dollars in payback from this
administration. The American people are going to be
paying that campaign debt for generations with bad
air, with lower quality of life. The large corporations,
mainly from the energy industry--but also Big Agriculture,
the big real-estate developers, timber and mining
industries--are rewriting all of our environmental
statutes and cashing in. I have three children with
asthma. One survey recently showed that one out of
every four black children in New York City have asthma.
We don't know why there's an epidemic of asthma, but
we do know that asthma attacks are triggered by
ozone and particulates and the largest source of
those, about 45 percent of those pollutants, are
being emitted by these coal-fired power plants that
were supposed to clean up under the Clean Air Act. I
live in New York state and now most of the fish in New
York state cannot be safely eaten. Every fish in
Connecticut is now unsafe to eat because of mercury
contamination. The largest source of mercury is from
those same power plants. Those plants were supposed
to clean up, but the president has just changed the
law and will allow them to pollute forever. The National
Academy of Sciences says that compromise will result in
30,000 deaths of Americans every year.
But many of these Bush initiatives that have such
beneficent sounding names, like for example Healthy
Forests. Clinton had conducted a timber summit in the
Pacific Northwest because there was a crisis in the
northwest. The old-growth timber had been cut to a point where
species were going extinct. The environmental community
came out with a settlement that everybody agreed on. It
allowed cutting on certain parts of the forest and continued
to protect large enough amounts to sustain some of our
endangered species, like the spotted owl. The Healthy
Forests Initiative throws out that timber settlement and
all of the work that went into reconstructing these
communities out there. It allows the timber industry to
go right back into those forests and cut them down
under the guise of fire protection. Of course, it's
not the old growth that is burning. The stuff that's
burning is the sagebrush in southern California.
If I can corroborate what? This is not a secret.
[Vice President Dick] Cheney's task force, which rewrote
the energy laws in this country, met for 106 days; they
didn't meet with a single environmental group. They had
709 meetings, all of them with industry. And the energy
policy came out of those meetings, behind closed doors,
came from cabinet officials who are all from the energy
industry: [Secretary of Energy] Spencer Abrahams,
[former Treasury secretary] Paul O'Neill, Don Evans,
who is the CEO of an oil company, [Secretary of the
Interior] Gail Norton, who's been a lobbyist for the
energy industry. (He didn't mention Coldoleza Rice, an
executive with Chevron.)
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In an article in the Independent of London, Robert F.
Kennedy Jr. wrote:
George Bush will go down in history as America's worst
environmental president. In a ferocious three-year attack,
the Bush administration has initiated more than 200 major
rollbacks of America's environmental laws, weakening the
protection of our country's air, water, public
lands and wildlife.
Cloaked in meticulously crafted language designed to
deceive the public, the administration
intends to eliminate the nation's most important
environmental laws by the end of the year. Under the
guidance of the Republican pollster Frank Luntz, the Bush
White House has hidden its anti-environmental programme
behind deceptive rhetoric, telegenic spokespeople,
secrecy and the intimidation of scientists and bureaucrats.
"The Bush attack was not entirely unexpected. George Bush
had the grimmest environmental record of any governor during
his tenure in Texas. Texas became No 1 in air and water
pollution and in the release of toxic chemicals. In his
six years in Austin, Bush championed a short-term
pollution-based prosperity, which enriched his political
contributors and corporate cronies by lowering the quality
of life for everyone else. Now President Bush is set to do
the same to America. After three years, his policies are
already bearing fruit."
This was from the article:
"AMERICA'S WAR ON NATURE; FOR DECADES, US CORPORATE
INTERESTS HAVE SYSTEMATICALLY SABOTAGED,"
By Robert F. Kennedy R. in the Independent
(of London) newspaper, December 4, 2003
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