Bush Policies Will Lead to Rise in Terrorism

Not only does climate change potentially have an adverse impact on the world we inhabit from a health and survival perspective, it also has the potential to decrease our national security. According to NPR on June 25, 2008:

Global climate change is likely to trigger humanitarian disasters and political instability that will have a major impact on U.S. national security, a top intelligence official told Congress on Wednesday.

A new assessment by the National Intelligence Council — with input from all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies — treats climate change as a security threat.

"Logic suggests the conditions exacerbated [by climate change] would increase the pool of potential recruits for terrorism," said Tom Fingar, deputy director of national intelligence for analysis, who testified before a joint House committee hearing Wednesday.

The day after this revelation, the Washington Post reported that White House officials were determined to circumvent a Supreme Court decision that ruled the EPA had violated the Clean Air Act by refusing to take up the issue of regulating automobile emissions that contribute to global warming. The EPA responded to this admonition by submitting new guidelines that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions on the grounds they pose a threat to public welfare. When the White House found that this proposal had been developed, they insisted on withholding the rule change and refuting its claims.

EPA's original December proposal included language saying that climate change poses a threat to public welfare, but the draft that [Agency Administrator Stephen L.] Johnson is preparing to issue will seek comments only on "whether" it poses such a danger, the sources said. It will also be shorter than the original document, which ran about 250 pages and included detailed alternative approaches on how to regulate greenhouse gases from fuels, vehicles and stationary sources such as power plants.

One EPA official said agency staff had encountered fierce opposition from Bush appointees on several of these sections. "They don't even want us to talk about alternatives," the official said, adding that Johnson and his top aides have been in an "intense negotiation" with White House officials on how much to alter the rulemaking, with Johnson working to resist major changes.

"The White House has found EPA's draft finding to be radioactive in three key areas," said S. William Becker, executive director of the National Association of Clean Air Agencies. "It validates the approval of California's waiver to regulate greenhouse gases from motor vehicles. It demonstrates that the Transportation Department's proposed fuel economy standards fall far short of what is technologically feasible and cost-effective. And it makes a strong case supporting how the existing Clean Air Act can be used to regulate greenhouse gases."

Drilling Illusion

An editorial in today's NY Times clearly states why the Bush/McCain prescription of opening off-shore drilling for oil is misguided. It is an all too typical policy aimed at rewarding big business, without saying so by claiming it is the poor gas user who they are concerned about. Opening up drilling would have no impact on gas prices until 2030.

It was almost inevitable that a combination of $4-a-gallon gas, public anxiety and politicians eager to win votes or repair legacies would produce political pandering on an epic scale. So it has, the latest instance being President Bush’s decision to ask Congress to end the federal ban on offshore oil and gas drilling along much of America’s continental shelf.

This is worse than a dumb idea. It is cruelly misleading. It will make only a modest difference, at best, to prices at the pump, and even then the benefits will be years away. It greatly exaggerates America’s leverage over world oil prices. It is based on dubious statistics. It diverts the public from the tough decisions that need to be made about conservation.

There is no doubt that a lot of people have been discomfited and genuinely hurt by $4-a-gallon gas. But their suffering will not be relieved by drilling in restricted areas off the coasts of New Jersey or Virginia or California. The Energy Information Administration says that even if both coasts were opened, prices would not begin to drop until 2030. The only real beneficiaries will be the oil companies that are trying to lock up every last acre of public land before their friends in power — Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney — exit the political stage.

The whole scheme is based on a series of fictions that range from the egregious to the merely annoying. Democratic majority leader, Senator Harry Reid, noted the worst of these on Wednesday: That a country that consumes one-quarter of the world’s oil supply but owns only 3 percent of its reserves can drill its way out of any problem — whether it be high prices at the pump or dependence on oil exported by unstable countries in Persian Gulf. This fiction has been resisted by Barack Obama but foolishly embraced by John McCain, who seemed to be making some sense on energy questions until he jumped aboard the lift-the-ban bandwagon on Tuesday.

A lesser fiction, perpetrated by the oil companies and, to some extent, by misleading government figures, is that huge deposits of oil and gas on federal land have been closed off and industry has had one hand tied behind its back by environmentalists, Democrats and the offshore protections in place for 25 years.

The numbers suggest otherwise. Of the 36 billion barrels of oil believed to lie on federal land, mainly in the Rocky Mountain West and Alaska, almost two-thirds are accessible or will be after various land-use and environmental reviews. And of the 89 billion barrels of recoverable oil believed to lie offshore, the federal Mineral Management Service says fourth-fifths is open to industry, mostly in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaskan waters.

Clearly, the oil companies are not starved for resources. Further, they do not seem to be doing nearly as much as they could with the land to which they’ve already laid claim. Separate studies by the House Committee on Natural Resources and the Wilderness Society, a conservation group, show that roughly three-quarters of the 90 million-plus acres of federal land being leased by the oil companies onshore and off are not being used to produce energy. That is 68 million acres altogether, among them potentially highly productive leases in the Gulf of Mexico and Alaska.

With that in mind, four influential House Democrats — Edward Markey, Nick Rahall, Rahm Emanuel and Maurice Hinchey — have introduced “use it or lose it” bills that would force the companies to begin exploiting the leases they have before getting any more. Companion bills have been introduced in the Senate, where suspicions also run high that industry’s main objective is to stockpile millions of additional acres of public land before the Bush administration leaves town.

This cannot be allowed to happen. The Congressional moratoriums on offshore drilling were put in place in 1981 and reaffirmed by subsequent Congresses to protect coastal economies that depend on clean water and clean coastlines. This was also the essential purpose of supplemental executive orders, the first of which was issued by Mr. Bush’s father in 1990 after the disastrous Exxon Valdez oil spill the year before.

Given the huge resources available to the energy industry, there is no reason to undo these protections now.

The 2008 Campaign

There are two major reasons to vote for Barack Obama in November.

First, the Republicans should be held accountable for the disaster they have created in this country over the past eight years – an unnecessary war that has killed and wounded American soldiers and thousands of more Iraqis, brought thousands of anti-Americans into the Al Qaeda fold, created massive deficits that will have to be paid by our children, ignored the findings of scientists and the perils of climate change, skewed wealth in this country to the benefit of big business and the rich at the expense of middle class and poor citizens, brought corruption and incompetence into the government on an unparalleled scale, and increased the unchecked power of the executive by ignoring and subverting Constitutional safeguards.

If Abe Lincoln was the Republican nominee, he would not deserve to be elected given this record, no matter how opposed he might be to those policies. Sometimes it is hard to see with all the focus on the President, but an administration is made up of thousands of political appointees who do the thinking and carry out the tasks of governance, and a McCain victory would only reward the people who have been in power under Bush’s leadership.

Second, experience in the Presidency is not the salient attribute for success. Presidents don’t micromanage the government. They don’t sit in the oval office and think up bright new ideas to be executed by their staff. What they should do is establish strategic goals and then evaluate the myriad suggestions, ideas, and plans proposed to them for meeting those aims and deciding which ones to pursue and which to ignore.

An analytical intellect, that can see reality clearly, and that is not influenced by a preset agenda is what is needed. Until you have been in the President’s office, you don’t bring significant experience to the job. Being a senator, a community organizer, or a prisoner-of-war doesn’t prepare you to be President. Being smart does. Being an elitist if this means that you are brighter than the average person is a desirable attribute. We’ve just suffered from eight years of an incurious ‘average man’ as President and we don’t want to repeat that experience.

McCain will claim that he has experience that Obama doesn’t. He will criticize Obama for not having visited Iraq as much as he has. The last time McCain went he came back excited and impressed about how peaceful it was walking through an Iraqi market in the middle of Baghdad, without realizing that he was surrounded by one hundred US soldiers, with combat helicopters in the sky, and checkpoints to keep most people away. Because of the position he had staked out in support of the Bush Iraq policy, he saw what he wanted to justify that position, rather than the reality on the ground. That approach to facts, that mode of thinking exactly mirrors what we have gotten from Bush and is the last thing we need as we go forward to rectify the Bush years.