Bush is no moderate on environment

Bush has been at pains to paint himself as a moderate, but the paint's washing off. If this man is a friend of the environment, he is his own worst enemy.

He has made it his first order of business to mount a series of attacks on environmental policies opposed mainly by the corporate interests that were large donors to his campaign.

Bush the uniter has become Bush the divider. He's engaged in a divisive, rapid-fire rollback of protections for drinking water, air and forests as well as for the national monuments and refuges where commercial resource extraction is understood to be off-limits by everyone except, it seems, those who profit from such activity.

There's nothing moderate about insisting on drilling for oil in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or entertaining the possibility of mining in national monuments. There's no moderation in refusing to regulate carbon dioxide, a key ingredient of climate change.

There's no moderation in rolling back standards for arsenic in drinking water, or undoing national forest roadless area protections. There's no moderation in reversing rules that required mining companies to post bonds, equal to the cost of cleanup, to ensure that they will clean up their messes on federal lands.

What's at work here is the time-honored Big Lie tactic: Repeat an absurd assertion often enough and it becomes credible.

In this case, the Big Lie is that the Clinton administration rushed into arbitrary regulatory excesses without adequate scientific consideration and ignored public wishes. It's simply not true.

For example, before enacting the roadless area policy that bars logging in one-third of national forests, the Clinton administration held 600 public hearings and received 1.6 million public comments, by far the most ever received by the government in a regulatory proceeding. And 96 percent of those comments favored the limit on logging. Yet Bush is challenging the ban in court.

Likewise, the Clinton administration's enactment of a more stringent arsenic standard -- which would affect 182 water utilities in Washington and is opposed by the mining and wood products industries and some water purveyors -- was based on a 1999 study by the National Academy of Sciences that showed the standard we've returned to "could easily" result in a 1-in-100 risk of cancer.

The arsenic standard adopted by the Clinton administration may well be expensive but it's hardly arbitrary: it's identical to the one adopted earlier by the World Health Organization and the European Union, and for good and proper reason: it protects the public from cancer.

The Bush administration is seriously out of step with the public on environmental policy. So it falls to Congress to ensure that environmental protections are not weakened.