A RATIONAL observer might conclude that President George Bush will not be best remembered for his efforts to protect the environment. Rather, it will be as the man who favoured drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, as a leader who refused to support the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and as a former oil baron who saw no need to raise the minimum gas mileage for automobiles in the US. It would take a major about-face for President Bush to get off the 鈥淢ost Wanted鈥� list of many environmental organisations.
But rationality can be a rare commodity, and gullibility is rampant, so it鈥檚 hardly surprising that the Environmental Protection Agency stoked up its public relations machinery in May to let everyone within earshot know that the Bush administration is in favour of using landfill gas (LFG) as an energy source. To prove this, the EPA points to a new project that will take this gas from a landfill just outside Washington DC in Prince George鈥檚 county, and use it to power two boilers at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. According to the EPA, 鈥淏y utilising LFG in place of fossil fuels, NASA will save taxpayers approximately $3.5 million over the next 10 years and reduce greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to removing 350,000 cars from the road.鈥�
I don鈥檛 want to seem grumpy, but there are three additional boilers at the Goddard facility that clearly will not be using the LFG, and Goddard is only one of hundreds 鈥� probably thousands 鈥� of federally owned facilities that are still relying on those nasty fossil fuels for their operations. The EPA has not announced any plans to refit those facilities.
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In short, this is probably not the about-face that environmentalists have been waiting for.
WHILE we鈥檙e talking about the environment, let鈥檚 take a look at what Bush has in mind for Iraq. The war that the president waged to oust Saddam Hussein created a mess. The tonnage of equipment that rolled north across the Iraqi desert on tracked vehicles seriously damaged the top layers of sand and soil. As tough as this ecosystem may look, it鈥檚 actually quite delicate. Ruts and track marks can cause long-term problems. So far, though, there is no word to suggest that anyone has the time or inclination to restore damaged tracts of the desert. However, the US army has shown some interest in the vast wetlands of south-east Iraq.
The Marsh Arabs, or Ma鈥檇an people, have lived there for centuries. But Hussein dammed up the source of water for the marshes in the 1980s because the Ma鈥檇an are Shiites and he suspected them of disloyalty. Now scientists say that about 5 per cent of this ancient wetland, which is also home to numerous rare creatures and is a stop-off on an important route for migratory birds, is dried up. Several people in the US and Britain are trying to get Bush and others to restore the wetlands (see, for example, 快猫短视频, 26 April, p 14).
As the money spigot into Iraq opens up, the project might catch some loose funds, but nothing compared with, say, what is likely to be spent on the oilfields. But perhaps there will be a few million here and there. That would create the interesting contrast of American money funding a major wetland restoration in Iraq at a time when wetlands in the US continue to disappear during Bush鈥檚 watch.
