In a refrain as predictable as the rising sun, environmental groups and their allies in the Democratic Party say President Bush has amassed the “worst environmental record in history” (worse than, presumably, Hitler and Stalin). No press release or fundraising event is complete without the epithet. The proof of this statement is obvious, they say, because President Bush is “gutting” clean-air protections and “rolling back” clean air laws (one Democratic notable even complained of the President’s refusal to regulate CO2, saying that emissions of the life-sustaining gas are “killing people” and “causing asthma” in children). Things are getting worse for everybody, but most especially for the elderly, children, the poor, the downtrodden…etc. Air pollution, according to their most objective assessments, is spewing out of smokestacks (as one green group put it) at “runaway levels,” all because of President Bush’s policies, including reform of New Source Review.

 

FACT: The fatuousness of these claims is obvious to the sober minded, including award-winning environmental journalist Greg Easterbrook, a senior editor of the New Republic and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution—two institutions, incidentally, quite well-known for their moderate to liberal views on public policy issues. Easterbrook’s comments, from his piece in the September 22 issue of Time, are worth quoting in full: “[N]othing you hear about worsening air quality is true. Air pollution is declining under President Bush, just as it declined under President Clinton…Aggregate emissions, the sum of air pollution categories, have fallen 48 percent since 1970, even though the U.S. population rose 39 percent during that period…In 2001, there were fewer than half as many air-quality warning days across the country as in 1988…And the Midwestern power plant emissions that Northeastern commentators constantly depict as horror? Such emissions are a problem—but a declining problem. Levels of sulfur dioxide from Midwestern power plants have dropped 40 percent in the past two decades, even as electricity production keeps rising.”