Articles by Lisa Hymas

Is “Clear Skies” really so ghastly?

David Whitman, in a compelling article in the Washington Monthly, argues that Bush's Clear Skies initiative is getting a bum rap from enviros. (He also argues that the much-vilified Jeff Holmstead, the Bush appointee who heads the EPA's Office for Air and Radiation, doesn't wholly deserve his anti-green rep.) Whitman asserts that the bill would do some real good, and debunks the widely repeated claim that the proposal would permit more pollution than the Clean Air Act. (Turns out there was more than met the eye to that bit about a secret EPA PowerPoint slide asserting that Clear Skies would make compliance cheaper and easier for utilities.)  

In case you weren’t convinced about the horrors of dioxin …

just look at the face of Ukranian presidential candidate Victor Yushchenko (before and after photos here).  Yikes. The bizarre case of his poisoning has brought renewed attention to this frightening substance, a byproduct of herbicide manufacturing, paper milling, waste incineration, and other nasty industrial processes.  

As BushGreenwatch points out, the Bushies are dragging their feet on curbing dioxin pollution, both domestically and internationally. "They've done nothing in regulations, and I don't see anything on dioxin moving on the federal level in the next four years," said Lois Gibbs, executive director of the Center for Health, Environment and Justice and an activist who made a name for herself by fighting for justice at Love Canal.

One might think this ghastly, high-profile assassination attempt -- complete with very public, physical evidence of the horrific damage dioxin can do -- could provide a needed kick in the pants. But don't hold your breath.  

Bushies gut national forest rules

Three days before Christmas, the Bush administration announced that it's making the biggest overhaul to forest-management rules in some three decades. The news made the front page of today's New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, etc. -- but ya gotta know it'll slip by unnoticed by a great many folks stuck in whited-out airports in the Midwest and teeming malls everywhere else.  

It's been a while since the Bushies pulled one of these announce-an-environmental-abomination-when-no-one's-looking stunts, but they returned to the tactic with a real doozy this time.  

"A key wildlife protection that has governed federal forest management for more than two decades will be dropped under new regulations announced Wednesday by the Bush administration, and requirements for public involvement in planning for the country's 192 million acres of national forest will be dramatically altered," write Bettina Boxall and Lisa Getter in the L.A. Times.  

A clear eye from Britain

Leave it to the British Independent to cut to the chase and succinctly summarize the environment-ravaging agenda of a second Bush administration and its cronies in Congress. Even the title of its article succinctly summarizes it: "Bush sets out plan to dismantle 30 years of environmental laws."

Reporter Geoffrey Lean notes that three laws in particular are in the admin's sights:

1. the Clean Air Act,
   
2. the Endangered Species Act (as Amanda Griscom Little has reported), and
   
3. the National Environmental Policy Act.