BoatBanter.com - Bad day on the Chesapeake Bay!

On 26 May 2005 07:24:45 -0700, wrote:

*JimH* wrote:
wrote in message
oups.com...

*JimH* wrote:

So explain how the Republicans specifically caused the water quality in
the
Bay decline.

Just for you and Fritz, to show how narrow minded you a

By Osha Gray Davidson

September/October 2003 Issue

As The World Burns
A Mother Jones special project on global warming

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IN THE EARLY 1980s you didn't need to be a member of EarthFirst! to
know that Ronald Reagan was bad for the environment. You didn't even
have to be especially politically aware. Here was a man who had, after
all, publicly stated that most air pollution was caused by plants. And
then there was Reagan's secretary of the Interior, James Watt, who saw
no need to protect the environment because Jesus was returning any day,
and who, in a pique of reactionary feng shui, suggested that the
buffalo on Interior's seal be flipped to face right instead of left.

By contrast, while George W. Bush gets low marks on the environment
from a majority of Americans, few fully appreciate the scope and fury
of this administration's anti-environmental agenda. "What they're doing
makes the Reagan administration look innocent," says Buck Parker,
executive director of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental law firm.
The Bush administration has been gutting key sections of the Clean
Water and Clean Air acts, laws that have traditionally had bipartisan
support and have done more to protect the health of Americans than any
other environmental legislation. It has crippled the Superfund program,
which is charged with cleaning up millions of pounds of toxic
industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead, mercury, and vinyl chloride in
more than 1,000 neighborhoods in 48 states. It has sought to cut the
EPA's enforcement division by nearly one-fifth, to its lowest level on
record; fines assessed for environmental violations dropped by nearly
two-thirds in the administration's first two years; and criminal
prosecutions-the government's weapon of last resort against the worst
polluters-are down by nearly one-third

It goes on:
So why aren't more people aware that George W. Bush is compiling what
is arguably the worst environmental record of any president in recent
history? The easy explanations-that environmental issues are complex,
that war and terrorism push most other concerns off the front pages-are
only part of the story. The real reason may be far simpler: Few people
know the magnitude of the administration's attacks on the environment
because the administration has been working very hard to keep it that
way.

And this:
JUST BEFORE SHE STEPPED DOWN last summer, EPA head Whitman issued a
"state of the environment" report that fairly rhapsodized about the
significance of environmental protection: "Pristine waterways [and]
safe drinking waters are treasured resources," one passage declared.
"The nation has made significant progress in protecting these resources
in the last 30 years."

What Whitman did not mention was that the administration has spent two
years attempting to eviscerate the law that brought about most of that
progress-the Clean Water Act of 1972. In January 2003, the
administration proposed new rules for managing the nation's wetlands,
removing 20 percent of the country's remaining swamps, ponds, and
marshes from federal protection. And wetlands are only the beginning: A
close reading of the proposed rules shows that the administration is
attempting to change the definition of "waters of the United States" to
exclude up to 60 percent of the country's rivers, lakes, and streams
from protection, giving industries permission to pollute, alter, fill,
and build on all of these waterways (see "Down Upon the Suwannee"). "No
president since the Clean Water Act was passed has proposed getting rid
of it on the majority of waters of the U.S.," notes Joan Mulhern of
Earthjustice-and Bush might not have tried either, had he been forced
to justify the move in congressional debate rather than burying it in
bureaucratic rule-making.

Get it now, Jim?

No. What does this have to do specifically with the Bay?

Holy ****, Jim!!! READ the last two paragraphs. What does it NOT have
to do with the Ches. Bay?????

Do you really think Republicans always vote against and Democrats always
vote for stronger environmental laws?

Hmm, did I say that Jim? But, alas, I can say ALMOST always.

Prove it.

No problem, here is part of the study:

The non-partisan Environmental Law Institute (ELI) studied all 325
cases brought in district and appellate courts under the nation's
cornerstone National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) from January 21,
2001 through June 30, 2004.

Among the findings:

* Federal district judges appointed by a Democratic President ruled in
favor of environmental protection 60% of the time. Judges appointed by
Republican Presidents ruled in favor of the environment 28% of the
time.

* District judges appointed by President George W. Bush ruled in favor
of environmental plaintiffs only 17% of the time.

* When industry or pro-development interests sue under NEPA, the
results are almost completely reversed. Democratic appointees rule in
favor of such plaintiffs 14% of the time, while Republican appointees
rule in favor almost 60% of the time.

* At the three-judge circuit court level, panels with two or more
judges appointed by a Democrat ruled in favor of environmental
plaintiffs 58% of the time. Panels with a majority of Republican
appointees ruled in favor of environmental plaintiffs in only 10% of
cases.

* When all three judges were Democratic appointees, the panel ruled in
favor of environmental plaintiffs 75% of the time, compared to 11% for
entirely Republican-appointed panels.

ELI is an internationally recognized independent research and education
center.

To read it all, go he
http://www.ems.org/nws/2004/10/08/study_finds_wide

Then, read this:
Weakening The National Environmental Policy Act
How the Bush Administration Uses the
Judicial System to Weaken Environmental Protections
DEFENDERS OF WILDLIFE 2ma03
A Report of the Judicial Accountability Project
By: William Snape III John M. Carter II

Executive Summary

This empirical study details the Bush (II) administration's treatment
of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), one of America's
most important and enduring environmental statutes. In this report, the
Bush administration's perceived hostility toward NEPA is analyzed by
examining arguments the administration has made in federal litigation
where NEPA violations have allegedly caused harm to the environment, by
comparing those administration arguments with well accepted legal
interpretations of those NEPA issues and by assessing the response of
the federal judiciary to the Bush arguments.

During the first two years of the Bush administration, executive branch
agencies have been active in the litigation of at least 172 decided
court cases involving the application of NEPA.[1] In 94 of those
cases, or roughly 54 percent of the time, the Bush administration has
presented NEPA-hostile arguments that attempted to weaken the
application of NEPA. Despite the fact that federal agency arguments
under NEPA are usually given a high degree of deference by federal
courts, the Bush administration has only won 21 of its NEPA-hostile
arguments, which represents a significant 78 percent failure rate. By
contrast, in the Bush administration's 78 NEPA-consistent arguments
that tended to uphold or promote NEPA, the Bush administration has won
75, a 96 percent success rate.[2] These statistics illustrate that
the Bush administration is not only frequently making arguments hostile
to NEPA in federal court, but is also frequently finding these
arguments rejected by the federal judiciary. The data also indicate
that the administration overwhelmingly wins when its arguments are
NEPA-consistent.

In contrast to the first two years of the Bush administration, a
comparatively fewer 105 NEPA cases were decided during the first two
years of the Clinton administration. In these cases the Clinton
administration had an overall win rate of 74 percent of its total NEPA
arguments, as opposed to the 55 percent win rate of Bush administration
overall NEPA arguments.

What makes the Bush administration's NEPA-hostile arguments more
troubling is the increasing necessity of citizen groups to turn to the
federal court system in order to uphold important environmental laws.
Conservationists faced with unresponsive agencies and a hostile
legislative branch are left with little choice but to defend important
environmental protections in court.[3] That NEPA essentially requires
only accurate information and public participation in federal
environmental decision-making merely amplifies the questions that
should be asked of this administration's environmental policy.

This report reveals a disturbing pattern by the Bush administration to
target certain key environmental issues with NEPA-hostile arguments
(e.g., exempting corporate timber interests from national forest
protections, undermining federal road and highway environmental reviews
and encouraging an increase in oil and gas drilling on public lands) in
a determined effort to push environmentally damaging actions under
deceiving slogans such as "the healthy forest initiative,"
"streamlining transportation" or "making America
energy-independent." In reality, both NEPA and the resources the
statute is designed to protect are losing, as Bush corporate supporters
are rewarded by the Bush administration with environmental
roll-backs.[4] Indeed, many of the administrative attempts to weaken
environmental regulations by the Bush administration have mirrored the
failing arguments made by the Bush administration in court.

For example, the Bush administration has used strategies described by
federal judges as "bait and switch tactics" and "mystical legal
prestidigitation," in order to shortcut NEPA as it applies to our
national forests. On the energy front, the Bush administration has made
arguments that an administrative law judge warned would "eviscerate
NEPA as it relates to pre-leasing environmental analysis." In
allowing development to encroach on the habitat of listed endangered
species, the Bush administration has presented NEPA analysis that a
federal court called "so implausible that it could not be ascribed to
a difference in view or the product of agency expertise." In its
refusal to support the Clinton roadless rules, the Department of
Agriculture went so far as to endorse an industry interpretation of
NEPA that a federal court of appeals stated would allow NEPA to be used
to "preclude lawful conservation measures by the Forest Service and
to force federal agencies, in contravention of their own policy
objectives, to develop and degrade scarce environmental resources."
This report confirms that, across the board, the Bush administration is
hard at work attempting to undo decades of environmental protections.

By fleshing these legal stories out and studying their empirical
patterns, this report identifies three general trends regarding the
Bush administration's NEPA arguments before the federal judiciary.
First, the Bush agencies have made many unfounded arguments in order to
avoid NEPA review through a variety of legal mechanisms. These
arguments have mostly failed. Second, Bush agencies have repeatedly
attempted to shortcut the NEPA process at the Environmental Assessment
(EA) phase by making unwarranted "Findings of No Significant
Environmental Impacts" (FONSI) despite facts that indicate either
significant impacts or significant scientific uncertainty, thus
necessitating a full Environmental Impact Statement (EIS). Again, these
arguments have mostly failed. Third, Bush agencies have sought to avoid
meaningful and honest environmental review of federal action, including
outright deception, the use of inaccurate or dated information and
simply ignoring relevant impacts. These arguments by the Bush
administration, too, have been rejected by the courts.

A potentially important side note is that although the overwhelming
majority of the Bush administration's NEPA-hostile arguments have
been rejected by federal judges of all political persuasions, including
Republican-appointed judges, there is some statistical evidence
indicating that Republican-appointed judges have been more likely to
accept NEPA-hostile arguments than Democrat-appointed judges. Given
some of President Bush's recent judicial nominees, many of whom have
anti-environmental records, the composition of the federal courts could
dramatically change in the coming years. In the cases reviewed for this
project, Republican-appointed district court judges were nearly twice
as likely to agree with NEPA-hostile arguments as were
Democrat-appointed judges. At the Court of Appeals level particularly,
the difference was striking. Where the composition of the three judge
federal appellate panel was comprised of a majority of
Republican-appointed judges, the success rate of NEPA-hostile arguments
was 60 percent, as opposed to only 11 percent where Democrat-appointed
judges constituted the majority of the panel.[5] The partisan voting
tendencies documented in this report are consistent with the results of
previous studies.

In sum, the Bush administration appears to be going to great lengths,
including the presentation of arguments in federal court that are
clearly not supported by law, to undercut NEPA and avoid informed
environmental decision-making. This report documents the Bush
administration's undeniable assault on NEPA, a law with no
substantive requirements that is intended only to ensure honest
evaluation of the environmental impacts of federal actions with
meaningful public and expert participation

If you need more information, please let me know!

Who invited you to this thread, Kevin?

--
John H
On the 'PocoLoco' out of Deale, MD

"Divide each difficulty into as many parts as is feasible and necessary to resolve it."
Rene Descartes (A true binary thinker!)