Orwell lives: Environmental doublespeak

TOM MAERTENS

Anyone familiar with George Orwell's doublespeak will recognize it in the Bush administration's environmental program:

• Bush's "Clear Skies Initiative" would actually weaken current environmental law, allowing two-thirds more nitrogen oxide, twice the sulfur dioxide and five times more mercury pollution than the existing Clean Air Act;
• Bush's "Healthy Forest Initiative" allows more logging in protected wilderness areas and national parks;
• Bush's "Clean Water" proposal would remove existing Clean Water Act protections from almost 60 percent of America's streams and wetlands.
• Since withdrawing from the Kyoto treaty the Bush administration has quietly issued 400 rule changes as part of a stealth campaign to gut environmental laws. Their allies, Senator James Inhofe, Chairman of the Senate Environmental Committee, and Tom DeLay are leading the attack on the enforcement agency, the EPA, which they call The Gestapo.

Both share the anti-science views of the Bush administration. Inhofe has termed global warming "the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people," and DeLay claims, "It's presumptuous to think that anything man can do will affect God's creation." DeLay apparently thinks the that the 45 percent of U.S. waters now deemed unsafe for drinking, swimming or fishing were polluted by God.

Their campaign on behalf of big polluters like the oil and coal industries is supported by Congressman Gil Gutknecht, who votes with DeLay 94 percent of the time. Gutknecht parrots the fossil fuel industry's claim that "the jury is still out" on global warming, a phrase the cigarette industry used for 40 years to deceive the public about smoking dangers.

It's easy to understand: Bush, DeLay and their cronies get campaign contributions; we get Orwellian lies and pollution.

(Reprinted from Mankato Free Press, June 18, 2005.)