The Orbis

Raising the emission caps on various harmful compounds while failing to cap carbon dioxide emissions, the Clear Skies Initiative will leave the skies dirtier over the next 15 years, failing the health of the U.S. public. Photo courtesy of www.energy.roch [Click to enlarge]

More than two years ago in a speech to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, President Bush first mentioned his new initiative to bring the United States up to date on clean air policy. Dubbed the Clear Skies Initiative, Bush’s plan has drawn severe criticism on numerous fronts, from the Sierra Club to the Union of Concerned Scientists, for its effective weakening of current environmental policy and its devastating effects on the environment.

Indeed, the Clear Skies Initiative — while touting an air pollution reduction of “70 percent, using a proven, market-based approach that will save American consumers millions of dollars,” according to a White House press release — actually raises emissions caps far over current levels allowed under the Clean Air Act. And as the implementation of the Initiative occurs only over a 15-year period, air pollution will get worse, not better.

For instance, the Bush administration raises current caps on the emission of nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur dioxide (SO2) and mercury (Hg), accounting for emissions increases of 68 percent, 125 percent and 420 percent, respectively, over levels allowed under the Clean Air Act. Curiously, the Bush administration neglects capping levels of carbon dioxide emissions, one of the leading suspected causes of global warming (another issue ignored by Bush in his plan) and eliminates updated emissions restrictions on upgraded power plants.

This, perhaps, has been the most persistently voiced criticism of Bush’s plan; while the enforcement of the Clean Air Act — which the Nixon administration ratified in 1970 and which has been amended regularly since (including under the previous Bush administration) to account for new scientific data — would effectively lower air pollution levels, Bush eradicates more than four decades of solid environmental legislature and does so while ignoring blatant health risks to Americans.

Nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide, for example, have been linked to severe respiratory illnesses like lung disease and asthma and are known to contribute to smog and acid rain. Airborne mercury places pregnant mothers in particular danger as inhaled mercury can cause mental retardation in developing fetuses. Yet, despite warnings from the scientific community, Bush persisted with his plan.

In its Feb. 2004 report "Scientific Integrity in Policy-Making," the Union of Concerned Scientists voiced its concern that the Bush administration was not only ignoring the scientific community’s suggestions, but had also suppressed scientific data that would undermine the administration’s policy. A long withheld EPA evaluation, for example, of an alternate plan proposed by Sen. Thomas Carper, D-Del., Sen. Judd Gregg, R-N. Hamp., Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., and Sen. Lincoln Chafee, R-R. I., which would limit CO2 emissions did not emerge until leaked to the Washington Post.

According to the UCS report, “the EPA concluded that the Senate proposal would cut the three pollutants earlier and in larger quantities than the Clear Skies Act, resulting in 17,800 fewer expected deaths by 2020 and reduce carbon dioxide emissions at ‘negligible’ cost to industry.” Despite these telling results, Bush has obstinately continued to favor industry over the health of Americans and the well-being of the environment, catering in his “proven, market-based approach” to the very energy corporations that support him.

Somewhere between the foreign and domestic policy issues explicated in the recent presidential debates, President Bush’s Clear Skies Initiative escaped critical public attention by receding under the dank rock from whence it came. With his characteristically flaccid grip on English rhetoric, Bush attempted to answer an environmental question — the only one in the debate of 8 October — and mentioned his Clear Skies plan only in passing, perhaps hoping no one would take notice of its deficiencies.

Silence and omission were certainly louder than any misused words he could have uttered.

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