Nader fans: the environment's safe with Dubya!

Great Debates
1

Hey there, third-party environmentalists! I just thought you’d like to see who your new Secretary of Interior is going to be:

Gale Norton!

Gale first cut her teeth working for Mountain States Legal Foundation, where she litigated against the EPA. Then, she followed her boss, James Watt, to Interior, where she became an associate solicitor. You remember James Watt, don’t you? I know, my memory is a little foggy, too. There was something about his being named “Public Enemy No. 1” by a coalition of environmental groups way back in the eighties, but I think that was all smoothed over when Watt called Indian tribes great examples of failed socialism. Anyway, Norton is being called a “protegee” of Watt, so you know that must mean something good for the environment!

Then she went on to become Attorney General of Colorado. While there, she helped found The Coalition of Republican Environmental Advocates, an environmental group! It had lots of great members, like Rep. Richard Pombo, who is just great on environmental issues–except for opposing the Endangered Species Act; and Rep. Helen Chenoweth–you know, the one who joked that she didn’t worry about salmon because she could always pick up a can of it at the supermarket? Funny! Trent Lott, a staunch environmental advocate, was part of CREA, too.

Some people called CREA a “greenscam,” a group masquerading as an environmental group whose mission was actually the relaxation of environmental laws and regulations, but what do they know?

Today, Ms. Norton mentioned that it was her intention to open up federal land in Alaska for oil exploration, which should make oil executives lots and lots of money which will eventually trickle back down to environmental protection efforts. And Norton is a big, big fan of “property rights,” so we can expect all the federal buffer-land around our national parks to go back to being hunting grounds and cow pastures. Cow poop is great for growing things, you know.

Anyway, I just wanted all you folks out there who supported Nader in the past election to know that your vote wasn’t wasted. Under the Shrub Administration, America will stay green, if they have to spray-paint it to keep it that way!

2

Oh good lord! I want my mommy!

3

Well, we knew from the beginning that dubya was going to look out for the oil companies (while somehow avoiding the special-interest groups–it’s magic!). At least he didn’t let us down.

How much do you want to bet that he’ll pin a medal on Capt. Hazelwood for his “laudable efforts to f*** up the ecosystem?”

4

I saw an SUV with a Nader 2000 sticker a few weeks ago. It made me laugh a whole bunch.

Marc

5

So how many years has Clinton had to protect the Arctic Refuge from drilling? And what has he done besides nothing?

We’ve had compromising and lost ground on environmental protection for the past 8 years. No meaningful pushes for alternative energy sources. No attention to population control.

More of the same to come.

6

Uh, isn’t that the point? For eight years, there has been “nothing” going on in ANWR. Now there will be “something,” as promised by the candidate hisself.

Y’all correct me if I’m wrong, but I seem to recall that drilling in ANWR would require a bill getting through both houses of Congress. If that’s true, I suspect that Dubya will drop ANWR as a token for the environmentalists who just like pretty landscapes, then go back to work on enlarging that ozone thingie.

7

Clinton could have taken pre-emptive action to protect the Refuge, as he did for at least one large tract of western land. I guess there’s no low-sulfur coal in the Arctic, so he couldn’t get any campaign $$$ from his Asian business buddies in return for blocking energy projects there.

OK, fellow environmentally concerned folk, let’s all hold our breath waiting for our allies in the Democratic party to announce their filibuster to block the Interior Secretary nomination.

(turning blue)

God, I love the two-party system.

8

Boy, I guess it’s a good thing we got all those third party environmentalists to block Norton’s nomination in the Senate, huh? This three-party system is working even better than expected!

9

I’m not kidding, some really evil shit is going to go down in this administration. Interior is already in violation of so many laws and regulations that the new people who come in are going to want to roll over and die at first.

Then they’re going to realize that nobody’s going to do anything about it. That’s when all hell is gonna break loose.

10

(shrug) So? W picked somebody who wants to butcher the environment to be Sec. of Interior. That should not be much of a shocker to the informed.

But putting the blame for the GOP’s smash-and-grab policy re: Nature on the minority of the voting populace who voted for Nader is strictly knee-jerk. The blame rests squarely with another minority of the voting populace: the minority who voted for W.

Assuming that Norton is a shoo-in is also knee-jerk; I would certainly expect some hassles with that nomination to say the least. And this could well be someone the GOP knows will get shot down anyway; a sacrificial lamb, so that they can come back with a “compromise candidate”, i.e. a more low-profile pro-corporate anti-environmentalist who could easily turn out to be far worse that Norton could ever be.

It’s all right, though. They may think they are putting one over on us, but W’s Republican puppetmasters are shooting themselves in the foot by the day. The more they are true to form, it’s just that many more people who will be willing to fund and support anyone & everyone running against the GOP in 2002 and '04.

PS: At first not being familiar with Norton’s record, my first thought was - how weird and pop-culture overdose is this? - of JonBenet Ramsey.
“Oh good,” I thought, “the Attorney General of Colorado sure must know how to run things and get things done and see things through, not.”

11

I once saw an SUV with a vanity plate that read “OZONE”. Wierd.

12

This is tactically sort of interesting- Norton and Whitman (EPA?) are both pro-choice. This means that Georgie can point to his cabinet and say “see- no lit-mus test,” but of course where it matters (AG), his appointee is safely anti-choice. I don’t think we need to wonder about his SC appointments- hell, he’s brought Cheney and Rumsfeld back- why not Bork? JDM

13

James Watt!!! A protege of James Watt!! I stagger! I reel!

'Twas James Watt who, in an interview, pointed out that environmental concerns were silly, since Jesus was coming back very soon, and that would settle things pretty much universally.

(And yes, I think he really believed it!There is no reference to an environmental policy in the Bible, you know. Unless you count that fishes and loaves stuff. And don’t forget, The Boss withered a fig tree 'cause it pissed him off.)

Kinda like appointing Lucrezia Borgia in charge of the Food and Drug Adm.

14

Or OJ Simpson to run a shelter for battered women…
And yes, it will turn everyone against the GOP, but will it be too late for our environment? Will the damage already be done?

15

While I’m still plenty pissed at the Naderites for helping to elect Dubya, who really will be much worse for the environment on their best days than Clinton was at his worst (Clinton didn’t do enough, especially in 1995, to stand up against the bad guys; Dubya’s crew are the bad guys he shoulda stood up against), the fact is that backbiting now isn’t gonna help a bit.

Write your Senators, and write Majority Leader (for 17 days, anyway :)) Tom Daschle, to demand that they block this nomination by whatever means possible. Remind Daschle (and your Senators, if they’re Dems) that the GOP has made it OK, these last eight years, to block nominations solely on the basis of ideology, and now it’s time for the worm to turn. This one absolutely has to be deep-sixed.

If all the Dems vote against this one, and it squeaks through only by Cheney’s tie-breaking vote, then it’ll show the country what Dubya means by bipartisanship: bipartisanship is the GOP shoves through its most radical agenda down our throats, possibly with the help of a few surviving Reagan Democrats who didn’t go over to the GOP.

And who knows - there are a few moderate GOP senators, and one or two are even pro-environment. Maybe enough pressure could get them to defect on this one. If the Dems stay united, all we need is one measly vote.

So Dems, Naderites, whatever - if you’d like to see our children have some intact ecosystems to see, instead of endangered species on artificial life support in zoos, write your Senators. I don’t know if they can filibuster votes on Cabinet nominations, but if the rules allow, they should be urged to filibuster. Let 'em know that’s how you feel. Tell them this one’s worth holding up the whole parade. There shouldn’t even be allowed to be a Bush administration, if that’s the way he’s gonna play. Not a single Cabinet nomination should be approved, as long as this one’s on the table.

Over half the voters voted for pro-environmental Presidential candidates, and in return, we get an Interior Secretary who would probably be happy to bulldoze it all. This is moderation? This is bipartisanship?

This is war.

16

Therein lies the problem. We don’t know!

The study of ecology and environment is as complex as nuclear physics, at the very least. But we have very little in the way of predictability. Not surprising, in an endeavor so recent.

We don’t have the cold equations yet. We don’t yet know whether burning down the Amazon Rain forest would kill us or not.

Greens face a terrible ethical dilemma: if doubling the fossil fuel usage would put a small, efficient engine in the hands of every subsistence farmer (Bangladesh, Uganda, wherever) could one possibly say “No”? If harvesting all the whales for ambergris would yield a protein that would stop AIDS is Africa? Or malaria?

With the kind of certainty such a terrible decision demands?

Therein lies our problem, big picture wise. We don’t know which ecological/Green issues are truly mortal, and which can be left aside for an emergency. The skin cancer rate in Tierra del Fuego vs the woody owl?

17

Don’t worry, RT, I’ll be sure to write my Senator, Peter Fitzgerald, and let him know how you feel. Hee Hee.

My prediction: ALL of President-Elect Bush’s Cabinet appointments will be approved by the Senate.

18

I’ll be sure to wire Phil Gramm and Kay Bailey Hutchison to stop the nomination. I can even ask my Congressman, Tom “The Exterminator” DeLay* to put pressure on them to do the right thing.

It’s interesting to contemplate what would have happened with such a narrowly divided Congress, if there had been even 1 or 2 Green Party members elected in the Senate and a half-dozen in the House. Maybe the need to form a majority coalition would have ensured more than a few crumbs on the table for the pro-environment forces.

The Democrats do not have the balls to attempt to block a single nomination.
*For those of you still gagging over Bush being your President, try repeating the phrase “My Congressman, Tom DeLay”. Arrrrghhh.

19

Except that that isn’t the big picture, with respect to the powers of the Secretary of the Interior.

Our beef production isn’t particularly dependent on grazing cows on sparse Western grasslands. We can do without the wood that is ‘harvested’ from our national forests. (A good chunk of it goes overseas anyway.) We don’t need to dig one more mine on Federal lands. The best estimates of the oil reserves under the ANWR are on the order of a few months’ American consumption, and that’s the new oilfield with the best potential. We’re doing far better by devising new ways of getting oil from old places - see this month’s Atlantic Monthly for details.

In short, we Americans don’t need the Federal lands for the natural resources we can extract from them, nor do we need the revenues - we’re an information economy, not a resource extraction economy; this is shortly the 21st century, not the 19th.

But as far as what’s happening to speciation and extinction, we do have the big picture: we’re in an enormous wave of man-made extinctions of animal and plant species. And we’re doing it by chopping up ecosystems into increasingly small fragments that lack any ecological integrity - that can’t ‘stand alone’ and keep on functioning as small, isolated pieces, the way they could as part of a continuous whole. And as a result, species die out - especially those toward the top of the food chain, that need more habitat per animal than the animals they eat.

We cannot re-create ecosystems, even if we save the component species in zoos and whatnot. We don’t have the knowledge to do so. Once they’re gone, they’re gone. And we’re poorer for it. And we’re not doing it to help the Bengladeshis, or even the poor of our own country. It’s being done to fatten a few corporate bottom lines, is all. Nothing of significant value is being gained. Logging the Tongass will not result in the finding of a valuable antibiotic; it will at best produce a handful of short-lived lumberjacking jobs. But it will turn a large ecosystem - imagine an Oriental rug, as David Quammen suggested - from a continuous fabric to a bunch of small, fraying pieces that will not hold together of their own.

It’s odd that people who would tear down complex systems that they are incapable of rebuilding would call themselves ‘conservatives’. They do not understand what the word means. They are shortsighted people, acting precipitously. Whether that’s because they’re blind, or because they just don’t give a flip, it hardly matters. People who do such things are not conservatives, nor are they liberals. They are simply a blight on the face of the earth.

20

I must say one of the nice things about being in MA and being a Democrat is that your guy (and it is all guys, weirdly enough) will vote against people like that.

I can’t and won’t predict the outcome of the nominations because the hearings will be even more of a circus than usual because of the split ;). Who knows, maybe one of those nice solid people didn’t register a nanny for Social Security :eek:! But I don’t like what I’m hearing about Gale Norton, either. I mean, James Watt? WTF?? Shouldn’t being a reformed ex-Wattsite be like being an ex-Bircher or something? OK, so you quit the organization but sheesh.