According to an AP story of this afternoon the following are short-listed for Director, Environmental Protection Agency in a Bush administration:
Pennsylvania Environmental Protection Secretary James M. Seif; Illinois Environmental Protection Agency chief Tom Skinner; former Illinois EPA chief Mary Gade; David Struhs, director of the Florida Department of Environmental Protection; Russ Harding, director of the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality.
That would be worth knowing about, considering that Bush is the polluter’s best friend, and Reagan did everything he could to trash the EPA without actually shutting it down.
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I Don’t know about the others, and haven’t followed David Struhs too closely in Florida, but a little familiar with his previous job heading the Massachusetts DEP (which – not that you want to know – in the state is actually subordinate to the state secretary of the environment, who is subordinate to the governor).
Struhs will clearly be more sympathetic to big and small business than Browner, and he definitely will be doing what he has to to make the Bushes happy, but will also generally try and do an honest job of environmental protection (your opinion and his of what the right thing to do could differ slightly of course). I wouldn’t expect any Reagan-era attempted destruction of the agency from Struhs.
The bottom line is, he’s not too bad on the trees <–> toxic waste scale. If Rachel Carson was old growth forest, and Gorsuch (Reagan’s EPA Administrator) was a toxic waste dump, Struhs is like a park with a little too much fertilizer and pesticides - somewhere in the middle, could be worse.
Of course, the views of his boss, and the majority leaders in Congress are another matter (but this isn’t supposed to be a Great Debate, so I’ll be good and shut up now.)
May I ask, by the way, what’s so bad about a toxic-waste burner? High-temperature incineration is the only safe, environmentally friendly way to dispose of many wastes. Perhaps you meant a toxic-waste dumper?