Ecologists, Bush make surprise deal: ... what the hell ...?
You know, the only reason I can think for this to have happened at all is that the administration realized that these species would all eventually have been protected, so they decided they might as well get the PR gravy from doing something environmentally-friendly. I mean, really, Gale Norton on the side of the endangered? Have aliens taken over her brain, or what? (Heh. They've protected freshwater snails, a chub and a frog in New Mexico. The agricultural interests that want to draw even more water from the Rio Grande -- not that there's a lot of water left there anyway -- will be absolutely livid. But I digress.)
Maybe His Fraudulency's minions are thinking that this could be a trading chip or that they can use a later threat to pull the protection to get around new environmental testing for Star Wars. Although an outright concession is a pretty weak trading card.
I suspect that the true marker of His Fraudulency's attitude to the environment is that he's appointed a man who can block any regulation issued by any agency on fiscal grounds, and who once said of dioxin, a known and particularly effective cancer-causing agent, that reducing dioxin levels too far might "do more harm than good." The new assistant director of the EPA was a lobbyist for Monsanto. And so on, and so on, and so on ....
Copyright © 2001, Iain Jackson, after-words.org
[Archives: 2001 and after]
Archives before February 5, 2001
Search entries:
12/19/2001: vive la france
12/19/2001: princess, redux
12/19/2001: yemen and rumsfeld
12/18/2001: you're NOT in the army now
12/18/2001: interesting donation
12/18/2001: shame on winn dixie, indeed
12/18/2001: saudi princess
12/17/2001: new resolve
12/17/2001: a victim of the attack ... yeah, right
12/17/2001: polluters ho!