[Mb-civic] Ex-EPA Chiefs Blame Bush in Global Warming By John Heilprin The Associated Press

[Michael Butler]

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    Ex-EPA Chiefs Blame Bush in Global Warming
    By John Heilprin
    The Associated Press

    Wednesday 18 January 2006

    Washington - Six former heads of the Environmental Protection Agency -
five Republicans and one Democrat - accused the Bush administration
Wednesday of neglecting global warming and other environmental problems.

    "I don't think there's a commitment in this administration," said Bill
Ruckelshaus, who was EPA's first administrator when the agency opened its
doors in 1970 under President Nixon and headed it again under President
Reagan in the 1980s.

    Russell Train, who succeeded Ruckelshaus in the Nixon and Ford
administrations, said slowing the growth of "greenhouse" gases isn't enough.

    "We need leadership, and I don't think we're getting it," he said at an
EPA-sponsored symposium centered around the agency's 35th anniversary. "To
sit back and just push it away and say we'll deal with it sometime down the
road is dishonest to the people and self-destructive."

    All the former administrators and the EPA's current chief, Stephen
Johnson, raised their hands when asked whether they believe global warming
is a real problem - and again when asked if humans bear significant blame.

    Agency heads during five Republican administrations, including the
current one, criticized the Bush White House for what they described as a
failure of leadership.

    Defending his boss, Johnson said the current administration has spent
$20 billion on research and technology to combat climate change after
President Bush rejected mandatory controls on carbon dioxide, the chief gas
blamed for trapping heat in the atmosphere like a greenhouse.

    Bush also kept the United States out of the Kyoto international treaty
to reduce greenhouse gases globally, saying it would harm the US economy,
after many of the accord's terms were negotiated by the Clinton
administration.

    "I know from the president on down, he is committed," Johnson said. "And
certainly his charge to me was, and certainly our team has heard it: 'I want
you to accelerate the pace of environmental protection. I want you to
maintain our economic competitiveness.' And I think that's really what it's
all about."

    His predecessors disagreed. Lee Thomas, Ruckelshaus's successor in the
Reagan administration, said that "if the United States doesn't deal with
those kinds of issues in a leadership role, they're not going to get dealt
with. So I'm very concerned about this country and this agency."

    Bill Reilly, the EPA administrator under the first President Bush,
echoed that assessment.

    "The time will come when we will address seriously the problem of
climate change, and this is the agency that's best equipped to anticipate
it," he said.

    Christie Whitman, the first of three EPA administrators in the current
Bush administration, said people obviously are having "an enormous impact"
on the earth's warming.

    "You'd need to be in a hole somewhere to think that the amount of change
that we have imposed on land, and the way we've handled deforestation,
farming practices, development, and what we're putting into the air, isn't
exacerbating what is probably a natural trend," she said. "But this is
worse, and it's getting worse."

    Carol Browner, who was President Clinton's EPA administrator, said the
White House and the Congress should push legislation to establish a carbon
trading program based on a 1990 pollution trading program that helped reduce
acid rain.

    "If we wait for every single scientist who has a thought on the issue of
climate change to agree, we will never do anything," she said. "If this
agency had waited to completely understand the impacts of DDT, the impacts
of lead in our gasoline, there would probably still be DDT sprayed and lead
in our gasoline."

    Three former administrators did not attend Wednesday's ceremony: Mike
Leavitt, now secretary of health and human services; Doug Costle, who was in
the Carter administration, and Anne Burford, a Reagan appointee who died
last year.

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