How Much Has Changed? Obama Administration Deals Series of Anti-Environmental Blows

By Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank, AlterNet. Posted May 29, 2009.

In a recent interview with Science, Holdren said: "We need to develop and deploy approaches to nuclear energy that can minimize the liabilities that have inhibited expansion of that carbon-free energy source up until now. We need to see if we can make fusion work. This is a quest in which I've been engaged since 1965. Again, I started [my work at MIT] in that domain. At that time, people thought fusion was 15 years away. Now people think it's 40 or 50 years away. We need to shrink that time scale again by increasing the investment for making that domain."

This means billions more for the nuclear lobby under the guise of research and development, the pipeline of federal subsidies that has kept the industry alive since Three Mile Island.

Then just last week, Obama announced a sweeping overhaul of the car-fuel-efficiency and exhaust-emissions standards, which have languished unmodified for more than a decade. These long-overdue upgrades will force car makers (if there are any left five years from now, when the rules are slated to finally kick in) to curb carbon-dioxide emissions by 35 percent and hike fuel efficiency standards from 30 to 35 miles per gallon. While the proposal has been hailed as historic, it has plenty of drawbacks.

For starters, the plan capitulated to automakers by endorsing a national emissions standard, which will likely pre-empt states, such as California, from adopting even more stringent clean air rules. Obama also gave the auto industry a few more years to come into compliance with these rather modest requirements. No wonder the move was hailed by traditional Motor City defenders such as Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and Rep. John Dingell, D-Mich.

Less endearing is the Obama administration's relentless push to replace oil with biofuels, which will push marginal agriculture lands into production of genetically engineered and pesticide-saturated monocrops, scalping topsoil and draining dwindling water supplies across the Great Plains and Midwest. Overseeing this misguided scheme is Obama's Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, the former governor of Iowa, who has long been a servant of industrial agriculture and the bioengineering industry.

Under Vilsack, the biofuels project is poised to move far beyond burning corn and soybeans for fuel. They want to chop down national forests and burn the public's trees inside a new generation of biomass power generators.

This insidious and little-noticed program will be marshaled by biomass booster Homer Lee Wilkes, a little-known urban planner from Madison, Miss. Wilkes was Vilsack's surprise pick for the powerful slot of Undersecretary of Agriculture for Natural Resources and the Environment, a position that, among other responsibilities, places Wilkes in control of the U.S. Forest Service.

So look for a new wave of timber sales on federal lands, sanctified in the name of fighting climate change, categorically excluded from full environmental analysis and enthusiastically supported by so-called collaborative groups who will be first in line to cash in on the lucrative logging contracts. Greens with chainsaws.

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Jeffrey St. Clair is the author of Been Brown So Long It Looked Like Green to Me: the Politics of Nature and Grand Theft Pentagon. His newest book, Born Under a Bad Sky, is just out from AK Press/CounterPunch books. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net. Joshua Frank is co-editor of Dissident Voice and author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Re-elect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and, along with Jeffrey St. Clair, is the editor of the new book Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, published by AK Press in July 2008.

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