George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography - Get a Free Blog

"international cooperation" on green issues. "We will support you," intoned Gilbert
Grosvenor, a fellow Yale alumnus "...Planet Earth is at risk." Among those present during
that gala evening was Sir Edmund Hillary, who had planted the Union Jack at the summit
of Mount Everest. [fn 8]
In order to be the Environmental President, Bush was willing to propose a disastrous
Clean Air Act that would drain the economy of hundreds of billions of dollars over time
in the name of fighting acid rain. Bush's first hundred days coincided with the notable
phenomenon of the "greening" of Margaret Thatcher, who had previously denounced
environmentalists as "the enemy within," and fellow travellers of the British Labour Party
and the loonie left. Thatcher's resident ideologue, Nicholas Ridley, had referred to the
green movement in Britian as "pseudo-Marxists." But in the early months of 1989,
allegedly under the guidance of Sir Crispin Tickell, the British Ambassador to the United
Nations, Thatcher embraced the orthodoxy that the erosion of the ozone layer, the
greenhouse effect, and acid rain --every one of them a pseudo-scientific hoax--were
indeed at the top of the list of the urgent problems of the human species. Thatcher's
acceptance of the green orthodoxy permitted the swift establishment of a total
environmentalist-Malthusian consensus in the European Community, the Group of 7, and
other key international forums.
Characteristically, Bush followed Thatcher's lead, as he would on so many other issues.
During the hundred days, Bush called for the elimination of all chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs) by the end of the century, thus accepting the position assumed by the European
Community as a result of Mrs. Thatcher's turning green. Bush told the National Academy
of Sciences that new "scientific advancements" had permitted the identification of a
serious threat to the ozone layer; Bush stressed the need to "reduce CFCs that deplete our
precious upper atmospheric resources." A treaty had been signed in Montreal in 1987 that
called for cutting the production of CFCs by one half within a ten-year period. "But
recent studies indicate that this 50 percent reduction may not be enough," Bush now
opined. Senator Al Gore of Tennessee was calling for complete elimination of CFCs
within five years. Here a pattern emerged that was to be repeated frequently during the
Bush years: Bush would make sweeping concessions to the environmentalist Luddites,
but would then be denounced by them for measures that were insufficiently radical. This
would be the case when Bush's Clean Air Bill was going through the Congress during the
summer of 1990.
After Bush's appearance before the Congress with his revised budget, the new regime
exploited the honeymoon to seal a sweetheart contract with the rubber-stamp
Congressional Democrats, who under no circumstances could be confused with an
opposition. The de facto one party state was alive and well, personified by milquetoast
Senator George Mitchell of Maine, the Democrats' Majority Leader. The collusion
between Bush and the Democratic leadership involved new sleight of hand in order to
meet the defecit targets stipulated by the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings law. This involved
mobilizing more than $100 billion from surpluses in the Social Security, highway, and
other special trust funds which had not previously been counted. The Democrats also
went along with a $28 billion package of asset sales, financing tricks, and unspecified