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I can't speak for all democrats, but I never thought that Obama was my friend, or even an ally, or even more or less on 'my side'. I thought back then and still think now he was the lesser of two evils. Unlike many of the republicans here, I do not idolize or unquestioningly support those who want me to think they are on 'my side'. I don't feel betrayed, just frustrated that he is the best the democrats seem to be able to scrape up.

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The last green democrat, I'm afraid, has never held office. ... but never really into office

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President Johnson cared deeply about conservation and the environment and believed they were an important part of his dream of a "Great Society" for our country. He asked Congress to pass environmental legislation covering many areas of concern, including air and water pollution; the urban environment; waste disposal; the use of natural resources; and the preservation of wildlife, wilderness areas, natural beauty, and historical resources. While in office, President Johnson signed almost three hundred conservation and beautification measures. Lady Bird Johnson, as First Lady, made the public aware of environmental issues.

{A FEW of his contributions, none of which you think is important, obviously}

1963: Clean Air Act

1964: Pesticide Controls strengthened the federal law controlling pesticides; Water Resources Research Act; Wilderness Act; and several national parks and seashores.

1965: Federal Water Project Recreation Act; Land and Water Conservation Fund Act; Solid Waste Disposal Act; Water Quality Act; Water Resources Planning Ac; and more national recreation areas, national parks, national monuments to protect the land.

1966: Marine Resources and Engineering Development Act'; Fish and Wildlife Conservation Protection Act; Clean Water Restoration Act; Endangered Species Act; Point Reyes National Seashore (for which we here are MOST grateful), and more national recreation area, national seashores, etc.

1967: National Park Foundation; Public Land Law; Wetlands Preservation; Air Quality Act.

1968: Land and Water Conservation Fund; National Trails System; National Wild and Scenic Rivers System; National Wilderness Preservation System increased; Hazardous Radiation Protection; National Water Commission;, and still more land preserved as national recreation areas, seashores, etc. Details of all this at http://www.lbjlib.utexas.edu/johnson/lbjforkids/enviro_timeline.shtm

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{Reagan’s EPA director} was dismayed by Reagan’s cavalier dismissal of the importance of acid rain, which had destroyed fish and plant life in thousands of American and Canadian lakes and streams. . During the 1970s it had become an issue in Canada, which objected to the pollution originating in US smokestacks in the Midwest and deposited in Canadian forests and lakes. Reagan had promised Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau during a 1981 visit that he would honor the [agreement which Trudeau had negotiated with Pres. Carter, which required] vigorous enforcement of anti-pollution standards.

After three years of much talk and little action, the EPA wanted Reagan to make a major budget commitment to reducing the causes of acid rain. The EPA’s proposal was assailed as wasteful government spending by Reagan’s OMB and was rejected by Reagan, who questioned the scientific evidence on the causes of acid rain and was reluctant to impose additional restrictions on industry.

Reagan did not share fears that he would be damaged by environmental issues. He believed he brought a common sense view to environmental issues that was widely shared by Americans. He always considered himself an “environmentalist,” a word he defined so loosely that he applied the term to James Watt as well. Left to his own devices, Reagan rarely thought about the environment in political terms. http://www.ontheissues.org/Celeb/Ronald_Reagan_Environment.htm] True, Reagan had a strong environmental record as governor, but one might surmise that it was strictly a political posture meant to appeal to his pro-environment constituency in California, given that the minute he stepped foot in the White House, his record on the environment took a dramatic turn for the worse. In fact, had Reagan and his cabinet members gotten their way, wildlands around the U.S. would have been turned into highways, or worse.

"The Reagan administration adopted an extraordinarily aggressive policy of issuing leases for oil, gas, and coal development on tens of millions of acres of national lands -- more than any other administration in history, including the current one," said the Wilderness Society's David Alberswerth.

Before delving further into Reagan's track record, it's worth recalling his infamous public statement that "trees cause more pollution than automobiles do," and that if "you've seen one tree you've seen them all." This is not, in other words, a president who demonstrated much ecological prowess.

Reagan's ignorance in this area is personified by James Watt and Anne Gorsuch, the leaders he selected to head the Department of Interior and the U.S. EPA, respectively. "Never has America seen two more intensely controversial and blatantly anti-environmental political appointees than Watt and Gorsuch," said Greg Wetstone, director of advocacy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, who served on the Hill during the Reagan era as chief environment council at the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The list of rollbacks attempted by these administrators is as sweeping as those of the current administration {this was written during the Bush presidency}. Gorsuch tried to gut the Clean Air Act with proposals to weaken pollution standards "on everything from automobiles to furniture manufacturers -- efforts which took Congress two years to defeat," according to Clapp. Moves to weaken the Clean Water Act were equally aggressive, crescendoing in 1987 when Reagan vetoed a strong reauthorization of the act only to have his veto overwhelmingly overridden by Congress. Assaults on Superfund were so hideous that Rita Lavelle, director of the program, was thrown in jail for lying to Congress under oath about corruption in her agency division.

The gutting of funds for environmental protection was another part of Reagan's legacy. "EPA budget cuts during Reagan's first term were worse than they are today," said Frank O'Donnell, director of Clean Air Trust, who reported on environmental policy for The Washington Monthly during the Reagan era. "The administration tried to cut EPA funding by more than 25 percent in its first budget proposal," he said. And massive cuts to Carter-era renewable-energy programs "set solar back a decade," said Clapp.

Topping it all off were efforts to slash the EPA enforcement program: "The enforcement slowdown was staggering," said a staffer at the House Energy and Commerce Committee who helped investigate the Reagan administration's enforcement of environmental laws during the early '80s. "In the first year of the Reagan administration, there was a 79 percent decline in the number of enforcement cases filed from regional offices to EPA headquarters, and a 69 percent decline in the number of cases filed from the EPA to the Department of Justice."

Sound familiar? "There are plenty of similarities between the anti-government, anti-environment ideology of the Reagan administration and that of the current Bush administration," said Sylvia Lowrance, a former EPA employee who worked as an attorney at the agency under Reagan. "But one critical difference made it far more difficult for the Reagan administration to get away with their agenda: a Democratic majority in Congress. There were strong checks and balances that we don't see now."

During Reagan's first term, there was a Democratic House of Representatives and the Senate was controlled by moderate Republicans -- many of them relatively pro-environment, including Robert Stafford (Vt.), Bob Packwood (Ore.), and John Chafee (R.I.). Having control of the House enabled Democrats to hold numerous hearings and investigations into the administration's controversial initiatives, something they can't do now that they're in the minority in both houses of Congress.

But there was another, possibly even more powerful, difference between the anti-environmentalism of the Reagan era and the hostility we see today: Brutal honesty.

"James Watt had all the political skills and public relations sense of a boa constrictor," said Jim DiPeso, policy director at REP. "When Watt wanted to open up wilderness areas to mining and drilling regardless of the environmental consequences, he said just that. But at least he had the virtue of being a straight shooter."

Lowrance recalls sitting across the table from Gorsuch in a heated debate over environmental rollbacks. "We had it out," she told Muckraker. "Contrast that to today when the career people are completely shut out of the conversation. It was a much more honest debate then."

Watt's impolitic bluntness ultimately got the best of him. He made the most odious comment of his career in defense of his widely criticized decision to authorize the sale of more than 1 billion tons of coal from federal lands in Wyoming. He argued that he was immune to criticism because members of his coal-advisory panel included "a black ... a woman, two Jews, and a cripple." This comment got him fired in 1983, the same year that Gorsuch was forced to resign because documents exposed by Congress revealed major misconduct within her agency.

It's a sad state of affairs when this kind of contemptible candor is remembered fondly: "If only we could see the wolves beneath the sheeps' clothing today," said Daniel Weiss, a senior vice president at the environmental consulting firm M & R Strategic Services, who worked as an environmental lobbyist during the Reagan era. "Unfortunately, now our leaders are much more savvy -- and far more insidious. They undo laws in the dead of night. Gale Norton is nothing more than James Watt with a smile." "As bad as the Reagan administration was," adds Wetstone, "it looks positively quaint in comparison to what's happening today." http://www.grist.org/article/griscom-reagan don't give me bullshit about Ray-guns being a "green President". He was anything BUT. I lived through it; I was an environmentalist at the time; I REMEMBER. Boy, do I remember; Watt and Gorsuch in particular.

Reagan was a politician; as Governor, it benefitted him to pretend to be pro-enviornment; as President, he didn't give a shit, so his true colors came out.

I will, however, give you Nixon, who was an "environmentalist" , albeit for political purposes and not at first. Eventually, yes, he put political muscle into environment.

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Nixon started out opposing environmental laws, although he was elected to the White House at a time of increasing public support for environmental protection. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Americans began to express much more concern about the Earth as television showed them environmental catastrophes such as oil spills in the oceans, a polluted Ohio River on fire, and air pollution in Los Angeles. In 1969, the year Nixon took office, he opposed the legislation that became the National Environmental Policy Act. The law required environmental impact statements for projects proposed by federal agencies. When Congress voted to pass the act with bipartisan support despite Nixon’s opposition, the president realized something that the House and Senate had already learned: Protecting the environment was popular. Nixon signed the legislation in early 1970 and said it was the first symbolic act of what he was calling “the environmental decade.”

By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, his administration had had a hand in a stack of environmental laws, executive orders and international agreements that totaled “more than any other administration in history,” Talbot said. “We could never have done it had the president not been willing to go along,” Talbot said. http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/ag-forst/1998-December/012461.html;, yes, "eager", no...a lot of this stuff was passed more "in spite of" Nixon than with his blessing. He signed into law a number of things LBJ BEGAN, and he bowed to a lot of what Congress wanted (one case at least where Congress DID represent the will of the people).

In other words, Republican Presidents Bush and Reagan were definitively ANTI-environment; Nixon was brought to a pro-environment stance kicking and screaming, and for political reasons. LBJ actually follwed his HEART where the environment was concerned. I call that a true environmentalist.


Hippie Operative Nikovich Nikita Nicovna Talibani,
Contracted Agent of Veritas Oilspillus, code name “Nike”,
signing off

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I have no time for this anyway, and I certainly have no time to be lectured at, and if you're not reading what I write, just ranting at me, you're wasting both my time and yours.

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