corrente

Never had it? It's delicious. Especially with a heaping serving of that spicy Tex-Mex salsa de toro. Of course, what isn't delicious, deep fried? Just don't pay attention to that slightly acrid aftertaste. Instead, reach for a glass of cold Tex-Mex beer, and it'll all go down, real smooth like.

I'm about to talk about Bush environmental policy, so go put at least a case of Dos Equis on ice.

Recently, the Bush administration announced the first retrenchment in the Clean Air Act since it's passage - a new set of rules that will allow the companies that operate the oldest, most polluting plants through-out the country to make major investments in upgrades, without, at the same time, having to meet current standards of pollution control.

The old rules were already a sop to the utilities companies, allowing them to continue to pollute and stay in business and make operational repairs, meanwhile the companies could decide when they were ready to upgrade the operation of these old plants, at which point, the plants would have to meet the same pollution standards as new plants. It's been a long enough time now, that these old plants require upgrades big time, for the sake of the bottom line, but cost-effectiveness doesn't include the health care money spent on a kid's asthma, for instance. No, you and I pay for that.

The new rules turn this original compromise inside out. After years of making money off these old polluting stinkpots, the utilities industry will now be able to operate them as shiny new polluting stinkpots.

And just in case you spent a single second thinking that maybe, just maybe, this Bush decision wasn't only about servicing campaign contributors and might make some environmental sense, check out this brazen annoucement that came down from the EPA yesterday.

A change in enforcement policy will lead the Environmental Protection Agency to drop investigations into 50 power plants for past violations of the Clean Air Act, lawyers at the agency who were briefed on the decision this week said.

The lawyers said in interviews on Wednesday that the decision meant the cases would be judged under new, less stringent rules set to take effect next month, rather than the stricter rules in effect at the time the investigations began.

The lawyers said the new rules include exemptions that would make it almost impossible to sustain the investigations into the plants, which are scattered around the country and owned by 10 utilities.

The lawyers said the change grew out of a recommendation by Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, which urged the government two years ago to study industry complaints about its enforcement actions. The Bush administration has said its goal is to ensure cost-effective improvements to air quality.

Makes sense to me, now that I remember what President Reagan tried to teach us; trees pollute, too. At the time, I'd scoffed at his ignorance, but after being inundated all week long with endless tales of his greatness, especially on MSNBC, which as much as Fox became the "all-Reagan-all-the-time" network, I have to reconsider if I'm the one who might be wrong.

Nah. It's coal plants that pollute.

The greed as well as the gall of this administration and the money patrons who put it in office is unquenchable.

That master debunker of liberal cant, Greg Easterbrook, has come in for quite a lot of debunking himself recently, about such self-selected subjects as men vs women's understanding of the word "no," as in "no, I don't want to have intercourse with you," or words to that effect, an openess to spirituality, (his) vs. the souless secularism of your average theoretical physicist, and the theory of "intelligent design" vs. modern biological evolutionary theory. Notice the structure of Easterbrook's argument seems always to require an other, whose arguments are made in bad faith, or carelessly, at the very least.

It was less than a month ago, (Oct. 14) that Easterbrook wrote a Time editorial, also published in the LATimes, (now disappeared behind the green door of pay-for archives,) that cruelly berated environmentalists and Democrats for beating up on Bush for his environmental policies. Here's as much as I can present to you from the Time abstract:

As President George W. Bush stood in a Michigan power plant last week defending his record on air pollution, critics cranked up the amperage. Bush is " gutting" clean-air protection, Senator James Jeffords pronounced. Environmental lobbyists asserted that air pollution is rising at runaway levels. Things are so far gone, asserted Senator and presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, that Bush has " the worst environmental record in history." Worse than Genghis Khan! Yet nothing you hear about worsening air pollution is true. Air pollution is declining under Bush, just as it declined under...

Clinton is the next word, followed by a list of Presidents; you get the picture. Something Easterbrook doesn't tell you, that Michigan plant Bush spoke at turned out to be one of those old stinkpots that was then under investigation for Clean Air Act violations. But that was before the Bush Clear Skies policy. Easterbrook doesn't discuss that policy in any sort of detail. Nor, please note, does he offer any quote wherein any specific person claims that "air pollution is rising at runaway levels." But the sneering complaints about environmentalists is the core of the piece. Bad faith, he implies, again and again.

Here's a bracing answer to Easterbrook's assertions, (which Alternet is still making available free of charge), by Amanda Griscom of "Grist," an environmental, humor magazine.

"Deep-Fried Baloney" is how she characterizes Easterbrook's environmentalism, quite appropriately, on the evidence she provides. From Ms. Griscom we learn, for instance, that the arguments in Easterbrook's op ed...

...come from "Everything You Know About the Bush Environmental Record Is Wrong," a report he wrote for the Brookings Institution and the right-wing American Enterprise Institute's Joint Center for Regulatory Studies. The crux of both the op-ed and the report is that the environment, and in particular air quality, has been getting dramatically better over the years -- so what's the harm in weakening a few regulations?

When are we going to stop referring to the Brookings Institution as a "liberal think-tank?" I'll even settle for "the SCLTT," or perhaps "the SCL think-tank."

Griscom questions Easterbrook's air pollution numbers, but she puts her finger on the more important structural dishonesty in his argument, one that occurs again and again.

More intolerable, however, is the way he ignores the primary reason these improvements came about in the first place: the very "command and control" regulations that President Bush is trying to eliminate, and that Easterbrook claims are unnecessary.

The op-ed has too many transparently preposterous statements to eviscerate them all here (take "logging is one of the few endlessly sustainable industries," for example). But the ones that deserve perhaps the most scrutiny are those that applaud Bush for his supposed environmental accomplishments.

Turns out the two "accomplishments" he credits to Bush were actually the work of Carol Browner and the rest of the Clinton EPA, and one of them was "reviewed" by the Bush EPA, doubtless with an eye to non-enforcement. The third accomplishment is a proposal, not yet acted upon.

Read the whole thing. Then check out "Grist" the Magazine. Griscom is terrific.

When it comes to Easterbrook, chronicler of the success of the environmental movement vs. the several generations of actual environmentalists who are responsible for that success, it's always an issue of bad faith.

On whose part, judge for yourselves, in light of yesterday's EPA annoucement.