The Bush Administration released its proposed budget for fiscal year 2005 on Monday. Environmental and energy spending plans are generating considerable concern. Over the next several days, BushGreenwatch will examine the impact of the Bush environmental budget.
Arctic drilling: In his budget projections, President Bush includes $2.4 billion in revenues from oil lease sales in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in the year 2006. Such sales have been repeatedly blocked by the Senate, but Administration officials said they would push Congress again this year to open the refuge to drilling.[1]
"When he assumes, yet again, that oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is going to be a big money maker, the president is ignoring the clear will of the American people, who don't want to trash one of the wildest places left in America," said Rodger Schlickeisen, president of Defenders of Wildlife.
The policy director for REP America, the national grassroots organization of Republicans for Environmental Protection, questioned whether it is fiscally responsible to include money in the budget that is unlikely to be realized. He urged the president to focus instead on conservation and efficiency to meet the nation's energy needs.
"Opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling is not the answer to our nation's energy problems," Jim DiPeso, policy director of REP America, told BushGreenwatch. "Arctic or no Arctic, we will remain on the foreign petroleum treadmill as long as we continue using so much oil so inefficiently."
Superfund: The Superfund program to clean up the nation's most toxic waste sites would increase about 10 percent under the Bush budget, to $1.38 billion in FY 2005. But the entire amount would come from the general treasury, rather than continuing the 24-year practice of requiring polluting industries to contribute to a trust fund that picks up the tab when a site's polluter cannot be located or is defunct.
Since Superfund was created in 1980, every administration has supported the principle of "polluter pays" for the hazardous waste trust fund. Mr. Bush is the only president not to ask Congress to reauthorize the tax on polluting industries and instead put the burden on taxpayers.[2]
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FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Read more about the Interior Department's budget.
Read more about the EPA's budget.
SOURCES:
[1] "Bush Budget Calls for Oil Drilling in Alaska Refuge," Reuters, Feb. 4, 2004
[2] U.S. PIRG fact sheet
