NYT editorial: Teddy Roosevelt? No, Secretary Kempthorne, Bush is no T.R.

[DeepModem Mom]

T.R.? He’s No T.R.
Published: February 11, 2007

Whenever President Bush is being hammered for his environmental policies, as he has been recently for his timid approach to global warming, he heads for a national park to reveal a hidden kinship with nature and, in effect, to promise a new day.

He did so again last week, visiting Shenandoah National Park to announce a sizable increase in the National Park Service’s budget. The photo op elicited suggestions from Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne that Mr. Bush was somehow channeling Teddy Roosevelt....One suspects...that Roosevelt would have tried much harder to protect fragile landscapes than the Bush administration has in its frantic drive for more oil and gas resources in the Rocky Mountains. One suspects — knows, even — that Roosevelt, who started the national wildlife refuge system, would not have pushed for oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Similarly, Roosevelt would not have declared — as Gale Norton, Mr. Kempthorne’s immediate predecessor, did in 2003 — that America had already acquired enough protected wilderness; he would have demanded more. He would not have rolled back, as Ms. Norton did, environmental rules governing mining for gold, copper and lead. He would not have countenanced the demolition job that Mr. Bush’s Forest Service has done on the web of forest protections it inherited from previous administrations. He would not have tried to scuttle one of the most important acts of environmental stewardship in many years, Mr. Clinton’s roadless rule, which made 58.5 million acres of the national forests off limits to new road building and development.

And Roosevelt would certainly have kept his word. Mr. Bush made three big promises in this area in the 2000 campaign. One was to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas. He reneged on that one almost immediately. The second was to finance the federal government’s core open space program, the Land and Water Conservation Fund, at its annual authorized level of $900 million. He has shortchanged it badly every year and this year he is asking for $85 million.

The third promise was to put more money into the national parks. Here history may give Mr. Bush higher marks, thanks largely to the entreaties of Mr. Kempthorne, who pressed for and received a commitment of $258 million in new spending this year and a guarantee of $1 billion over 10 years. The parks have been starved for years (and not just by this administration), and people who care about them have every reason to be pleased by the prospect of a substantial increase in the budget....

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/opinion/11sun1.html