Last night I posted about “Bush the Environmentalist” who is boasting a claim that he has created the world’s largest wildlife sanctuary. I also showed where this actual sanctuary was originally created by Clinton in 2000. Now I have come across (with the help of a friend at political-nutshell) more articles that shows how concerned Bush was over this area of ocean:

The first article is from April 1, 2006:

In its review of Clinton-era environmental rules, the Bush administration is now reconsidering pending marine protections for the Channel Islands off Santa Barbara, as well as a new coral reef reserve off the northwest Hawaiian Islands.

[SNIP]

Another option presented to Commerce Department officials is to rescind Clinton’s executive order in December that created Northwestern Hawaiian Islands Coral Reef Ecosystem Reserve.

So within Bush’s first 3 months in office, he was already looking at a possibility of undoing what Clinton had done. While Osama was putting final preparations on flying airplanes into buildings, Bush was preparing to attack the environment.

Now things get worse. This snip is from January of 2002:

Achitoff says, “The administration promptly complied, and through [Commerce Secretary] Donald Evans placed the executive order under review, and ever since has kept the coral reef reserve in limbo. It’s failed to do anything to support it and has failed to do the Department of Commerce’s duties under the executive order to put the reserve into operation. It’s failed to develop a reserve operations plan to manage the resources for the objective of conservation, it has discouraged the reserve council that had been appointed to help manage the reserve from meeting.”

“Essentially what we have is a stealth rollback by pocket veto,” Achitoff said. “The administration has tried to stop the reserve from ever being established, and we fully expect the administration to now try to strip the reserve of its protections against overfishing, threats to endangered species, coral harvesting, fish collecting and other industry that will benefit a few at the expense of everyone else.”

So why has Bush now changed his mind and made it a national monument? Simple. He thinks he may muster up some support from the environmentalists. The truth lies in the fact that this area is still not fully off to fishing. They are talking about stopping it within the next five years, but with Bush’s abuse of power he could easily make that not happen.

For people who think Bush is finally doing something great for the environment, compare it to Clinton in this same point in his Presidency. Clinton by June of 1998 had already signed 74 different pieces of legislation or executive orders to help protect our environment. We don’t even know if Bush will follow through on this one and it is very ironic that commercial fishing could be stopped within five years if he chooses to. Of course Bush will be out of office by that time and who knows what is next. So we will be looking at over 10 years from when Clinton signed the original executive order to the time it may be fulfilled.