The Environment - Fighting the Faith.(Column)(Short Story)

President Bush is learning how dangerous it is to let faith-based organizations and ideas get too close to government. Not churches trying to help drug addicts, but environmentalists.

The blizzard of midnight regulations that Bill Clinton signed at the end of his presidency included a new EPA standard on arsenic in water, knocking the accepted level down from 50 parts per billion to 10, in order to avoid risks of cancer. This was done even though no studies have suggested cancer effects at the old level, and despite the fact that the costs of compliance could raise rates in small towns where fewer consumers would bear the increase, or could even force utilities to cut off service. Bush wanted a harder look at the problem. He got rewarded by bad headlines, jokes about drinking poison, and antsy Republican moderates.

Bush is preparing to back down on another issue-drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) on the north coast of Alaska. As the Washington Post editorialized in 1987, ANWR "is one of the bleakest, most remote places on this continent, and there is hardly any other where drilling would have less impact on the surrounding life . . ." Fourteen years later, right-thinking folk have decided that the frozen caribou commuting corridor is a "unique, wild, and biologically vital ecosystem" (the Post today), and Bush's campaign proposals to allow drilling there were greeted as Earth-rape. Bush has decided to look elsewhere for natural gas.

The president did take a tough shot, however, at the Kyoto protocol on carbon-dioxide emissions. Kyoto would have given the United States and Europe until 2010 to reduce these emissions from 1990 levels by 7 and 8 percent respectively. The advanced world would suffer a 2 to 4 percent shrinkage of GDP if it implemented the Kyoto cutbacks (the Third World was given a free pass). No politician could face slamming on the brakes that hard, and in fact European nations have not put in place the legislation necessary to lower their levels. Bush acknowledged the fact, declaring that "we will not do anything that harms our economy." For his blunt honesty, he was showered by abuse from hypocritical Europeans.

That reaction will seem like a serenade if Bush follows through on an energy strategy being developed by an inter-agency task force led by Vice President Cheney. The Cheney group has ...