Editor's Note:  With the Bush Administration's remaining time in office now measured in hours, we asked CPR Member Scholars to remind us of some of the less publicized moments of the Administration's record on environmental issues.   Following is the first of several entries that we'll run on CPRBlog before President Bush returns to Texas.  A. Dan Tarlock is first up.

The record of the Bush II Administration on biodiversity is one of almost unrelenting hostility to the idea and sustained efforts, continuing into the last days of the Administration to gut the Endangered Species Act. The one positive legacy is the establishment of federal marine reserves.

The “highlights” of its efforts to gut the Endangered Species Act include the reduction of habitat designation, the subordination of science to politics (which was even worse than first reported in 2006), and the recent regulation which …

President Bush’s designation of 195,000 square miles of marine monuments last week drew praise from a wide constituency—including many environmentalists, who have so often been at odds with the Bush Administration over the past eight years.  Without a doubt, President Bush’s use of the Antiquities Act to preserve the Marianas, Pacific Remote Islands and Rose Atoll National Marine Monuments is a major victory for conservation, especially when considered in addition to his similar designation of the 140,000 square mile Papahanaumokuakea (Northern Hawaiian Islands) Marine Monument in 2006. 

When news of the Northern Hawaiian Islands designation broke, the LA Times reported that a private screening of a PBS documentary about the beauty of (and threats to) that archipelago of islands seemed to capture President Bush’s imagination.  To his credit, he followed through and acted to protect not only those areas but also …

After years of study and analysis on the public health implications of regulating perchlorate in drinking water, EPA has come to the conclusion that … it needs to do more study and analysis.

In fact, that is the conclusion of two different EPA offices. Within a two-week span, EPA’s Office of Water and its Office of the Inspector General each issued a report suggesting that the agency should refrain from regulating the chemical until more research clarifies various uncertainties.

On December 30, EPA’s Inspector General released a report that faulted both EPA and the National Academy of Sciences for failing to use cumulative risk assessment techniques to derive the reference dose for perchlorate. The Office of the Inspector General hired a contractor to review EPA’s and NAS’s work, and provided this summary:

Based on our scientific analysis documented in our report, perchlorate is only …

Environmentalists are not usually accustomed to having industry allies in their efforts to address climate change.  However, behind the scenes large private insurance companies have long advocated for reducing the greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to climate change and ultimately threaten these companies’ bottom line.

Recently, reinsurance giant Munich Re attributed significant human and financial losses in 2008 to climate change and increasingly severe weather events.  A deadly cocktail of hurricanes, earthquakes, and other natural disasters caused nearly 220,000 human deaths, as well as financial losses totaling $200 billion.  These totals represent a 150-percent increase in financial losses from 2007. 

According to a press release by Munich Re on the impacts of climate change on the insurance industry, major catastrophic events in 2008 included:

• Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar, which brought heavy rainfall and a storm surge that caused more than 3 meters of flooding and extended …

Last week, the New York Times ran two stories that present a fascinating dichotomy in people’s response to rising home-heating costs.

On Friday, Elisabeth Rosenthal reported from the central German town of Darmstadt about “passive houses” that employ high-tech designs to provide warm air and hot water using incredibly small amounts of energy – as little as might be used to power a hair dryer.

Rosenthal explains the design briefly:

Using ultrathick insulation and complex doors and windows, the architect engineers a home encased in an airtight shell, so that barely any heat escapes and barely any cold seeps in. That means a passive house can be warmed not only by the sun, but also by the heat from appliances and even from occupants’ bodies.

The next day, Rosenthal’s colleagues, Tom Zeller, Jr. and Stefan Milkowski, reported on an entirely different trend that is developing here …

Chairmen Henry Waxman and James Oberstar have been busy sharpening water protection tools on the Congressional whetstone. In a memorandum to President-elect Obama, Waxman, chair of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, and Oberstar, chair of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, detail serious deterioration of Clean Water Act (CWA) enforcement. The investigation found nearly 500 enforcement cases, brought to protect the nation’s waters, that have been negatively affected as a result of a divided 2006 Supreme Court ruling and subsequent Bush administration guidance. The memo is here.

Among key findings, the memo concluded that:

• The Supreme Court’s 2006 decision in Rapanos v. United States and resulting EPA guidance for regional EPA offices to implement the decision have caused a decline in enforcing hundreds of CWA violations, contrary to sworn statements made by Bush Administration officials that the effects on CWA were “slight …

The Environmental Working Group is out with a new guide to Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs (CFLs), and they warn that not all CFLs are environmentally equal.

CFLs offer huge energy-consumption and length-of-use advantages over traditional incandescent bulbs, but they introduce one noteworthy environmental problem: each CFL has a tiny amount of mercury inside the glass. It’s not much – about what would fit on the tip of ballpoint pen – but if the bulb breaks, the mercury can be dangerous. If one breaks, you’re supposed to get children, pregnant women and pets out of the room, open the windows, turn off air conditioning or heating, put on rubber gloves and a mask, and carefully put the pieces into a sealed jar. (Read cleanup instructions from EWG here, and from EPA here (pdf)).

Disturbing as that description is, CFLs still pose less of a mercury problem than incandescent …

David Fahrenthold had a powerful article in Saturday's Washington Post on the failures of Chesapeake Bay cleanup efforts. The lede:

Government administrators in charge of an almost $6 billion cleanup of the Chesapeake Bay tried to conceal for years that their effort was failing -- even issuing reports overstating their progress -- to preserve the flow of federal and state money to the project, former officials say.

Devising accountability mechanisms to safeguard against just such problems with the Chesapeake Bay Program –– the multi-state effort to restore the Bay – was the purpose of a unique project of CPR’s this year. The effort yielded recommendations to help establish a framework for the accountability mechanism. Read more, here.

It breaks no new ground to observe that the Bush Administration’s record on respecting science and scientists is dismal. Three examples tell the tale:

• The President’s 2001 decision to severely restrict federal support for stem cell research;
• The President’s embrace of Intelligent Design – the latest ruse for insinuating the religious doctrine of Creationism into public school biology classes alongside evolution; and,
• The one for which future generations may best remember George W. Bush: his active opposition to meaningful action on climate change, which went so far as to suppress EPA’s scientific findings on the subject.

Those and other examples have set off a long-running battle – eight years of running, to be precise – pitting scientists and advocates of science against White House and industry operatives. Defending the White House record through much of this was Science Advisor to the President John Marburger. It was …