Bush veto bad news for Great Lakes

[Spiel]

Bush veto bad news for Great Lakes

 

05/11/08 / COMMENTARY

Eric Sharp - DETROIT FREE PRESS

 

 

 

President George W. Bush has threatened to veto a House-passed bill that would make saltwater ships install systems that kill all living organisms in their tanks before dumping ballast in U. S. waters, including the Great Lakes.

 

There’s no question this administration has one of the worst environmental records in history, drawing fire from conservative hunting and fishing groups as well as the usual ecological lefties, and that the bill the president threatens to veto is no more than a step in the right direction.

 

Yet anyone who fishes or goes boating in the region should contact both of their senators and tell them that the Senate needs to adopt the House bill quickly and send it to the White House with a veto-proof majority, because if nothing else, it’s a start.

 

Jordan Lubetkin, a spokesman for the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office in Ann Arbor, Mich., said this bill is “a step in the right direction to stop what has been a plague on the Great Lakes. We really need to get the Senate to pass this. We can’t let the momentum stop or we’ll be back to square one.”

 

The administration’s objections to the bill center on provisions that would require the Coast Guard to provide security for natural gas terminals and ships and make changes in the organization’s top command structure. The validity of those objections is belied by the fact that the bill passed the House, 395-7, with nearly unanimous bipartisan support.

 

The White House has also floated a specious argument that the new law would force recreational boats to meet the same standards as commercial ships. But that would require a ludicrously narrow interpretation of the law, and even if that were remotely possible, Congress already is working on legislation that would clearly exempt small boats.

 

The provision to protect the Great Lakes and other waters from continued invasions by damaging exotic species is included in a U. S. Coast Guard reauthorization bill.

 

Zebra mussels alone have cost the United States several hundred million dollars in damages since they arrived from the Baltic Sea about 25 years ago.

 

When you add up the damage caused by other species, such as the sea lampreys that have decimated lake trout and other game fish, viral hemorrhagic septicemia that has infected the three lower Great Lakes, and algae blooms caused by the invaders, the total cost has to be in the billions of dollars.

 

But that’s small potatoes compared with what the Bush administration has borrowed for the war in Iraq; many economists project that the total war costs will exceed $1 trillion.

 

This is the administration that in 2004 announced a major initiative to protect the Great Lakes and then failed to finance that program.

 

Mary Gade, the Midwest administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, recently told the Chicago Tribune that the Bush administration forced her to resign because she was aggressively investigating Dow Corp.’s role in dioxin pollution of the Tittabawassee and Saginaw rivers and Saginaw Bay, all of which feed into the Great Lakes.

 

And dozens of scientists in the EPA have said they have been pressured by superiors to water down data that might be detrimental to friends of the administration or have had their scientific findings ignored by administration rule makers.

 

This is an administration that doesn’t think that protecting an ecosystem that holds 95 percent of the surface water in North America is as important as protecting the profits of its powerful friends in industries such as oil and chemicals.

 

But if you hunt or fish, you know better, and there should be little that’s more important to you than protecting our lands and waters.