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Sunday, April 22, 2001 2:04 p.m. EDT Blaming America First on Earth Day
It's Earth Day. And that means it's time for good environmentalists everywhere to commence their annual ritual (at least during years when the Republican Party controls the White House) of beating up on the president for not being sufficiently green.
All the major Sunday TV chat shows turned vast segments of their programming over to environmental concerns, with Bush administration Cabinet secretaries Christie Whitman and Gale Norton placed squarely on the defensive.
But do Americans really think the country suffers from the sort of environmental crisis that would justify this kind of blanket coverage? Not particularly, at least according to a recent Gallup poll that shows the environment ranking 16th among the concerns of those surveyed.
A better question might be, does the largely Democratic environmental lobby, along with its media friends, really have America's best interests at heart? Or are they merely using the issue as a hot-button topic to keep Republicans from dealing with the nation's burgeoning energy crisis?
Two-dollar-a-gallon gasoline and rolling power blackouts in California are the kinds of things Americans do really care about. But listening to the media chatter, you'd think the public was ready to ditch their cars and douse the lights as long as we can end the scourge of oil drilling in Alaska and banish arsenic from our drinking water.
The arsenic issue is particularly comical. For the entire history of the environmental movement it was nowhere on the green agenda. But after Bush rebuffed the Clinton administration's last-minute decision to further limit arsenic levels in drinking water, suddenly we're all just one unregulated gulp away from poisoning ourselves.
In truth, much of America's enviro-activism is decended from the same old blame-America-firstism that was the stock- in-trade of the Democratic left a generation ago.
Don't believe it?
Then ask yourself why the greenies never complained much about the genuine threat to America's environmental health and safety posed by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's plan to plant a radioactive time bomb just 180 miles away from one of America's most densely populated regions.
Though environmentalists succeeded in making Three Mile Island a household name during their crusade to halt the U.S. nuclear power industry, it's a sure bet that few Americans have ever heard of Juragua.
But in fact, up until this past December, that tiny Cuban town was the scene of Russian-sponsored construction for a nuclear power plant modeled on the seriously flawed Soviet design used at Chernobyl.
Most need no reminder of the impact of the Chernobyl disaster. The 1986 meltdown in the then-Soviet controlled Ukraine was far and away the worst accident in the history of nuclear power, killing thousands within days and poisoning air, water and milk supplies in the region for years to come.
As Chernobyl's radioactive cloud drifted toward Western Europe and Scandinavia, it left yet more death and environmental destruction in its wake. Total fatalities from the Soviet catastrophe are said to be as high as 125,000, with a disproportionate share of casualties suffered by children, pregnant women and rescue workers.
How bad would a similar meltdown at Juragua be?
"Scientists have estimated that a nuclear accident on the scale of the 1986 Chernobyl event could expose 80 million Americans to potentially lethal radioactive fallout," reported the Orlando Sun-Sentinel in 1998.
If there was ever an environmental threat that needed a response from the U.S. government, Juragua was it.
But you couldn't tell that from watching Clinton administration officials, whose only reaction was to float a plan to enhance U.S. radiation detection capabilities.
In fact, President Clinton actually gave his blessing to a meeting on nuclear safety held in Moscow in 1996 without uttering so much as a peep about the nuclear disaster- waiting-to-happen right off U.S. shores.
For the 16 years it was under construction, Greenpeace, Worldwatch, the Sierra Club and the other green bomb throwers were mute on Juragua. Ditto on Clinton's silence about the potentially lethal environmental threat.
These are the same folks who have now gone to Defcon 3 alert status over oil drilling in Alaska's National Wildlife Refuge and the non-existent threat posed by current levels of arsenic in U.S. drinking water supplies.
Thankfully Russia was eventually forced to suspend funding for Juragua as their economy took a nosedive, though Havana and Moscow repeatedly voiced plans to restart the project. In December 2000, Castro finally decided that Juragua would not be "economically viable."
No thanks to the "blame-America-first" environmental crowd.
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