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Bush's Budget: Hello Petroleum, Goodbye Endangered Species, Clean Water, Amtrak...

| Wed Feb. 7, 2007 11:25 AM PST

Despite a seemingly robust support for alternative, environmentally-friendly fuels in his State of the Union address, President Bush is anything but green. The President's $2.9 trillion budget, submitted to Congress Monday, included the one-two punch of cutting conservation while increasing gas and coal-powered industries.

Here are just a few ways the President is trying "to promote energy independence for our country, while dramatically improving the environment."

Clean power:

$385 million for "clean" power derived from coal

Nearly $500 million for a nuclear waste dump

$114 million to expand the U.S.'s nuclear power facilities

$405 million for the U.S. to reprocess nuclear reactor fuel for sale to foreign nations

$5.8 million increase for the Bureau of Land Management's oil and gas operations

Doubles the capacity of the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve over 20 years.

$400 million cut from Amtrak's passenger services

Conservation:

$44 million cut from clean water initiatives

$9 million decrease for the National Institutes of Environmental Health Sciences

$85 million cut from the Land and Water Conservation Fund

Proposes selling $800 million of National Forests

950 million acres of public lands to be sold over 10 years

Wildlife:

$5.5 million cut from the endangered species recovery program

funding for private landowners to help conserve at-risk wildlife, cut entirely

Budget assumes the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge will be used for oil and gas drilling

National Wildlife Refuge System receives a small increase in funding, but still less than FY 2004 level

Bureau of Land Management's wildlife program, cut entirely

All this may sound dire, but not to worry. The President's budget also calls for a 10-year plan to get the National Parks rehabilitated in time for their 2016 centennial--by selling private companies the rights to name trails and facilities. An idea he cribbed from his buddy, Richard Pombo, who, after his November whuppin' is nonetheless probably quite pleased with this budget scenario.

—Jen Phillips

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Jen Phillips is an assistant editor at Mother Jones. For more of her stories, click here.

Comments

Submitted by bob t (not verified) on Sat Feb. 10, 2007 12:55 PM PST.

Pombo is another corrupt catholic republican whose greed for money and political continues on even thoug he got thrown out of office. I amy be a catholic but not that/their kind of catholic.
The popes, both present and previous, and the US Conference of Catholic Bishops and most catholic voters have sold themselves and catholicism out to the rethpublikkkan party. Will they change, most likely never. The church has sold it's soul and demeaned itself and become nothing more than another political organization, no longer a religion. Evangelical FUNDAMENTALISM is bad for america and the entire world. Big religion is destroying both.