Good News/Bad News Sept. 5, 2002

By Matthew Wheeland, AlterNet. Posted September 5, 2002.

Well, we made it through another World Summit on Sustainable Development, and there wasn't a corporate coup, and our political and corporate leaders didn't pull off their masks to reveal their true alien-monster faces. So that's good news. Otherwise, it was a moderately crappy week for Mother Earth's health. That said, we'll be starting with the Bad News:

Mad Max, where are you now? A hundred years from now, thanks to the Bush Administration's ruling on privatizing water supplies, the world will be a desert, with wealthy oases holding all the water, and poor schlubs like Barstow, Calif., pouting in their sand gardens. Sure, we're talking more about Kevin Costner than Mel Gibson, but "Mad Max" is a much more dramatic name than "The Mariner," don't you think?

Just when the dread scourge of acrylamide had sunk below the public radar for the time being, a German magazine found the toxic chemical in coffee. However, at the same time a group of scientists found that caffeine reduces the risk of skin cancer. What's a coffee junkie to do?

Environmentalists are complaining that the Earth Summit was unable to accomplish any meaningful sustainability progress because said summit was caught in the mighty invisible hand of capitalism, with the thumb of that invisible hand being the OPEC nations, and the (middle) finger being the almost comically evil and greedy Bush Administration.

The best part of this job is finding the little stories that just perfectly illustrate the larger problems. It seems that only seven of the 200 countries attending the Earth Summit have volunteered to pay into the fund for cleaning up the site of the Summit. Can't you just imagine a bunch of rich, fat white guys sitting around, smoking, tossing their Big Mac wrappers far and wide, and then going home to brag about their green sensibilities to the gullible press?

Despite this absolute lack of interest in truly helping out, the Bush Administration offered, as its showcase at the Earth Summit, more voluntary partnerships to save the planet! This time, he wants the world to partner with transnational corporations. Pardon our cynicism, but won't this just perpetuate the current cycle of corporate "responsibility:" It will allow the government to do nothing, and the corporations to do nothing, but both groups will be able to just feel good about themselves...

The EPA has just approved the use of toxic chemicals, like diesel fuel, to open up oil and gas wells. We are comfortable applauding this asinine maneuver, as it is just giving one more clear example whose side the EPA is on in the ongoing battle between industry and environmentalists.

Along with most right-thinking people these days, we get a little jittery and paranoid any time Bush wants to "review" and/or "modernize" environmental legislation or treaties. The latest on his hit-list is the Nat'l Environmental Policy Act, established by everyone's favorite environmentalist, Richard Nixon, to prevent hasty or unnecessary logging and development without environmental impact reports. After Bush's stellar work on the Kyoto Protocol and the Earth Summit, we can only wonder what's in store for the next Act.

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