"Some courts are taking laws written more than 30 years ago to primarily address local and regional environmental effects, and applying them to global climate change. The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act were never meant to regulate global climate change." —George W. Bush, April 16, 2008

The Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Environmental Policy Act—enacted with bipartisan support and signed by a Republican president, Richard Nixon—were most definitely not meant "to primarily address local and regional environmental effects." The statement makes no sense.

What's the best expression to describe the Bush administration these days? Pig-headed? Stubborn? Incorrigible? Mulish? Headstrong? Dogged? Intractable, Recalcitrant, Rigid? Willful? Indeed, all those adjectives apply to the outgoing (not soon enough) Bush administration, particularly with respect to its environmental activities. A handful of illustrations.

A year ago, the Supreme Court ruled that greenhouse-gas emissions from vehicles are pollutants that the Environmental Protection Agency must regulate. The EPA has refused. More litigation is underway to force action, but if the Supremes can be ignored one wonders what's the point. Pig-headed, meaning no disrespect to swine.

Up in the Arctic, the administration has missed several self-imposed deadlines to announce its decision whether to protect polar bears. During the delay time, the administration sold leases for oil drilling in the bears' Chukchi Sea habitat. When Senator Barbara Boxer asked Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne to explain to her committee what was going on, he simply refused to appear. Incorrigible.

The Bush administration, highly placed sources have revealed exclusively to Tom's Turn, is putting the final touches on one last, sweeping reorganization of the federal environmental bureaucracy. Elements of the plan include:

• Selling the national parks in order to reduce the national debt and prop up the investment banking system and hedge fund operators. Existing concessionnaires will be given preference, followed by Disney and other theme-park operators. The Saudi royal family, it is said, might take over the national monument in Oklahoma where oil was first discovered.

• Giving the national forests to the timber industry. Why not sell them? An anonymous administration spokesman said, "We've been selling the trees on the national forests at a loss for decades; why would anyone expect us to ask to turn a profit on those lands now?"

Bill McKibben is on a crusade. He wants to pound the number 350 into the heads of everyone on the planet, including yours.

Three fifty is the amount of carbon in parts per million that the atmosphere can handle safely without warming up and melting glaciers, raising the sea level, bringing on killer storms, destroying wildlife habitat, and all the other horrors that pop like mushrooms from your morning paper nearly every day.

Three fifty. Remember it.

So what's the current CO2 level? About 375 and rising quickly.

Writing this on St. Pat's Day, the holiday that turns thoughts to subjects green. And isn't green all the rage! My friend and colleague Terry Winckler just sent around an email that allows you to order your TV viewing habits by green content, should that be appealing.

On a slightly related note, I just received a note from the Internal Revenue Service that says in a few months we'll be receiving a few hundred dollars as part of the government's attempt to stimulate the economy. I tend to be of the opinion that a growing economy is a large contributor to what has led us to this climate mess we're in, not to mention many other environmental problems, that a steady-state economy is what we should aim at, but one doesn't say such things in public. Still, the government has decided that it needs to go another $150 billion into debt in order to give most taxpayers $600 they can spend and get the economy rocketing along again.

I'm not one to write about internal affairs very often, but there was a West Coast celebration last Thursday evening (March 6) you might enjoy hearing about.

The occasion was an event to honor Buck Parker, who served as the Executive Director here at Earthjustice for the past 10 years, as he passes the reins of leadership to Trip Van Noppen. The event was held in a beautiful old club at the Presidio of San Francisco, and there must have been 250 people attending, including representatives from the Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, the Natural Resources Defense Council, The Wilderness Society, and many other fine non-profit organizations we've represented in court over the years.

Among the evening's highlights: San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom (whose father, incidentally, serves on the Earthjustice board) gave a fine tribute-cum-stemwinder about how the city by the bay is tackling global warming. Bill Meadows of The Wilderness Society gave a gentle, folksy talk about Buck's leadership within the environmental community.

I have a simple rule of thumb to decide how to vote on the ever-more-complicated, ever-more numerous propositions that infest the ballot here in California come election time. It is this: Anything that is supported by the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association is something that I will enthusiastically vote against. The late Mr. Jarvis and a co-conspirator named Paul Gann managed to get a property tax measure passed in 1978 that ruined the public schools in our fair state and caused much other mischief that we still suffer from. The association remains active and is reliably wrong on everything.

Well, it looks as if we may have just such a lodestone on matters environmental. It's a new group known as Responsible Resources. The website gives immediate clues-a rotating slide show with heroic photographs of offshore oil rigs, a dam, the Alaska pipeline, giant cooling towers, and an onshore oil rig, with solar panels and windmills thrown in for good measure. An ad launching the group argues against raising taxes on the energy industry.

Sometimes, not often enough but sometimes, the bad guys get their just deserts. (And yes, that's deserts not desserts in case you wondered. But I digress.)

We're speaking today of a congressman from southern Arizona named Rick Renzi. Mr. Renzi, a Republican and chairman of John McCain's Arizona campaign, persuaded Congress to enact a nefarious little paragraph in 2003 that declared the Army at Fort Huachuca not responsible for the full impact of its water withdrawals on the San Pedro River.

The San Pedro is a desert (not dessert) miracle, a verdant, meandering stream teeming with an amazing variety of wildlife, including the most varied array of mammals outside Costa Rica, or so they say. The river rises in Mexico, flows north past the fort and the town of Sierra Vista, which exists to serve the fort and its personnel, and eventually joins the Gila. The Renzi rider has blocked efforts to rein in the growth of the fort and the town. Increased groundwater pumping has been a principal cause of the river's drying up from time to time, wreaking havoc on its wildlife. Earthjustice has made some headway with litigation, but the rider is a big bad obstacle.

Sometimes, not often enough but sometimes, the bad guys get their just deserts. (And yes, that's deserts not desserts in case you wondered. But I digress.)

...the next 11 months promise to be even worse than the last 85!

By my oh-so-sophisticated calculations we have now endured 85 months of the Bush assault on our environmental laws, our environmental agencies, and our environment itself.

That leaves eleven months to go, and the administration seems hell-bent on ratcheting up the pace of its assault as the public becomes a tad outrage-weary and hopes that whoever eventually wins a ticket to the White House can't possibly be as bad as what we've suffered through for seven long years.

Do I exaggerate? Here's a bit of what happened in Month 85:

We've had a spate of stories here in northern California about the crash of the fall run of king salmon returning to spawn in the watershed of the Sacramento River. Historically, many hundreds of thousands of the fish would return annually; this year the count was around ninety thousand, which spells disaster for salmon fishermen up and down the coast. It is also one more indicator that the river system, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta in particular, is very sick, largely because of the enormous volume of water diverted via giant pumps for agricultural and domestic use.

This was the story that the papers carried, and it did not make Big Ag happy. Just this morning (Feb 19) the San Francisco Chronicle carried an opinion piece from one Laura King Moon of the State Water Contractors that tries to put a different spin on the matter. She argues that the pumps that suck water from the delta are carefully regulated to protect salmon, that the problem must be out in the ocean or with fishing. And she puts much of the blame on striped bass, a species that was introduced into the delta more than a century ago and has coexisted with the salmon ever since. Moon says predation by bass on baby salmon is significant. She conveniently ignores the desperate plight of scores more delta species including the delta smelt, which recently provoked a court order that requires that more water be allowed to flow through the delta during the first half of the year. This may require that diversions from the delta be reduced unless we have big wet year.