At an Environmental Protection Agency symposium commemorating the agency’s 35th annivesrary, six former EPA chiefs criticized the Bush administration for failing to act on Global Warming.
Said Bill Ruckelshaus, the first EPA administrator under Nixon and Ford, “I don’t think there’s a commitment in this administration.”
His successor, Russell Train, charged that, “We need leadership, and I don’t think we’re getting it.”
Lee Thomas, who served during the Reagan administration, said “if the United States doesn’t deal with those kinds of issues in a leadership role, they’re not going to get dealt with. So I’m very concerned about this country and this agency.”
Even Christie Whitman, Bush’s first EPA administrator, said that people are obviously having having “an enormous impact” on global warming. “You’d need to be in a hole somewhere to think that the amount of change that we have imposed on land, and the way we’ve handled deforestation, farming practices, development, and what we’re putting into the air, isn’t exacerbating what is probably a natural trend,” she said. “But this is worse, and it’s getting worse.”
It seems unanimous…outside the Oval Office.