America - Andrew Stephen hears carbon dioxide emissions are harmless

There is no such thing as global warming, or carbon dioxide emissions. And if they do exist, it's certainly not the job of the Bush administration to do anything about it. Those environmentalist troublemakers may come up with statistics - such as that the US, with less than 5 per cent of the world's population, produces 23 per cent of its CO2 - but there's no proof for any of this, so Dubbya and his cronies can safely relax and ignore all these supposed problems (which are subjects, after all, for losers like Al Gore).

I believe there are two reasons why this is, in essence, the approach of Dubbya and his cronies to the environmental issues of the day. The first is that moves to cut down carbon dioxide emissions would cost US industry - and especially the power plants so beloved of Bush, Cheney and co - a significant slice of its profits. The second is that the Bush administration's members are, either literally or figuratively, old, and there is an instinctive, lazy attitude that if such problems were not known to exist in their younger days, then they are modernistic baloney.

Take what happened just over a week ago. The Environmental Protection Agency - the hapless government body whose duty it is to protect the environment - ruled that it could not categorise carbon dioxide as an air pollutant. The Clinton administration had insisted that the agency had the authority to deal with CO2 as a pollutant; but the Bush administration has now reversed that. "We cannot try to use the Clean Air Act to regulate for climate change purposes because the act was not designed or intended for that purpose," explains Jeff Holmstead, an agency spokesman. So take that, all you campaigning tree-huggers.

To say that the agency under Dubbya is a toothless body is to put it mildly. In June, its head, Christie Todd Whitman, resigned after a series of climbdowns and humiliations under the Bush regime that appointed her. Her last report, issued four days before she stepped down, contained scant mention of global warming or other sensitive matters. The Bush administration had censored the report, reducing its discussion of global climate change to two inconsequential paragraphs. It highlighted instead that six major air pollutants - sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, carbon monoxide, ozone, lead and particulate matter - had declined by about a quarter over the past three decades.

But of carbon dioxide, widely assumed nowadays to be the principal cause of global warming, there was no mention. The most striking thing about the report, though, was how it showed that the improvements which have been made, in air quality, drinking water and the like, are all products of laws and rulings introduced in the 1970s - measures that the Bush administration is now doing its best to amend or weaken.

More than 125 million Americans suffer from intermittent unhealthy air, while 270,000 miles of rivers and streams remain too polluted for fishing or swimming. But Dubbya is doing his best to emasculate the Clean Air Act, which might have improved matters, and has instead put forward a much weaker plan called "Clear Skies". This would supposedly reduce power-plant emissions over the next two decades, but it does not address the issue of carbon dioxide. Information withheld by the Environmental Protection Agency shows that a competing bill drawn up by a group of senators would provide substantially better health benefits than the so-called Clear Skies proposal. The senators say that their carbon dioxide-reducing bill would result in 17,800 fewer deaths by 2020, and that this could be achieved at "negligible" cost to industry.

But Dubbya has held firm, saying that such regulations would hurt the economy and prove too costly for the power industry. For the same reason, his administration pulled out of the Kyoto Protocol. Many of Bush's supporters insist that because carbon dioxide is vital to life - being absorbed by plants and trees and emitted by humans and animals - calls to reduce it are newfangled nonsense.

The agency's ruling on carbon dioxide came the same week that thousands of older power plants and oil refineries were judged to be exempt from the poor old Clean Air Act. Dubbya, in short, has done an about-turn on all major environmental issues. In his 2000 campaign, he acknowledged that CO2 was a pollutant, but he has now gone back on campaign pledges to reduce it. Meanwhile, of the 150 glaciers that were in Montana's Glacier National Park a century ago, the remaining 26 are melting.

But has this anything to do with global warming? Good gracious, no. Bush and his cronies are tough men of the world who do not bother themselves with effete little issues such as the environment. Long may the power plants belch out their noxious fumes, and to hell with the Kyoto Protocol and all the tree-huggers, for those fumes are what makes Uncle Sam and the American economy tick.