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Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress
Published in cloth in 2004, Strategic Ignorance revealed to countless readers the true scope of the Bush administration's assault on the environment. Midway through the second Bush term, with a Supreme Court far less likely to rein in the "wrecking crew"--as the authors describe those working to dismantle environmental protections--this book will be even more important and useful.
Strategic Ignorance sets forth not only the shocking Bush record but the stories and strategies behind it. Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and coauthor Paul Rauber brief us on the key administration figures, as well as legislators and lobbyists on the reactionary right, who strive to gut landmark laws; facilitate payback to polluters; distort, suppress, or ignore science; and invent soothing flimflam like "Clear Skies." The authors were prescient in predicting Bush's repeal of the Roadless Rule, the censoring of evidence on global warming, and the stonewalling on mercury emissions. They also foresaw the backlash now Congress rebelling against the EPA's "sewage blending" ploy, local opposition to coal-bed methane mining in the West, and resurgent environmental support at the polls.
Strategic Ignorance remains the indispensable guide to the Bush team's motives and tactics--and to how we can best oppose them to safeguard America's citizens, landscapes, and resources.
Strategic Ignorance sets forth not only the shocking Bush record but the stories and strategies behind it. Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope and coauthor Paul Rauber brief us on the key administration figures, as well as legislators and lobbyists on the reactionary right, who strive to gut landmark laws; facilitate payback to polluters; distort, suppress, or ignore science; and invent soothing flimflam like "Clear Skies." The authors were prescient in predicting Bush's repeal of the Roadless Rule, the censoring of evidence on global warming, and the stonewalling on mercury emissions. They also foresaw the backlash now Congress rebelling against the EPA's "sewage blending" ploy, local opposition to coal-bed methane mining in the West, and resurgent environmental support at the polls.
Strategic Ignorance remains the indispensable guide to the Bush team's motives and tactics--and to how we can best oppose them to safeguard America's citizens, landscapes, and resources.
- GenresPolitics
303 pages, Paperback
First published May 1, 2004
About the author
Carl Pope
6 books7 followersA veteran leader in the environmental movement, CARL POPE is the former Executive Director and Chairman of the Sierra Club. He's now the principal adviser at Inside Straight Strategies, looking for the underlying economics that link sustainability and economic development. He serves as a Senior Climate Adviser to former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He was a founder of the Blue-Green Alliance and America Votes. He has served on the Boards of Ceres, the California League of Conservation Voters, As You Sow, the National Clean Air Coalition, and California Common Cause. He is currently a member of the US-India Track II Climate Diplomacy project of the Aspen Institute. He writes regularly for Bloomberg View and Huffington Post. Mr. Pope is also the author of three books: Sahib, An American Misadventure in India; Hazardous Waste in America; and co-author along with Paul Rauber of Strategic Ignorance: Why the Bush Administration Is Recklessly Destroying a Century of Environmental Progress, which the New York Review of Books called "a splendidly fierce book."
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 25, 2019
Chronicling a return to the ethos of the robber barons
Carl Pope is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and his co-author Paul Rauber is a senior editor at Sierra Magazine. Their prose is direct, clear and hard-hitting, and their book is a devastating indictment of the Bush administration's environmental polices.
Exhibit #1 is the big lie. As Pope and Rauber put it, the Bush administration's strategy is to "Say one thing, do another" and "Never admit what you're up to. Rather, assert the opposite repeatedly and despite all available evidence." (p. 24) The interesting thing about this is, what could be more authoritarian and anti-democratic?
Bush's so-called "Clear Skies" proposal, which is aimed at circumventing the Clean Air Act, is an excellent example of the big lie and of the Orwellian doublethink employed by Bush's people. The authors quote Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords as saying, "The President says one thing, but does another...With a straight face he talks about protecting resources for our children--even as he abandons the federal protection of land and air and water as fast as he can. Does he think we don't notice?" (p. 78)
Actually we don't, most of us anyway. It very hard for most people to believe that the President can call for "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" while deliberately fostering the opposite. Yet, that is exactly what Bush does as this book so clearly and overwhelming demonstrates. The question might be why? Don't the people in the Bush administration love their children too?
Strange as it may seem the faith-based logic of the administration has Higher goals. It believes first that it is essential to reduce the size and effectiveness of government. Bush wants to make government less popular by making it less effective (see Chapter 13). But more than this is an underlining rationale that simultaneously desires a return to a social Darwinian ethos while believing that the Second Coming will make all of this irrelevant anyway. Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who would fit nicely into the Bush administration except for his candid expression, put it like this when asked if it might not be wise to save something for future generations: "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." (p. 25)
Meanwhile, no more "nanny state." Let's bring back the "social Darwinian notion of the struggle for existence as 'red in tooth and claw.'" Only "this time...the predators" will be "ruthless corporations, not carnivores." Let's "Stop coddling the public. Only wimps and trial lawyers worry about parts per million." (p. 23) Indeed, there is the idea that winning is its own justification, even if you cheat to win, and the devil take the hindmost.
Consequently it is not greed alone that is powering the Bush pollution machine. It is instead a kind of spiritual arrogance that allows the employment of a deliberate strategy of ignorance, as the authors see it, a strategy that allows Bush to reward polluters and others who desecrate America, without qualm, all in the name of a new sort of laissez faire mentality combined with a belief that this earth, this country and our lives are just stopping places on the way to the coming rapture. With this kind of mentality it doesn't matter what science says. The studies are really irrelevant. Junk science is as good as real science; indeed, the only science that matters is the science that agrees with the polluters.
Pope and Rauber detail in sharp focus how the Bush administration has perverted the scientific method and in effect substituted false rhetoric and lies for scientific experiment. But it is not enough to allow the contamination of our country by big corporations. It is also necessary that laws be passed that protect those corporations from being sued by people who may be harmed by their pollution. Therefore it is a top priority this year for the White House to see that laws are passed limiting the ability of citizens to sue those who pollute or otherwise harm them.
In addition to the indictment, the authors present a way to reclaim America's future as outlined in Chapter 15. Clearly at the top of the list of how to save America is to ENFORCE the Clean Air Act! The authors also want the Superfund tax restored so that polluters will have to pay for their own clean-ups instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. This is included in the "Ten Commonsense Solutions for the Next Twenty Years" that they present beginning on page 228.
To the commonsense solutions I would offer this: we need more journalists trained in environmental concerns and publishers who are not afraid to actually report what the administration is doing. If a wider public actually knew the extent of the despoiling of America being undertaken by George W. and friends, they would cry out long and loud and maybe something could be done about it. The authors offer, in an appalling Appendix beginning on page 241, a list of what Bush has done to the environment since taking office in 2001.
Messrs. Pope and Rauber are to be commended for their work in trying to counteract the horrors committed by the Bush administration, and Sierra Club Books and the University of California Press are to complimented on helping to produce such an outstanding and extremely important book.
And yes, rivers should NOT catch fire, nor should those who drop their waste on the rest of us get away with it.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
Carl Pope is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club and his co-author Paul Rauber is a senior editor at Sierra Magazine. Their prose is direct, clear and hard-hitting, and their book is a devastating indictment of the Bush administration's environmental polices.
Exhibit #1 is the big lie. As Pope and Rauber put it, the Bush administration's strategy is to "Say one thing, do another" and "Never admit what you're up to. Rather, assert the opposite repeatedly and despite all available evidence." (p. 24) The interesting thing about this is, what could be more authoritarian and anti-democratic?
Bush's so-called "Clear Skies" proposal, which is aimed at circumventing the Clean Air Act, is an excellent example of the big lie and of the Orwellian doublethink employed by Bush's people. The authors quote Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords as saying, "The President says one thing, but does another...With a straight face he talks about protecting resources for our children--even as he abandons the federal protection of land and air and water as fast as he can. Does he think we don't notice?" (p. 78)
Actually we don't, most of us anyway. It very hard for most people to believe that the President can call for "Clear Skies" and "Healthy Forests" while deliberately fostering the opposite. Yet, that is exactly what Bush does as this book so clearly and overwhelming demonstrates. The question might be why? Don't the people in the Bush administration love their children too?
Strange as it may seem the faith-based logic of the administration has Higher goals. It believes first that it is essential to reduce the size and effectiveness of government. Bush wants to make government less popular by making it less effective (see Chapter 13). But more than this is an underlining rationale that simultaneously desires a return to a social Darwinian ethos while believing that the Second Coming will make all of this irrelevant anyway. Reagan's Secretary of the Interior James Watt, who would fit nicely into the Bush administration except for his candid expression, put it like this when asked if it might not be wise to save something for future generations: "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns." (p. 25)
Meanwhile, no more "nanny state." Let's bring back the "social Darwinian notion of the struggle for existence as 'red in tooth and claw.'" Only "this time...the predators" will be "ruthless corporations, not carnivores." Let's "Stop coddling the public. Only wimps and trial lawyers worry about parts per million." (p. 23) Indeed, there is the idea that winning is its own justification, even if you cheat to win, and the devil take the hindmost.
Consequently it is not greed alone that is powering the Bush pollution machine. It is instead a kind of spiritual arrogance that allows the employment of a deliberate strategy of ignorance, as the authors see it, a strategy that allows Bush to reward polluters and others who desecrate America, without qualm, all in the name of a new sort of laissez faire mentality combined with a belief that this earth, this country and our lives are just stopping places on the way to the coming rapture. With this kind of mentality it doesn't matter what science says. The studies are really irrelevant. Junk science is as good as real science; indeed, the only science that matters is the science that agrees with the polluters.
Pope and Rauber detail in sharp focus how the Bush administration has perverted the scientific method and in effect substituted false rhetoric and lies for scientific experiment. But it is not enough to allow the contamination of our country by big corporations. It is also necessary that laws be passed that protect those corporations from being sued by people who may be harmed by their pollution. Therefore it is a top priority this year for the White House to see that laws are passed limiting the ability of citizens to sue those who pollute or otherwise harm them.
In addition to the indictment, the authors present a way to reclaim America's future as outlined in Chapter 15. Clearly at the top of the list of how to save America is to ENFORCE the Clean Air Act! The authors also want the Superfund tax restored so that polluters will have to pay for their own clean-ups instead of putting the burden on taxpayers. This is included in the "Ten Commonsense Solutions for the Next Twenty Years" that they present beginning on page 228.
To the commonsense solutions I would offer this: we need more journalists trained in environmental concerns and publishers who are not afraid to actually report what the administration is doing. If a wider public actually knew the extent of the despoiling of America being undertaken by George W. and friends, they would cry out long and loud and maybe something could be done about it. The authors offer, in an appalling Appendix beginning on page 241, a list of what Bush has done to the environment since taking office in 2001.
Messrs. Pope and Rauber are to be commended for their work in trying to counteract the horrors committed by the Bush administration, and Sierra Club Books and the University of California Press are to complimented on helping to produce such an outstanding and extremely important book.
And yes, rivers should NOT catch fire, nor should those who drop their waste on the rest of us get away with it.
--Dennis Littrell, author of “The World Is Not as We Think It Is”
January 23, 2008
Good Grief! I was amazed by this book (unfortunately everything that surprised me was bad). The Bush administration has taken what used to be a government "by the people, for the people" and turned it into a government that is by corporate America, for corporate America. It's disgusting what contempt the government has for any regulation that protects the common assets, like our collective environment. (Reading Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal really helps to understand where the administration is coming from.) In an absolutely free market, corporations would have no regulations and there would be no public property, only private. This is the direction the Bush administration has moved. Unfortunately, stripping governmental pollution regulations doesn't just affect corporations, but it affects everyone. Does the polluted air around an outmoded coal-fired power plant, that the Bush administration removed cleaning requirements from, stay around the dirty plant, or does it move to the inner-city poor and the rural poor and cause their children athsma atacks? Is the mercury it belches into the atmosphere consumed by only the plant's owners, who bring home the profit from the plant, or does it pollute out waters and make everyone's water unsafe to drink and everyone's fish unsafe to eat? Does the polluted water that drains from filthy commercial feedlots stay near the feedlot or does it make us all sick? Our government has stripped regulations placed to save the entire population from damage in order to give a tiny, miniscule, fraction of people much more money. How's that for serving The People?
I used to think of the result of pollution as global warming, which it is, but, as terrible as that is, there is so much more. There is so much more damage caused the citizens of America and the earth that will harm us even before global warming does. Our government needs to take care of its entire people, not just the pocketbooks of the one's that own businesses.
America doesn't need to suffer financially from having clean practices. If we join with the international community, which is waiting for us, and work together to clean up our earth, then we can also work together to encourage any dirty stragglers to adopt cleaner policies. We can renegotiate trade agreements so that all parties are required to have clean production standards in order to have free trade. This way clean nations don't suffer financially because of the cheaper production costs of dirty countries.
There is no reason to continue our polluting ways. With the proper incentives by our government, technological advances will be made that allow us to slash our pollution and to be a global leader (and financial benefiter, as American technologies would be sold worldwide to clean industries) of tomorrows worldwide green economies. Just like the Clinton administration invested in research and recognized the financial potential of the internet, and so DEVELOPED (not invented like people mischaracterized Gore's words, but developed - like Gore actually said) the internet, a forward-looking administration today could recognize the huge financial opportunities of a future green economy. Being the forerunners in green technology could be America's next financial boom, if we only have an administration that will help pull corporate America out of its antiquated ways and focus it on development.
We have made terrible environmental mistakes, but we can make enormous environmental advances that will not only not damage our economy, but will stimulate huge growth. It's imperative that we move in this direction if we care at all about the conditions our children will live in.
I used to think of the result of pollution as global warming, which it is, but, as terrible as that is, there is so much more. There is so much more damage caused the citizens of America and the earth that will harm us even before global warming does. Our government needs to take care of its entire people, not just the pocketbooks of the one's that own businesses.
America doesn't need to suffer financially from having clean practices. If we join with the international community, which is waiting for us, and work together to clean up our earth, then we can also work together to encourage any dirty stragglers to adopt cleaner policies. We can renegotiate trade agreements so that all parties are required to have clean production standards in order to have free trade. This way clean nations don't suffer financially because of the cheaper production costs of dirty countries.
There is no reason to continue our polluting ways. With the proper incentives by our government, technological advances will be made that allow us to slash our pollution and to be a global leader (and financial benefiter, as American technologies would be sold worldwide to clean industries) of tomorrows worldwide green economies. Just like the Clinton administration invested in research and recognized the financial potential of the internet, and so DEVELOPED (not invented like people mischaracterized Gore's words, but developed - like Gore actually said) the internet, a forward-looking administration today could recognize the huge financial opportunities of a future green economy. Being the forerunners in green technology could be America's next financial boom, if we only have an administration that will help pull corporate America out of its antiquated ways and focus it on development.
We have made terrible environmental mistakes, but we can make enormous environmental advances that will not only not damage our economy, but will stimulate huge growth. It's imperative that we move in this direction if we care at all about the conditions our children will live in.
July 6, 2008
This book was very informative, although it was amazingly depressing as you might imagine. The first few chapters are really snarky and skippable, but the rest is fine.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews