How Green Is The White House?

This year there is no peace on Earth Day. While the nation's attention has been focused on war in the Middle East, domestic battles still rage between those who want to cordon off America's wild places and those who want to tap the oil and gas reserves that lie beneath them. Environmental groups were stoked last week by a Senate vote that killed--at least for now--George W. Bush's plan to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, but the greens are continuing to hammer Bush's environmental record. Protesters planned to don surgical masks and hound Bush on Earth Day, April 22, for his air-pollution policies. Friends of the Earth, which had refrained from criticizing the President since Sept. 11, ended its silence this month by taking out full-page newspaper ads charging that Bush has put the earth up for sale. Philip Clapp, president of the National Environmental Trust, calls Bush "the worst President for the environment since the first Earth Day in 1970." Eric Schaeffer, who recently quit as chief of civil enforcement at the Environmental Protection Agency because he believes the White House is undermining the agency's role as watchdog, describes the problem this way: "The EPA is in the backseat, or maybe even riding the bumper, and the energy industry is having a field day."

Bush blinked on the high-profile issue of Alaskan oil, choosing not to spend political capital to save a dying, unpopular bill. But he hasn't given up on the domestic exploration he thinks is needed to reduce American dependence on foreign oil. In recent months the Administration has approved plans to search for oil and gas at dozens of sites in the Lower 48 states. In January, it fast-tracked seismic exploration for oil and gas by 26-ton "thumper trucks" in Utah's Dome Plateau desert, a few miles from Arches National Park--until the Interior Department's appeals office temporarily halted the trucks, saying a more thorough assessment of environmental damage was needed. And now the Administration is considering a proposal to drill more than 50,000 methane-gas wells in Wyoming and Montana.

To rebut its critics, the Administration is emphasizing its policies to clean the air and slow global warming. Bush plans to spend Earth Day in the Adirondacks, trumpeting policies that don't fit the environmentalists' caricature of him--such as EPA's decision to make General Electric pay almost $500 million to clean up the Hudson River. His defenders argue that environmentalists tend to be a misanthropic lot. "For many people, you can never do enough," EPA boss Christie Whitman told TIME. Indeed, the League of Conservation Voters, which in February gave Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney a grade of D-, gave Bill Clinton and Al Gore a C+ after their first year in office. "The President's environmental agenda is ambitious," says James Connaughton, chair of Bush's Council on Environmental Quality, which serves as a broker among myriad environmental agencies. "But it's also realistic. We focus on what's doable."