A US Environmental Protection Agency symposium took place on Wednesday, January 18, 2006, in Washington DC, in order to commemorate the agency’s 35-th anniversary. Established by President Nixon in 1970, EPA was chaired to-date by ten Administrator’s - eight of them were appointed by Republican Presidents and two by Democrats. At the Wednesday’s symposium participated seven Administrators. Those missing were: Mike Leavitt, the current health and human services secretary, who we assume was not going to sit in judgement on a fellow member of the present Administration in Washington, Mrs. Anne Burford, a Reagan appointee who died last year, and Dough Costle, one of the two Democrats, who was in the Carter administration.

The current agency chief is Stephen L. Johnson; he was the only one saying good things about the state of the EPA under the George W, Bush Presidency , he is the third agency chair of this administration. The six former administrators - five under Republican Presidents and the sixth under President Clinton - all of them had very serious misgivings about the present EPA.

The First administrator was William D. Ruckelshaus who served 1970-1973 under President Nixon, and then again, 1983-1985 under President Reagan.

The second administrator was Russell E. Train who served under President Nixon 1973-1977. Ruckelshaus and Train, in the Nixon years, built the agency and one could say indeed that since that great start, the further developments, were basically downhill, with the oil and automotive industries doing their best to interfere with its work.

Lee M. Thomas was the agency head in the Reagan’s second administration.

William K. Reilly served under George Bush, the father. He was the head of the agency at the time of the 1992 Rio Summit, and was replaced by Carol M. Browner in the Clinton administration.

Christie Whitman was the first of the three EPA administrators of the George W. Bush presidency.

Mr. Johnson defended the agency’s current policies, saying it has invested $20 billion since 2001 in research and technologies intended to cut carbon emissions through dozens of programs. This did not go over well and his predecessors reminded him that since Bush took office in 2001, neither the President nor the Republican-led Congress has proposed any comprehensive plan to limit carbon emissions from vehicles, utilities and other sources, a problem that Mr. Bush’s own Department of Energy predicts to grow worse. The agency’s Annual energy Outlook for 2006, which was released in December, showed that CO2 emissions from inside the US are projected to increase by 37% by 2030.

Mr. Johnson said: “I know from the President on down, he is committed, and certainly his charge to me was, and certainly our team has heard it - “I want you to accelerate the pace of environmental protection. I want you to maintain our economic competitiveness.” And I think that’s really what it’s about.”

 www.environmental-finance.com also of January 19, 2006.

“Five US organizations have become the first members of EPA’s Climate Leaders programme to meet their voluntary GHG emissions reduction targets.”

These organizations are: Healthcare Group Baxter International, car-maker General Motors, Pharmaceutical giant IBM (?), Cleaning Product firm SC Johnson, and the D.O.E. own National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL).

And what have they done? GM cut GHG emissions by 10% from its automotive production North American facilities; IBM cut the emissions related to its energy use by 4% worldwide; NREL cut GHG emissions by 10% per square foot (?); Baxter International cut its emissions per unit of production by 16%; and the winner is SC Johnson which reduced emissions by 23% per pound of product.

What about GM producing better cars that save on oil products? - not a word! We assume they still oppose any improvement of the miles/gallon figure. What is the meaning of some improvement in their economics by reducing waste, but doing nothing to improve the quality of the product leaving their plant? Are we to be taken by this gimmick? What is this hiding behind voluntary achievements?

Further, the information about the thrashing of the present EPA by its former heads was hard to get. Thanks to the Associated Press, it was the British Guardian who had a good article titled: “Ex-EPA Chiefs Blame Bush in Global Warming.”

The New York Times had an article by Michael Janofsky but the article was not available on its website. This is nothing new. Whenever a good article against oil appears in the printed version of the NYTimes, it is not made available to the much larger readership of the web. Without having it on the web, obviously those articles do not reach the environmental press either. As a case in point, the good articles by Thomas Friedman do not reach the international audience either. Perhaps the paper thinks they make for good political sense for East Coast readers in the US, but could be deemed inflammatory if read by others? The NYTimes had not a single word about the recent AP6 meeting in Sydney, Australia, either, even though the US was prominent at that meeting. The New York Times sold space for an ExxonMobil advertisement on the January 19, 2006 OP-ED page; that add is available on the www.SustainabiliTank.info “CARTOONS” button.