Mar 16, 2006, Reuters, Washington - "President George W. Bush chose [one-term Senator and current] Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne today as his choice to replace Gale Norton as Interior secretary. ...
The Interior secretary job, which oversees federal lands, requires Senate confirmation.
... Bruce Hamilton, national conservation director for the Sierra Club, was highly critical of Norton and said he did not think Kempthorne would be any friendlier to environmentalists' causes.
"Although he is known as a very nice, personable, noncombative person, he has an abysmal record on the environment," Hamilton said.
The Interior Department manages national parks, wildlife refuges and other federal lands, which account for 1 out of every 5 acres in the United States.
An unfinished item on Norton's agenda was the effort to convince Congress to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, still a priority for Bush.
Republicans are trying to push that plan through the Senate by attaching it to a budget now under debate. But that idea is controversial among Democrats and many moderate Republicans and faces its stiffest resistance in the House of Representatives."
Interestingly, this is not the first time Bush has considered putting this particularly affable fox in charge of the henhouse. In 2003, W was considering putting Kempthorne as a recess appointment at the head of EPA (hilarious, since he once threatened to run the EPA out of Idaho). Timothy Noah at Slate.com has a good summary of Kempthorne's really horrible environmental record, prepared as of 2003. Basically, he says, "Kempthorne would be a disaster as EPA administrator..." and presumably as Secretary of the Interior he'd be just as anti-environmental.
A Seth Borenstein article originally published by Knight-Ridder is still available at Commondreams.org, but it says in part, "Kempthorne... was elected governor in 1998. ...While 35 states and the nation as a whole reduced the amount of toxins released into the environment from 1998 to 2000 - the most recent year of available data - Idaho increased emissions by 2 percent. National emissions decreased by 9 percent in the same period, an achievement Whitman hailed Monday as an environmental success story.
Idaho emitted 59 pounds of toxins per resident on average in 2000, according to the EPA's Toxic Release Inventory. The national average was 25 pounds of toxins per person in 2000.
With 76 million pounds of toxic releases in 2000, Idaho - population 1.3 million - has more total toxic emissions than California, population 33.9 million.
In 2002, 56 percent of Idaho's rivers and streams were polluted. The national average in 2000 was 39 percent.
Idaho is "trying to keep (inspections) to a bare-bones minimum," Jon Sandoval, the chief of staff for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, told Knight Ridder. "Anything else outside the court order either got postponed, stopped or delayed." ...
[Kempthorne's] environmental record in Washington has earned him a near-zero rating from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental political lobby. Kempthorne voted with the environmental organization only once in 70 votes.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents business interests, gave Kempthorne a near-perfect grade, saying he voted on their side in 78 of 81 votes."
Montana's New West blogger, Bill Schneider, wrote today, in an article entitled "Please, not Kempthorne": "Recently, Kempthorne created quite a stir with Idaho's contentious wolf-killing plan, and he opposed the Roadless Rule, even sued in an attempt to stop its implementation. He considers the rule a "federal edict," forgetting that these are public lands belonging to all people in all states, not some people in Idaho."
Says the Seattle Post-Intelligencer: "On a new interior secretary's agenda is the administration's desire to open 3.6 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling over vehement objections from the president's brother, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. He also would be the administration's chief advocate for allowing oil drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."
Mmm, yeah boy. Sounds like another stunning Bush legacy coming up.
