by neile mcgrew

Created on: February 06, 2007   Last Updated: April 19, 2007

The Environmental Protection Agency has announced its 2008 budget, which is another decrease in funding for the EPA. The $7.2 billion budget is down from $7.3 billion last year, and down from the Bush Administration high of $8.4 billion in 2004. The EPA is also cutting 235 jobs from their staff of nearly 18,000.

In a time when environmental scientists are warning of cataclysmic change and that if the current rate of carbon emissions is not reduced, the warming of the Earth may be irreversible, the EPA's budget outline does not directly address global warming.

The EPA states that there are five goals that will be addressed by the 2008 budget, and Goal One is Clean Air and Climate Change. Upon closer inspection, the wording of the budget request and outline does not specifically name global warming as a threat that the EPA will address. The only reference to what may be global warming is the EPA's commitment to work toward better science and instituting a stronger peer review process for climate change science. The EPA does not specify an amount of the budget that will fund this initiative.

The Bush Administration has been criticized for not acknowledging the issue of global warming. In his recent State of the Union address in January 2007, Bush brought up the issue and his commitment to reduce the United States reliance on fossil fuels and in turn emissions, but did not go into any detail about the pressing problem of elevated carbon levels in the atmosphere that are contributing to the greenhouse effect, which could raise the mean temperature of the planet by as much as nearly 6 degrees in the next century, according to a UN panel's report.

The EPA budget does allocate a good deal of funding toward restoring the waters in the US. 38% of the EPA's 2008 budget is going to a goal named "Clean and Safe Water." This includes a concentration of efforts to clean up and protect four major bodies of water: The Chesapeake Bay, Puget Sound, the Gulf of Mexico, and the Great Lakes. This comes days after the Joint Ocean Commission Initiative gave the US a very poor report card in its implementation of the 2004 US Ocean Policy and Action Plan.

Good news in the EPA's 2008 budget is additional funding for the EPA to build partnerships with the private sector in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Bush has set forth a plan to reduce emissions by 18% by 2012. However, the Federal Government is not taking a direct role in addressing the problem, instead relying on market forces and other organizations to take on the problem.

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