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While there are plenty of reasons for holding the U.S. accountable to a higher environmental standard than is currently the case there is no reason to submit that she should be held to a higher environmental standard than the rest of the world. We all have our duty and responsibility to ensure that our children and our children's children enjoy a healthy future untainted by contaminated drinking water and free from the health risks of industrial pollution no matter where on the face of this planet they live. Notwithstanding that, the U.S. should take the lead in addressing important environmental issues because of her underlying obligation as implicated by her self-imposed status as leader of the world. The assumption of this leadership is not necessarily being addressed where it concerns environmental management to the satisfaction of the world body. Many European countries have surpassed the U.S. in this area and as a result their citizens enjoy healthier and cleaner lives.

Conscientious efforts in the U.S. to address environmental issues fluctuate with the advent of every new government administration and are largely dependent on the level of empathy directed toward them by those who happen to be occupying the highest places in government at the time. In 2002, president George W. Bush stood before the nation and declared that America's energy shortage problems were approaching crisis proportions, especially in the area of fossil fuels. The people were informed that by 2012 over 72 percent of America's fossil fuels would be imported. That same year the biggest selling automobile in the U.S. was the pickup truck. Every year since then, SUV's and pickup trucks have retained the top spot in new automobile sales. In the interest of addressing the issue of gasoline shortages and high fuel prices the government could have imposed stern measures on the automobile industry. For example, legislation could have been enacted to ensure that non-commercial vehicles intended for private use have engines of no more than four cylinders with a limit put on their displacement. That didn't happen. In fact, nothing happened to address the issue - other than the construction of the world's largest and most expensive oil pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan on the Caspian Sea through Tbilisi in Georgia to Ceyhan in Turkey on the Mediterranean coast under cover of the Iraq war in record time by essentially the same mega-corporation which incidentally was the biggest contributor to the

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