On Monday President Bush lifted the ban on offshore drilling laid down by his father. Thankfully, it’s only an empty gesture. Offshore drilling cannot really begin unless Congress lifts their ban as well. Fingers crossed, they won’t do something every Congress for the past twenty years has voted against. Offshore drilling will produce more oil, but it will not provide any relief for gas prices in the near future, not to mention the harm it will do to the environment and tourism of coastal communities.

Unfortunately, this is not a surprise coming from Bush. It’s only the last in a long list of Bush’s crimes against the environment for his pimp, Big Oil. His list of crimes against the environment, according to Source-watch, are:

* gutting key sections of the Clean Water and Clean Air acts, laws that have traditionally had bipartisan support and have done more to protect the health of Americans than any other environmental legislation.

* It has crippled the Superfund program, which is charged with cleaning up millions of pounds of toxic industrial wastes such as arsenic, lead, mercury and vinyl chloride in more than 1,000 neighborhoods in 48 states.

* It has sought to cut the EPA’s enforcement division by nearly one-fifth, to its lowest level on record; fines assessed for environmental violations dropped by nearly two-thirds in the administration’s first two years; and criminal prosecutions — the government’s weapon of last resort against the worst polluters — are down by nearly one-third.

* The administration has abdicated the decades-old federal responsibility to protect native animals and plants from extinction, becoming the first not to voluntarily add a single species to the endangered species list.

* It has also now endorsed commercial whaling, reversing a US ban in place since 1986 [8].

* It has opened millions of acres of wilderness — including some of the nation’s most environmentally sensitive public lands — to logging, mining, and oil and gas drilling. Under one plan, loggers could take 10% of the trees in California’s Giant Sequoia National Monument; many of the Monument’s old-growth sequoias, 200 years old and more, could be felled to make roof shingles.

* Other national treasures that have been opened for development include the million-acre Grand Canyon-Parashant National Monument in Arizona, the 2,000-foot red-rock spires at Fisher Towers, Utah, and dozens of others.

* mountaintop removal involves blasting away entire mountaintops to get at coal seams below and dumping the resulting rubble, called “spoil,” into adjacent valleys. ... which has buried at least 1,000 miles of Appalachian streams and destroyed tens of thousands of acres of woodland that the EPA describes as “unique in the world” for their biological diversity.

Not to mention the Bush administrations refusal to do anything about climate change, let alone only recently admitting it exists. Most disturbing of all, Bush said at the G8 summit in Hokkaido, Japan: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter!”

In this case, being the biggest does not equal being the best. Whoever becomes the next president will have a lot of work to do when it comes to cleaning up Bush’s dirty record. Goodbye, indeed.