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BUSH TO PLANET EARTH: DROP DEAD!

17 May 2001

Friends of the Earth has savaged President George W Bush over his new “energy strategy” announced today. The Bush strategy will

• order federal agencies to "dismantle regulatory barriers" to gas, electrical, coal and nuclear power production
  
  
• support the development of 1,300 new power stations in the next twenty years, including a new generation of nuclear plants
  
  
• call for oil and gas exploration on federal lands, including the Alaska wildlife reserve.

The policy has been developed by a task force headed by Vice President Dick Cheney. Both Bush and Cheney have made fortunes in the oil business. President Bush recently angered European and other Government by announcing that the US would renege on the Kyoto climate agreement.

Commenting, FOE Climate Campaigner Kate Hampton said:

"This is payback day for George Bush's political backers in the US oil industry.

Instead of seriously trying to tackle the waste of energy by the world's most profligate economy, the Cheney energy strategy simply gives a green light for ever faster consumption of fossil fuels and greater use of nuclear power. The result of this will be to devastate yet more of the US' precious remaining wildlife areas. It will also create an ever larger stockpile of nuclear waste, which must be managed for tens of thousands of years and for which no safe disposal method exists. The US administration will face protests at home and across the world if it ever tries to put this plan into action.

Tony Blair must reject this reactionary excuse for an energy strategy and promise that Britain will act with our European partners to implement the Kyoto agreement,with our without the US."

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