Bush receptive on environmental issues

At a breakfast meeting last week, six leaders of major U.S. environmental groups urged President-elect George Bush to provide the leadership needed to avert environmental disaster and handed him their list of more than 700 recommendations. Characterizing their meeting with Bush as "enthusiastic and positive," Jay D. Hair, president of the National Wildlife Federation, admits that the environmentalists received no hard commitments from the President-elect. What they hoped to do, and what they believe they accomplished, was to help Bush "face the global crisis that looms before us," Hair says. High on the list of global threats is climate warming, the so-called greenhouse effect. But the environmentalists from some 30 groups also cite the thinning of the stratospheric ozone layer, massive tropical deforestation, extreme pollution in Third World countries, and explosive population increases as endangering "the environmental stability of our planet," says John Adams, executive director of the Natural Resource...