Green lies and subsidies.

ITEM: Writing in the Berkeley Daily Planet for April 22, Representative Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) commented: "For the last 35 years, since Earth Day was first celebrated in 1970, we have come together as a global community to celebrate our planet and recognize the importance of a clean and healthy environment." However, she said, George Bush "has consistently slashed funding for the Environmental Protection Agency," among other perceived misdeeds.

She railed repeatedly against the administration, saying that, "in the four years that President Bush has been in office, he has put together one of the worst environmental track records of any president in modern-day history. Instead of declaring and ensuring that no mother should have to worry about her children getting asthma, or that no company who pollutes our air, our land or our water will escape prosecution, or that no soldier should have to be deployed to the Middle East to be sacrificed for oil--he has done exactly the opposite."

She likened the Bush administration to an "environmental disaster," and continued: "We need to change the dynamic in Washington. Instead of putting big business first, we need to put our children's health first."

ITEM: An April 21 Earth Day release from U.S. PIRG, the Washington, D.C., advocacy office for the state Public Interest Research Groups, charged that "the Bush Administration and Congressional leaders seem bent on taking us back to the dark ages." Said PIRG, "With a stroke of a pen, President Bush could require car companies to build better cars that go farther on a gallon of gasoline and save us many times the oil we'd ever get from drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge."

CORRECTION: Aside from largely blind partisan and ideological biases, these environmental alarmists have other problems with their doomsday claims. For example, they ignore facts.

The congresswoman apparently believes that Mr. Bush has the constitutional power to outlaw asthma--but refuses to use it. The PIRG activists long for a green totalitarian who would issue diktats about which cars could be built, ostensibly to save fuel.

However, their scare stories are largely bogus. Air-pollution levels have dropped dramatically in recent decades, and are now at the lowest level ever recorded. Senator James In-hole (R-Okla.) has noted that between 1970 and 2003, the U.S. Gross Domestic Product increased 176 percent; vehicle miles traveled jumped 155 percent; energy consumption rose 45 percent; and the population grew by 39 percent. Yet, during this same period, the total emissions of the six principal air pollutants in the country dropped by 51 percent.

The latest Index of Leading Environmental Indicators, compiled by the Pacific Research Institute and American Enterprise Institute, also shows improvement in mercury emission levels, and growth in wetlands and forestlands, among others. Concerning asthma, the Pacific Research Institute points out, "Despite widely held beliefs, there continues to be very little correlation between regional air pollution rates and asthma rates. In fact, while air pollution rates have consistently declined, asthma rates have increased. In the U.S., asthma rates in children under the age of five rose more than 160 percent between 1980 and 1994--a period when air pollution rates fell from 25 to 80 percent."

The notion that simply waving a governmental wand to require more-efficient vehicles will save on the total amount of fuel used is not borne out by the evidence. "CAFE [Corporate Average Fuel Economy] standard increases affect only new vehicles and do nothing to reduce driving. In fact, they tend to encourage increased driving as costs per-mile-driven decline," says Andrew Kleit, a Penn State energy economics professor.

EPA budgets during President Bush's first term actually totaled more than 4 percent above those in President Clinton's last term, though no doubt there could never be enough funding for some tree-huggers.

Indeed, the Bush Environmental Protection Agency continues to fund radical "environmental" organizations, groups that carry out political attacks on the administration. Two reports issued last fall by the majority staff of the Senate Environmental and Public Works Committee, chaired by Sen. Inhofe, made a convincing case that the EPA has been directing grants, without competition, to favored groups that are in turn involved in partisan political activity. Between 1997 and 2003, the committee found, the EPA gave more than a quarter-billion dollars to such nonprofit environmental organizations.

Reviewing those Senate reports, Foundation Watch reported that the EPA had "institutionalized its collusion with politically active non-profit grantees. As the election year unfolded, the committee staff uncovered more and more: a maze of interconnected ... environmental organizations, all engaged in political activities, all part of the Democratic 'Dump Bush' network, and all transferring money, one to another, in patterns that could circumvent election laws."

Elitist support for "pressure from below" has been a time-tested revolutionary tactic. In this case, radical green activists are being funded by tax-exempt foundations and federal grants to lobby for even more federal spending for (at best) dubious programs.