These ideas had been gestating in right-wing and libertarian think tanks for years. Norton, for example, spent the first four years of her career at the Mountain States Legal Foundation, a nonprofit law firm co-founded by James Watt, Ronald Reagan's Interior Secretary, that frequently represented corporate interests. In a 1989 speech Norton's admiration for market mechanisms led her to suggest that corporations should "have a right to pollute" and then be charged accordingly. Her friend Hayward, who got Norton invited to the May 1999 meeting with Bush, conceded that she "put it poorly" but defended her underlying point: "Let's give landowners an incentive to protect species we want protected." The same basic reasoning underlies another concept that Norton championed for Bush that afternoon: "takings" theory, which asserts that government must compensate a landowner if a government policy precludes full economic exploitation of his property. Most environmentalists criticize takings theory as paying people to obey the law, but it is gaining ground under Bush. In a June 2001 decision the US Supreme Court endorsed takings theory by a 5-to-4 vote.

The intellectual rationale presented to Bush that afternoon in Austin has proven wonderfully convenient to him as President, for it enables him to tell himself he is helping the environment even as he pursues the corporate-friendly agenda that has defined his entire political career. How the philosophy translated into action became evident less than two weeks after Bush took office, when soaring electricity prices and threatened blackouts in California began making national news. Bush quickly blamed environmentalists and the overly stringent regulations they had supposedly imposed to keep the state from building enough power plants. California's energy shortages, Bush argued, were another reason to support his plan to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling (which Vice President Dick Cheney promised could be done with minimal environmental impact). Environmentalists and public officials in California scoffed that the new President was talking nonsense. Just what devious nonsense, however, only became clear a year later, with the unfolding of the Enron scandal. What had really driven up electricity prices in California, it turned out, were the artificial shortages that Enron and other companies created by manipulating a deregulated marketplace. The right-wing gospel had said leave corporations alone and the environment would prosper, but reality in California proved otherwise.

Jump ahead now to the summer of 2002. Much of the nation has been suffering from prolonged, extreme drought. In the West, millions of acres have been ravaged by wildfires. Once again Bush is faced by a genuine public emergency. Once again he scapegoats environmentalists and federal regulators to advance a corporate agenda. During a visit to a still-smoldering forest in Oregon, the President declares that the wildfires are the result of irresponsible forest management. Excessive underbrush had accumulated, and then caught fire, because loggers had been prevented from thinning forests in a scientifically sound manner. From now on, said Bush, federal policy would promote well-managed forests and recognize that "there's nothing wrong with people being able to earn a living off of effective forest management." To set things right, Bush turned to a man who had long made a very good living from timber: Mark Rey, who was vice president of the American Forest and Paper Association before becoming Bush's Under Secretary of Agriculture. Rey's solution called for waiving fundamental stipulations of the National Environmental Protection Act, such as mandatory environmental-impact assessments, while making protection of wildlife an "optional" goal for national forest managers. With straight faces, Bush's spin doctors proclaimed it the "Healthy Forests Initiative."

In truth, the wildfires of 2002 were more likely rooted in an environmental reality that Bush refuses to confront: global climate change. Drought of the sort experienced in 2002 is exactly what scientists project will occur increasingly in the years ahead as global temperatures rise, bringing more extreme weather of all kinds. Thus killer floods punished central Europe and southern Asia in 2002, while Arctic ice is melting at record speed. The signs of impending disaster are so unmistakable and frightening that they are converting even such die-hard skeptics as Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who has watched his state absorb billions of dollars of property damage as melting tundra buckles roads and buildings, and forests are consumed by a species of beetle suddenly able to survive in Alaska's warming climate.

Bush, meanwhile, remains loyal to his oil-industry roots: Global warming is something to study, not resist. Bush promised in a September 2000 campaign speech to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide (and three other pollutants). But it's doubtful he understood the implications of his speech, and once it became clear that honoring the promise would preclude the kind of energy plan Cheney cooked up in secret with Enron and other industry representatives, the promise obviously had to go. So did US support for the Kyoto Protocol on global warming, a move that provoked more anger overseas than perhaps any other action Bush took in his first year in office.

The White House has won the legal battle over whether it can keep secret the meetings that gave rise to the Bush energy plan, but who needs further proof of industry fingerprints when the policy speaks for itself? Its call for oil drilling in Alaska has driven discussion in Washington and therefore media coverage, but that may be a diversion. Even as environmental groups fundraise and Democratic senators threaten to filibuster over Alaska, the Administration has pursued a less-noticed but equally destructive aspect of its energy plan: encouraging drilling and mining of millions of acres of public land in the West, including national monument areas. Court rulings have blocked much of the Administration's efforts--so far.

The single most powerful action Washington could take to slow global warming would be to impose a meaningful increase in vehicle fuel-efficiency standards. The Bush philosophy instead dictates a voluntary plan to reduce emissions, one that respects corporations' freedom to make whatever products the market demands. Bush believes that, like him, America's corporate leaders care about the environment, and they will do more to protect it if government stops telling them how to do so (which explains why he has cut environmental enforcement budgets and prosecutions nearly 50 percent from Clinton-era levels). Let consumers start buying more hybrid-powered cars, and Detroit will respond.

The same faith in corporate goodness underlies the rollback of the Clean Air Act's so-called New Source Review provision, a policy that literally threatens death for thousands of Americans, especially very young and very old people who already suffer from asthma or other respiratory ailments. Approximately 75 percent of all power-plant emissions in the United States come from facilities built before 1977, which pollute four to ten times as much as plants with modern pollution controls. The Clean Air Act has long required companies to install modern pollution controls if they expand capacity at older plants. The companies complained that this requirement discouraged modernization and thereby prevented them from cutting pollution. The Administration has endorsed this logic with its new rules, which make pollution upgrades largely voluntary. The upshot, EPA Administrator Christie Whitman has promised, will be cleaner skies as corporations step up and do the right thing.

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