NICOLE COLSON reports on George W. Bush's assault on the environment.

LIMITS ON arsenic in drinking water, controls on the use of toxic chemicals, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act--all of this and more is on the Bush administration's environmental hit list. The Bush gang has also opened up fragile wetlands to development, and shifted Superfund hazardous waste cleanup costs from polluters to taxpayers.

Then there's global warming. Earlier this year, Dubya's administration officially abandoned the Kyoto international treaty requiring countries to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases that cause warming.

This isn't surprising, of course. When Bush took office, the New York Times referred to his administration as a "boys' club of former oil executives." As for his "environmental team," he picked "pro-business advocates who have worked on behalf of various industries in battles with the federal government," the Times wrote.

The administration's attitude to corporate polluters was summed up by an e-mail message from Energy Department official Joseph Kelliher to an industry lobbyist last year, asking for policy recommendations. "If you were king or Il Duce," wrote Kelliher, "what would you include in a national energy policy, especially with respect to natural gas issues?"

Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)--the federal environmental watchdog--is working for the other side. In June, it announced that it was rolling back emissions standards for coal-burning power plants--allowing corporations to increase air pollution at hundreds of the country's oldest and dirtiest power plants.

This comes at a terrible human cost--according to the EPA itself, pollution from power plants causes thousands of premature deaths and chronic respiratory problems.

With these priorities, it was only a matter of time before Bush and his boys figured out a way to abandon the Kyoto accords. Kyoto was already weak, requiring industrialized countries to collectively reduce emissions worldwide to 5.2 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

But even this modest reduction was too much for Bush. His administration has come up with its own plan--appallingly misnamed "Clear Skies." Instead of cutting greenhouse gas emissions, the Bush proposal allows corporations to peg greenhouse emissions to the rate of growth of the national economy, meaning that greenhouse gas emissions will actually increase significantly.

This is despite the fact that the EPA has finally admitted that global warming is a reality. But the EPA's U.S. Climate Action Report claims over and over that the best way to combat warming is to encourage "free-market solutions" across the globe. "In particular, we seek an environmentally sound approach that will not harm the U.S. economy," says the report.

What about harm to people's lives? Health problems caused by global warming "can be ameliorated through such measures as the increased availability of air conditioning," says the EPA.

Bush's record on the environment is disgusting. But he's not alone in Washington in putting profits before the future of the planet. Under the Clinton-Gore administration, the supposedly environment-friendly White House opened up vast areas of the Pacific Northwest and Alaskan wilderness to logging companies; abandoned a promise to stop a hazardous waste incinerator in Ohio; handed out tax breaks for oil companies to drill in the Gulf of Mexico; and removed regulations on strip-mining.

This anti-environment record for Democrats shows why the issue of environmental destruction runs deeper than which politicians are in power--to the system of capitalism itself. Capitalism is driven by profit and accumulation, not meeting human needs--which is why it's fundamentally incompatible with protecting the environment.

And the system's "bottom-line-first" logic has brutal consequences. According to recent reports by the United Nations (UN), more than 2 million children die each year--5,500 every single day--because of exposure to pollution.

What's more, the UN says that if "market forces [which] drive the globe's political, economic and social agenda" are allowed to continue, in 30 years' time, more than 11,000 plant and animal species will be dead or dying--including a quarter of the world's mammals--and more than half of the world's population will face moderate to severe water shortages. "We haven't reached the point of no return yet, " said one UN official, "but we're heading that way."

The technologies exist to slow global warming--and clean up a host of other environmental problems, while also providing a dramatic rise in living standards for billions of people. In a sane system, they would already have been put into place.

Mass public transportation systems--ones organized to work efficiently--would decrease dependence on fossil fuels. Automakers could be required to meet higher fuel efficiency standards, and large-scale recycling programs would be made convenient and rational. "Clean" energy technologies like solar, wind and hydroelectric power could be developed to work on a large scale. Reforestation projects to restore huge areas of land cleared by corporations would help reduce greenhouse gas levels.

All of this and much more could and should be done. But under capitalism, it won't be--simply because this isn't "profitable." That's why we have to build the fight for a different kind of society--a socialist society based on meeting people's needs.

Fish love toxic sludge