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The article offers suggestions for improvements to United States President George W. Bush's stance on environmental policies. Embracing greenery would be good for Bush, good for the Republican Party, good for relations with Europe, and, above all, good for the environment. Support for strict environmental regulation among evangelicals has jumped from 45% in 2000 to 52% in 2004. Many of the founding fathers of modern conservatism were environmentalists. Environmentalism also makes good political sense for Bush. Gregg Easterbrook at the Brookings Institution points out that former U.S. President George Bush senior's 1990 Clean Air Act pioneered the use of "cap-and-trade" rules to reduce the amount of sulphur dioxide that coal-fired power plants emit. Bush's Clear Skies Act proposes to use this cap-and-trade approach to cut the amounts of sulphur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and mercury emitted by power plants by 70%. The emergence of a Republican environmentalism would not only be good for the party, but for the environment.

This article reports on grass-roots efforts for environmental protection in the United States. Could the next grass-roots revolution in America be over climate change? George Bush stomped out of the UN's Kyoto treaty on global warming three years ago and did a U-turn on campaign pledges to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2). Since then, he has refused to come up with sensible domestic policies. Yet that very obstinacy has fomented a backlash in the states. Massachusetts led the way by imposing curbs on CO2 emissions from power plants. The New England states have also joined the eastern provinces of Canada in vowing to cut emissions of greenhouse gases by 12% by the end of the decade. Not to be outdone by Yankees, California, Oregon and Washington have now banded together to tackle climate change. California has passed the country's first law regulating emissions of greenhouse gases from cars.

Is America finally going to re-examine the hodgepodge of laws governing its oceans? The United States controls 4.5m square miles of them, an area about a fifth bigger than its land area, and they are being ruined by overfishing, rapid coastal development and pollution. Most of the laws governing the seas come from the 1969 Stratton Commission, which was set up to deal with poaching by other countries' fishing fleets. Since then, measures have been introduced on a crisis-by-crisis basis, but there has been no comprehensive attempt to regulate either seashore sprawl (half the population lives in coastal counties) or the ever more high-tech fishing industry. One chance to set up a proper regime passed in 1983 when Ronald Reagan expanded America's marine territory from 12 to 200 miles offshore. On June 4th, the bipartisan Pew Oceans Commission released the first big report since Stratton. The Pew report concentrates on two evils: overfishing (around 90% of America's large marine fish, such as tuna and swordfish, are now gone) and pollution. Greens now hope that President George W. Bush will protect America's oceans in the same way that his hero, former President Theodore Roosevelt, created national parks and game refuges on land.