Howie Hawkins on Environment Green Party Challenger for President

Polluters should have burden of proof of safe practices

• Restore state health, safety, and consumer protection laws by striking federal preemptions that weaken state law.
• Preserve and expand product-labeling requirements.
• Repeal the misnamed Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005.
• Establish new independent government consumer advocacy agencies to protect the interests of consumers and restore the U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs.
• Uphold the precautionary principle, requiring polluters to bear the burden of proof in demonstrating the safety of their practices.
• Expand the application of the precautionary principle from chemicals and health to land use, waste, energy, food policy and local economic development.
• Support, enforce and strengthen the National Environmental Policy Act.

Strengthen Endangered Species & Clean Water Act

The Green Party supports a strengthened and enforceable Endangered Species Act. We support reintroducing native species to areas from which they have been eradicated, eliminating predator control on public lands, and reintroducing native predators where they would contribute to a viable ecosystem. We should educate ourselves about animal behaviors to overcome our culture's irrational fear of wildlife, and learn techniques of co-existence with other species.

Shut down waste incinerators; phase out landfills

Convert corporate agribusiness to organic agriculture

Environmental collapse follows from capitalist system

ECOLOGICAL DESTRUCTION: We will never reverse pending planetary environmental collapse as long as we have a capitalist economy where competition for profits drives the blind, relentless growth that is consuming the environment, heating up the planet, and destroying ecological foundations of human civilization.

Strengthen environmental regulation and enforcement

Hawkins supports the following principles regarding the environment and energy.
• Strengthen the regulation and enforcement of the Clean Water Act.
• Strengthen the regulation and enforcement of the Clean Air Act.
• Strengthen emission controls and fuel efficiency standards on all gasoline and diesel-powered engines, including cars, trucks, and sport utility vehicles.
• Encourage further development and use of alternative fuels to reduce pollution.
• Support the use of ethanol as an alternative fuel.
• Support the Kyoto Protocol to limit global warming.
• Hawkins adds, "Support cellulosic ethanol, not corn or soybean ethanol. Take $300 billion a year from the military and invest it in a renewable energy infrastructure for the world. In ten years this program should reduce carbon emission s by 70 percent to stop global warming and end resource wars over oil."