Here's a front-page story from the Alternate Universe Tribune: "BUSH ADMINISTRATION MAKES ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION EARLY THEME." Ridiculous, right? We all know the new administration is engaged in "the most alarming rollbacks in environmental efforts that we have ever seen" (Richard Gephardt). Or, as Hearst newspaper columnist Helen Thomas "asked" at Bush's most recent press conference: "[Y]ou have rolled back health and safety and environmental measures. This has been widely interpreted as a payback time to your corporate donors. Are they more important than the American people's health and safety?"

Yet the Alternate Universe Tribune has it right. On almost every environmental issue, Bush has upheld the Clinton-Gore position. The new president is guilty of a few missteps, which are getting reams of attention, and has accomplished important advances, which are being ignored. Journalists and liberal commentators have had so much success in recent years pillorying conservatives as foes of the environment that it's become a kind of reflex. But this time the evidence isn't there.

First, take Bush's much-mocked decision to postpone a reduction in the maximum allowable arsenic in drinking water. This was indeed a mistake, as the scientific case for tighter rules is strong. But Bush has not acted to "allow more arsenic in drinking water," as commentary has erroneously asserted, nor to force Americans to consume "poisoned drinking water," as a New York Times editorial claimed. All he's done is delay the date on which trace levels of arsenic are cut. This is precisely what Bill Clinton and Al Gore did for almost eight years--postponing any tightening of the standard until just before leaving the White House, because new rules are stridently opposed by a few localities where arsenic naturally occurs in water, such as Albuquerque, New Mexico, where the mayor is a Democrat. Clinton's delay was unfortunate, as was Bush's, but not catastrophic, since arsenic is not one of America's leading environmental problems. It occurs in drinking water at worrisome levels in only a few areas of the country, and public health estimates show at worst a 1 percent increase in the odds of late-life cancer for someone who consumes such water for decades.

Contrast the media furor over Bush's arsenic decision with the near silence regarding his action on diesel-fuel reformulation. One of the president's first actions was to uphold a sweeping, expensive regulation that requires petroleum companies to remove most pollutants from diesel fuel. Unlike the arsenic standards, which would have benefited a tiny percentage of the population, the diesel-fuel rule has broad environmental and public-health consequences. Recent research has shown that the "particulates" in diesel exhaust lead to 20,000 or more premature deaths per year and contribute to the rise of asthma in cities. Bush's strict new diesel rules will spare many lives and reduce urban haze; in fact, they represent the most important anti-air-pollution advance in a decade. The reform will also cost billions of dollars, and it came over the howls of the petroleum industry, whose pocket Bush supposedly is in. Yet W.'s move has received virtually no recognition--after all, the diesel-fuel decision interrupts the doomsday script.

Consider another act for which Bush has been damned: his request that Congress suspend for one year the filing of lawsuits demanding that more plants and animals be listed under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). On its front page, The New York Times portrayed this as a horrifying step backward. Yet the Clinton administration did almost exactly the same thing: Last year Clinton suspended the classification of plants and animals as endangered, saying the Fish and Wildlife Service, which administers the ESA, was so snowed under by frivolous or dilatory lawsuits that it couldn't get its work done. The Times account was craftily written to depict the Bush decision as an unprecedented departure, not mentioning Clinton's similar policy until the fourteenth paragraph, and then only obliquely.

Bush has also been attacked for merely considering overturning regulations requiring big increases in the energy efficiency of air conditioners, washers, dryers, and other appliances. But when he announced that the appliance standard would be upheld and the air-conditioner standard only mildly loosened, less attention was paid. He's been similarly scolded in the Times and other papers for considering reversing Clinton's eleventh-hour decision to reduce logging in national forests; but when Bush then appointed, as head of the Forest Service, a man instrumental in drawing up the less-logging policy, the Times buried the article on page A15. Bush also won little praise for upholding most of Clinton's eleventh-hour designations of new national wilderness areas, set-asides that were highly unpopular in much of the West. Bush decided this week to keep strict new limits on construction in wetlands--angering developers, another natural Bush constituency, who hate wetlands rules with a white passion--and also to impose strict standards regarding lead emissions. These moves were widely depicted as puzzling departures from form. But it only seemed that way because the media had misconstrued so many of Bush's other decisions.

Then there is Bush's abandonment of the Kyoto global-warming treaty, for which he's been hammered as an antediluvian. Yet the president might plausibly have said, "I have decided to continue the Clinton-Gore approach to global warming," since the previous administration took no binding action on Kyoto either. Clinton never submitted the Kyoto agreement to the Senate because he knew it stood no chance of ratification. In a 1997 test ballot, the Senate went on record 95 to zero against a Kyoto resolution; it didn't get a single Democratic vote.

In other words, the deal was history well before Bush took office. Any lingering hope ended last fall, when the European Union essentially rejected America's attempt to add to the agreement an international "carbon trading" system, which economists almost unanimously view as the best hope for near-term, affordable greenhouse-gas reduction. Canada's environment minister, David Anderson, has said the European Union rejected carbon trading specifically to make Kyoto fail: "Europe adopted a position they knew would force the United States to pull out." Why? Because Europe didn't want to do anything about the greenhouse effect but wanted the United States to take the blame. American commentators have happily parroted Europe's line.

Bush's father harmed himself when he turned from pro-environmental (backer of the 1990 Clean Air Act) to anti-environmental (snarling about spotted owls) as the 1992 campaign began; Newt Gingrich and the 1995 House Republicans saw their popularity sink in part because of their efforts to repeal environmental laws. From these episodes, Democrats, enviros, and reporters seeking an instant-doomsday slant have grown adept at bashing Republicans with preposterous overstatements and phony claims of ecological crises. The White House's inability to see this coming is bad politics. For example, the current legal maximum for arsenic in drinking water is 50 parts per billion; the proposed rule Bush delayed would have made it ten parts per billion, a level some studies suggest is regulatory overkill. Bush could have split the difference and announced a new standard of 25 parts per billion, saying he was making the rule twice as strict.

But bad p.r. and bad policy aren't the same thing. With the exception of oil exploration in Alaska, so far there are no meaningful differences between Bush's environmental goals and those of Clinton and Gore. This is surprising and to Bush's credit. It's time the press started giving him some.

GREGG EASTERBROOK is a senior editor at TNR.