Polluting, even as he exits
WHILE President Bush seems to have gone on automatic pilot in the waning days of his term, bureaucrats in the bowels of his administration are laboring feverishly on 11th-hour rules intended to free drillers, loggers, miners, factory-farm owners, and coal-plant operators of environmental restrictions. Getting rules on the books just before the witching hour is common. President Clinton's most famous rule protected one-third of all national forest acreage from road-building, but Bush administration officials have worked to revise it. Congress and the Obama administration should be willing to undo any Bush rules that seriously threaten the nation's air, water, or national parks and forests.
The most controversial Bush measure would gut the Endangered Species Act by banning federal wildlife scientists from weighing the effect of greenhouse gases on species and their habitats. This could be called the "leave no polar bear alive" clause. Administration officials were alarmed earlier this year by the prospect that the Department of the Interior's designation of the polar bear as a threatened species could derail new coal-fired power plants.
Bush also wants to weaken the Endangered Species Act by letting a federal agency like the Army Corps of Engineers determine that a new dam, for instance, would have no adverse impact on listed species or their habits - without consulting with the US Fish and Wildlife Service. In addition, the corps could unilaterally determine that a project would have just a "marginal" impact on a species, ignoring the cumulative effect of many such marginal impacts. John Kostyack of the National Wildlife Federation calls this "death by a thousand cuts for many threatened and endangered species."
Other new rules would ease oil-shale development, which requires large amounts of water; curb limits on the waste that mining companies can dump into streams; and exempt factory farms from air-pollution reporting. The Environmental Protection Agency is changing regulations to permit more coal-burning plants and other pollution sources near national parks and wilderness areas. The parks are also threatened by a hurry-up auction of drilling leases near their borders, although the Bureau of Land Management has agreed to stop some sales.
It is regrettable that at this troubled hour in the nation's history, Congress and the new administration will have to expend time and energy reversing the Bush administration's last of many favors for industry. But they will have to, for the good of the nation's environment. "The evil that men do lives after them" will be the Shakespearean epitaph for this administration. It certainly won't be "All's Well that Ends Well." 