Hallelujah.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama on Tuesday directed U.S. government agencies to consult with scientists before taking action that could harm endangered species, rolling back last-minute rules put forward by former President George W. Bush.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A Bush administration plan for more research, development and demonstration oil shale leases will be scrapped because the proposal is flawed and royalties to the government are too low, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said on Wednesday.
U.S. Interior scraps Bush research oil shale leases
By DINA CAPPIELLO, Associated Press Writer
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WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Obama administration signaled Friday that it will seek more stringent controls on mercury pollution from the nation's power plants, abandoning a Bush administration approach that the industry supported.
The Justice Department on Friday submitted papers to the Supreme Court to dismiss the Bush administration's appeal of the rule, which a lower court struck down last year.
Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency said it would begin crafting a new rule limiting mercury emissions from power plants.
The court was expected to decide later this month whether it would take the case. Last year, an appeals court ruled that the Bush plan violated the law by allowing utilities to purchase emission credits instead of actually reducing emissions.
Such a plan would have allowed some power plants to release more mercury pollution than others, creating localized "hot spots" where concentrations are higher, states and environmental groups argued. The law requires all facilities to install the best technology available to curb emissions.
Power plants are the biggest source of mercury, which finds its way into the food supply. It is commonly found in high concentrations in fish. Mercury can damage developing brains of fetuses and very young children.
"It is yet another Bush administration policy they are not going to go forward with," said David Bookbinder, the Sierra Club's chief climate counsel.
The EPA also announced Friday that is was starting the review of the Bush administration's decision to deny California and other states the right to control emissions of the gases blamed for global warming for cars.
Shift Would Let Firm Pave Logging Roads
By Karl Vick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, January 4, 2009; Page A02
LOS ANGELES -- The Bush administration appears poised to push through a change in U.S. Forest Service agreements that would make it far easier for mountain forests to be converted to housing subdivisions.
Mark E. Rey, the former timber lobbyist who heads the Forest Service, last week signaled his intent to formalize the controversial change before the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama. As a candidate, Obama campaigned against the measure in Montana, where local governments have complained of being blindsided by Rey's negotiating the policy shift behind closed doors with the nation's largest private landowner.
The shift is technical but has large implications. It would allow Plum Creek Timber to pave roads through Forest Service land. For decades, such roads were little more than trails used by logging trucks to reach timber stands.
But as Plum Creek has moved into the real estate business, paving those roads became a necessary prelude to opening vast tracts of the company's 8 million acres to the vacation homes that are transforming landscapes across the West.
SACRAMENTO (AP) ― California is suing the Bush administration to block last-minute endangered species regulations that are intended to reduce input from federal scientists.
Attorney General Jerry Brown announced Tuesday that he had filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. The suit was filed late Monday.
Brown says the Bush administration is trying to gut the Endangered Species Act.
The Interior Department issued the revised rules earlier this month. They allow federal agencies to issue permits for mining, logging and similar activities without getting a review from biologists.
by Peter Aldhous, 27 December 2008
Barack Obama may have an impossible burden of expectation on his shoulders, but one fervent wish of many US scientists should be easy enough to fulfil: simply lead the nation back into the "reality-based community".
That phrase, famously used by a senior adviser to George W. Bush in a 2002 conversation with the journalist Ron Suskind, epitomised the Bush administration's contempt for those who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality": that is from observation rather than ideology.
Instead, the Bush White House boasted of creating its own reality, and had little time for research that questioned its policies, leading to what some observers characterised as a "war on science". Many top scientific jobs were filled by ideologues, and empirical evidence was ignored or distorted in order to bolster policies such as inaction on global warming, a reluctance to list species as endangered, and an approach to HIV that focused on sexual abstinence.
Scientists were prominent among those cheering Obama's election victory on 4 November. A clear sign of the president-elect's new direction came two weeks later when he sent a video message to a conference on global warming in Beverly Hills, California. "The science is beyond dispute and the facts are clear," Obama said. "Delay is no longer an option. Denial is no longer an acceptable response. The stakes are too high; the consequences too serious."
EPA Drops Rules Easing Controls on Power Plants
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Six weeks before leaving office, the Bush administration is giving up on an effort to ease restrictions on pollution from coal-burning power plants, a key plank of its original energy agenda and one that put the president at odds with environmentalists his entire eight years in the White House.
President George W. Bush had hoped to make both changes to air pollution regulations final before leaving office on Jan. 20. In the midst of a coal-fired power plant construction boom, the rules would have made it easier for energy companies to expand existing facilities and to erect new power plants in areas of the country that meet air quality standards.
But the Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday conceded that it didn't have enough time to complete the rules changes, which were undermined by a federal court decision earlier this year that scrapped a signature component of Bush's clean air policies.
The EPA, in a statement, said that it ''will continue to advocate for the important health benefits'' the initiatives would have achieved.
Environmentalists, however, said the decision would leave intact for the incoming Obama administration the strongest tools under the law for dealing with power plant pollution.
''It's stunning. This is the most high profile prize sought by the utility industry,'' said John Walke, a lawyer with the Natural Resources Defense Council. ''It would have entangled the incoming administration up in a new rulemaking process while causing harm in many parts of the country.''
By Renee Schoof and Bill Estep, McClatchy Newspapers
WASHINGTON - The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday approved a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration that will allow coal companies to bury streams under the rocks leftover from mining.
The 1983 rule prohibited dumping the fill from mountaintop removal mining within 100 feet of streams. In practice, the government hadn't been enforcing the rule. Government figures show that 535 miles of streams were buried or diverted from 2001 to 2005, more than half of them in the mountains of Appalachia. Along with the loss of the streams has been an increase of erosion and flooding.
The 11th hour change before President George W. Bush leaves office would eliminate a tool that citizens groups have used in lawsuits to keep mining waste out of streams. Mining companies had been pushing for the change for years.
It also means that President-elect Barack Obama's administration will have to decide whether to try to restore and enforce the rule, a process that could take many months of new rulemaking. Obama's transition team declined to comment on its plans on Tuesday.
Another option would be for opponents to go through the courts. Opponents have argued that the rule change is illegal.
EPA to gut mountaintop mining rule protecting streams (McClatchy Newspapers)
Wed, 03 Dec 2008 00:52:00 GMT
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer
Few federal agencies are expected to undergo as radical a transformation under President-elect Barack Obama as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Interior Department, which have been at the epicenter of many of the Bush administration's most intense scientific and environmental controversies.
...
In June 2007, Obama told reporters in Reno, Nev., that he would not hesitate to reverse many of the environmental policies Bush has enacted by executive order.
"I think the slow chipping away against clean air and clean water has been deeply disturbing," Obama added. "Much of it hasn't gone through Congress. It was done by fiat. That is something that can be changed by an administration, in part by reinvigorating the EPA, which has been demoralized."
Friday, November 28, 2008; Page A02
White House emailing mayors to oppose greenhouse gas limits
Nick Juliano, The Raw Story
On his way out the door, President Bush seems to be taking one last shot at torpedoing court-ordered action to restrict global warming.
Top Bush administration figures have been e-mailing sympathetic mayors and other allies encouraging them to oppose Environmental Protection Agency rules to limit greenhouse gas emissions. The Supreme Court last year ordered the EPA to craft a proposal to limit the emissions under the Clean Air Act, but the White House made clear it doesn't like the idea.
"At the time, President Bush warned that this was the wrong way to regulate emissions. [House Energy and Commerce Committee] Chairman John D. Dingell called it 'a glorious mess,' " Jeremy J. Broggi, associate director of the White House Office of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote in the e-mail, obtained by The Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin. "And many of you contacted us to let us know how harmful this rule would be to the economies of the cities and counties you serve."
"The Bush administration," Eilperin says, "...is sending out a message to some of its allies: Tell us how much you don't want us to regulate emissions linked to global warming."
The e-mail appears to be one is a series of steps Bush is taking to leave as many as his fingerprints as possible on federal policy before he leaves office. The administration is pushing through an array of parallel deregulatory policies including lifting barriers to mountaintop coal mining and ocean-fishing along with easing standards governing drinking water quality.
Bush administration quietly works to torpedo global warming regulations
Jonathan Turley summarizes the situation well:
The symbolism is perfectly exquisite. President George Bush, who has given out fewer pardons than any modern president, felt that he could not leave office without releasing Leslie Owen Collier of Charleston, Mo., who pleaded guilty in 1995 to unlawfully killing three bald eagles in southeast Missouri. Bush is generally viewed as the most hostile president to environmental protections in modern times. His pardons seemed to reflect that profile with a number of environmental felons rescued in the fourteen pardons issued this week.
Collier is a real charmer. He explained that he was only trying to kill coyotes by lacing hamburger meat with pesticides — a trap that is widely denounced by environmentalists around the world and well-known to be a danger to bald eagles and other animals. Collier was appropriately convicted for unauthorized use of a pesticide and violating the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act.
What is particularly galling is that Collier received a light sentence: two years probation, $10,000 in restitution. Yet Bush believed that even that was too harsh for an environmental crime.
Bush Pardons Man Who Killed Three Bald Eagles
By Juliet Eilperin and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff WritersThe president of the nation's largest general science organization yesterday sharply criticized recent cases of Bush administration political appointees gaining permanent federal jobs with responsibility for making or administering scientific policies, saying the result would be "to leave wreckage behind."
"It's ludicrous to have people who do not have a scientific background, who are not trained and skilled in the ways of science, make decisions that involve resources, that involve facilities in the scientific infrastructure," said James McCarthy, a Harvard University oceanographer who is president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. "You'd just like to think people have more respect for the institution of government than to leave wreckage behind with these appointments."
His comments came as several new examples surfaced of political appointees gaining coveted, high-level civil service positions as the administration winds down. The White House has said repeatedly that all gained their new posts in an open, competitive process, but congressional Democrats and others questioned why political appointees had won out over qualified federal career employees.
Top Scientist Rails Against Hirings
Saturday, November 22, 2008; Page A03
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