Soot Heaven

Get ready to add another to the long list of Bush-administration assaults on the natural environment. No final decision has been made, but White House officials say it's likely the administration will bend to the desires of utility-industry lobbyists and loosen regulations on coal-fired power plants. Attorneys general in nine eastern states are hopping mad, understandably, for legal action is already under way to force Midwestern air polluters to cut poisonous emissions that flow eastward on prevailing winds. Now Mr. Bush wants to make it easier for Midwesterners to send more filth downwind, not less. This is not progress.

The oblique Bush plan is too cute by half. It would let utilities "expand" and "upgrade" their operations without installing up-to-date anti-pollution technology. Up till now, Clean Air Act regulations required new facilities - even if they were connected to an old plant - to be cleaner-burning than the outmoded plants. But the industry says this approach is too expensive, and it wants to build more dirty plants. The industry's rationale is that these facilities would be more energy-efficient, and that justifies the pollution. But what this does is guarantee that large foul-air producers will be around not just for years to come but for decades into the future.

Give her credit, for Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Christie Todd Whitman, former governor of smoggy New Jersey, is reported to be struggling against any relaxation in power-plant rules. She has been overwhelmed, however, at least so far, by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, Vice President Dick Cheney, and Marc Racicot. Mr. Racicot is the new chairman of the Republican National Committee and an energy-industry lobbyist who agreed to end his lobbying for loggers and the utility industry only after members of the party he now heads pointed out that voters might view this dual role as unsavory. Others might call it refreshingly transparent.

In fact, White House political strategists are said to be worried that setting the Clean Air Act back 30 years, as some environmental groups are describing the new rules, would lead to the public perception that Mr. Bush is a captive of the utility companies. Could be.

In fact, as the nation's eyes have been riveted on Ground Zero and on the national unemployment figures, the administration has been reveling in an orgy of anti-environmentalism. Protections for national monuments have been weakened, snowmobile restrictions in smog-filled national parks have been postponed, wetland protections have been fiddled with, roadbuilding by loggers has been given the go-ahead in national wilderness areas, and the permit process for mining that degrades the environment has been streamlined at the behest of the industry lobbyists who funded the Bush presidential campaign.

Both Democrats and moderate Republicans in Congress have remained largely mute throughout this campaign of environmental mayhem, most of it carried out behind a scrim of "national emergency". This abdication of responsibility is going to haunt the country's political institutions when the electorate eventually notices its awful effects.