Many new constraints for Bush on the environment

Congress and US courts have hit the administration with a series of policy setbacks – on greenhouse-gas emissions, strip mining, and logging.

from the April 9, 2007 edition

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Even before Democrats took control of Congress in January, lawmakers of both parties were burrowing into alleged wrongdoing at Interior, which manages 500 million acres of federal land, most of it in the West. Now a fight is brewing over administration plans to change the Endangered Species Act. As reported by Salon.com, the draft plan limits species and habitat protection in ways that could favor logging, mining, and other development, and gives more regulatory power to states.

While environmentalists and legal analysts are hailing last week's Supreme Court decision on climate change as the most important ruling on the environment in years, other recent court rulings are significant as well.

•The high court last week ruled that coal-fired power plants must include new pollution controls when such plants are expanded.

•A week earlier, a federal district court in West Virginia granted a temporary restraining order limiting coal mining that involves the removal of mountaintops and the filling of valleys. Critics say this pollutes rivers and streams in violation of the Clean Water Act.

•Also in recent days, federal judges in San Francisco and Seattle took aim at the administration's logging policies in the West. Judge Phyllis Hamilton, in San Francisco, ruled that the administration was trying to manage national forests without proper environmental review and that it did not adequately consider public input in setting new management practices designed to allow for more logging. In Seattle last week, Judge Ricardo Martinez ruled that the administration had illegally suppressed and misrepresented the views of dissenting scientists when it eased logging restrictions in the Pacific Northwest.

As a result of a lawsuit challenging logging proposals in Tongass National Forest in Alaska, the US Forest Service last week agreed to drop plans for new road-building and clear-cutting in nine large areas until a new management plan is completed.

Meanwhile, polls show that Americans are becoming greener in outlook. Gallup reported Friday that an "overwhelming majority" of Americans support proposals to strengthen government restrictions on greenhouse-gas emissions and to spend more taxpayer money on developing alternative sources of fuel and energy.

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